Kéthly, Anna (1889–1976)

Hungarian Social Democratic leader and a major force in the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Name variations: Anna Kethly. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1889; died in Blankernberg, Belgium, in September 1976.

Served as minister of state in the short-lived government of Imre Nagy that was overthrown by Soviet troops during Hungary's 1956 national uprising; lived the remainder of her life in exile.

Born in Budapest in 1889 into a family of nine children, Anna Kéthly would become a leader of Hungary's Social Democratic Party for more than half a century, opposing all forms of intolerance and totalitarianism including those practiced by the Horthy dictatorship, native and foreign fascists, and the Communist Party. She received her education in her home city, as well as in Vienna's Sacré-Coeur School, and then worked in an office. During this time, she became an active member of the Social Democratic Party, a powerful working-class organization founded in 1890. Drawn to journalism, Kéthly also became involved in feminist and trade-union activities. By 1920, she had become head of the Women's Secretariat of the Social Democratic Party and in 1922 was elected to Parliament, serving as the only woman in that body until 1937.

From 1919, when a short-lived Soviet Republic was suppressed, until 1945, Hungary was a half-fascist dictatorship headed by Admiral Nicolas Horthy. Kéthly was fearless in her criticism of this regime, both in speeches and in print. A gifted journalist, she was editor of the journal The Female Worker during the years 1926 through 1938. In the early years of her political career, she worked to improve conditions for, and to free if possible, the thousands of "Red" political prisoners the Horthy regime held in prisons and concentration camps.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Kéthly worked to advance the causes of free trade unions and human rights. By the early 1940s, Hungary had fallen into the orbit of Nazi Germany. Although the Horthy regime tried to retain a measure of sovereignty, each passing year witnessed ever more repressive measures unleashed against both the political Left and the Jewish community. Kéthly courageously protested against the state's brutal anti-Semitism and suppression of dissent. In March 1944, German troops occupied the country and within months a radical faction of pro-Nazi Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross Party, seized power; among other things, they butchered political opponents and handed the country's Jewish population over to the Germans for annihilation. Kéthly went into hiding during this perilous time, keeping in contact with leaders of the banned Social Democratic movement.

Although hostilities would not end on Hungarian soil until April 1945, Kéthly returned to political life in February of that year. Immensely popular with the masses because of her fearless political record, she was returned to her old seat in Parliament and within months was elected deputy speaker of the Hungarian Legislative Assembly. In the first democratically elected Parliament in Hungary's history, the Communist Party was able to win 70 out of 409 seats, with Kéthly's Social Democrats doing almost as well, winning 17.4% of the national vote in the 1945 elections. At first, the Communists insisted that they supported democratic ideals and that they would work to rebuild the nation as part of a broad anti-fascist coalition. Soon, however, it became clear that Hungary's Communists, with the backing of the Soviet Union, were intent on creating a monopoly of power for themselves. Relying on "salami tactics" which took thin slices of human rights over an extended period of time, the Communists destroyed Hungary's hard-won freedom and created a one-party state over the course of three years.

The elimination of the Social Democrats, traditional champions of both social reform and political democracy, was an important part of the Communist totalitarian agenda. Kéthly strongly opposed her party's bowing to pressure from the Communists, and she spoke out in public against such moves by members of the party's left wing, individuals whose mixed motives ranged from the idealistic and realistic to the

mercenary. Kéthly's definition of democratic socialism was in harmony with that of the British Labor Party, members of which she met on several occasions when they visited Hungary. She also made trips to London in April 1946 and traveled to the International Socialist Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 1947, in order to keep in touch with developments within the global democratic socialist community.

Despite encouragement from foreign colleagues and friends, Kéthly could do little to halt the inexorable growth of Communist power in Hungary. She was increasingly isolated and powerless to stop elections rigged by the Communists which guaranteed defeats for democratic parties like her own, and her protests carried little weight with a demoralized public. Her voice also had small impact on the growing number of her fellow Social Democrats who managed to convince themselves that a merger of their party with the Communists was not only inevitable but even desirable.

In 1948, Kéthly was forced out of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. In June of that year, the pro-Communist elements within her party merged with the Communists to form a new and totally Communist-dominated entity, the Hungarian Workers' Party. Kéthly was among a small group of Social Democrats who risked their own safety by refusing to recognize this shotgun marriage. One of her colleagues, former Minister of Justice Istvan Ries, was arrested and eventually beaten to death in prison.

The late 1940s was a time of terror and fear in Eastern Europe, and Hungary was no exception. The danger extended beyond "reactionaries" and "bourgeois-nationalist elements" who found themselves subject to persecution and surveillance, or worse. Even Communists, many of them Jewish, were accused of being Zionists, Western spies, or Trotskyites, and a number of Communist leaders were purged and executed in 1949. Social Democrats, too, now found themselves targeted. Along with a number of other Social Democrats who had refused to accept the Communist dictatorship, Anna Kéthly was arrested in June 1950. Her sentence was harsh: life imprisonment at hard labor. This vindictive act of political justice soon became a cause célèbre around the world, and many prominent individuals and important organizations in democratic nations raised their voices in protest. In July 1953, the Socialist International strongly condemned Kéthly's sentence and imprisonment.

The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 created a new international climate as well as a cautious atmosphere of thaw in the Soviet Union. In 1954, the British Labor Party brought the Kéthly case to the attention of the new post-Stalinist Soviet government. The international protests on her behalf very likely hastened her release from prison in November 1954. Although she would remain under house arrest for the next two years, Kéthly was now able to regain her health and reestablish contacts with the informal network of Social Democrats that still remained in Hungary.

By 1956, Communism in Eastern European had entered a profound stage of crisis. In his secret address to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party early that year, Nikita Khrushchev had revealed the immensity of Joseph Stalin's crimes. By implication, the philosophical and moral foundations of the Soviet system were now open to all forms of scrutiny and criticism. Long-festering grievances against Soviet occupation forces, economic failures, and the corrupt and brutal nature of Communist rule erupted later that year, first in Poland in the spring and then in Hungary during October 1956. Within a few days, protests by intellectuals in Budapest ignited the entire nation in a spontaneous revolutionary upheaval. A new government, headed by a reform-minded veteran Communist, Imre Nagy, demanded that Soviet forces leave Hungary and announced the creation of a democratic multiparty system. Amidst this euphoria, the banned Social Democratic Party reconstituted itself, choosing Kéthly as its leader on October 31, 1956.

On November 1, 1956, she went to Vienna to bring the latest news of the Hungarian revolution to her Western colleagues at a meeting of the bureau of the Socialist International. Kéthly's pleas for support of the Nagy government met with sympathy from Western Social Democrats, but their actual power was quite limited. The horrible reality of Hungary's geopolitical status as a pawn of the great powers became only too clear on November 4, when Soviet forces in Hungary went on the offensive, crushing the popular uprising in a sea of blood. Immediately, Kéthly flew to New York to make an appeal on behalf of democratic Hungary before a special session of the United Nations Security Council. While in the United States, she brought Hungary's case to the attention of world and wrote a detailed report on the causes and events of the Hungarian revolution. Kéthly's impassioned advocacy of her nation's right to exist free of Cold War pressures impressed many, but the concrete results of her testimony were meager. A special meeting of the United Nations in September 1957, and a special report on events in Hungary, became part of the historical record, but the reality remained that, at least in the short term, Soviet power had prevailed. A fiery Hungarian patriot as well as a Social Democrat, Kéthly was incensed by those individuals who attributed the 1956 uprising to incendiary propaganda by Radio Free Europe and meddling by Western intelligence agencies. Her response to an American journalist at the time of the revolt was a curt one: "What kind of people do you think we are that we need some radio broadcasts to tell us to resist Russia?"

In June 1958, Imre Nagy and several of his associates in the 1956 revolution were executed, not in Hungary but in Rumania. Speaking as one of the most respected Hungarian leaders in exile, Kéthly condemned this deed in the most powerful terms possible. Refusing to be discouraged, she settled down as a political emigre in Brussels. In October 1957, the first anniversary of Hungary's failed bid for freedom, she founded and became president of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in Emigration. That same year, the Council of Europe headquartered in Strasbourg awarded her a special prize of 10,000 German marks to commemorate her life's work of dedication to the causes of freedom and human rights. Kéthly announced that she would contribute the prize funds to support the activities of exiled Hungarian youth organizations.

Despite her advanced age, Kéthly was determined to make a new life for herself in exile. Falling back on her skills as a seasoned journalist, she became editor of an exile journal, Voice of the People, which was published in London between 1957 and 1963. In 1962, the Communist government of János Kádár, securely in power and able to point to significant economic reforms, "forgave" Kéthly for her past transgressions and rehabilitated her, but she chose not to return to Hungary even for a visit. Instead, she continued to criticize the Communist regime and the ideology it used to justify its deeds. In Brussels, she played a key role in founding the Imre Nagy Institute, a research center that monitored the situation in Hungary, and over the next decades she published several studies of the 1956 revolution and its aftermath.

Anna Kéthly died in Blankernberg, Belgium, in September 1976, almost two decades after the start of the Hungarian uprising. By the time of her death, her name was largely forgotten in the West, as were most details of the tragic revolt in which she had been a leader. In Hungary, however, her name remained well known, at least among aging Social Democrats who continued to hope for a time when the Communist system would collapse of its own contradictions. When this finally did take place in 1989 in Hungary and other Soviet satellite states, Kéthly's name and achievements once more served to inspire those individuals who believed that freedom and social justice were inseparable ideals. In November 1989, the Hungarian Social Democratic Party opened its first congress in over four decades by declaring null and void its forced absorption by the Communists in 1948. On the platform during this moving occasion was a blue screen bearing the portrait of the party's last leader before its demise, Anna Kéthly.

A year later, in November 1990, Kéthly's ashes were returned from Belgium and placed in Hungarian soil in Budapest's Rakoskeresztur Cemetery near the grave of Imre Nagy and his martyred associates. With intellectual freedom restored, Hungarians could read about her life, and several books about Kéthly appeared in print during the 1990s. In October 1994, a centrist and non-Marxist faction within the Hungarian Social Democratic Party was announced, calling itself the Anna Kéthly Social Democratic Party. Party chair Sandor Bacskai named as his new party's goal the creation of an organization resembling that of the Social Democrats of Germany, whose 1959 Bad Godesberg program marked a final break with Marxist dogmatism and theories of class struggle. It is likely that Anna Kéthly would have been flattered to have a political party named after her. It is safe to speculate that she would have been even happier, however, in the knowledge that this took place in a Hungary where citizens enjoyed strong guarantees of political freedom and fundamental human rights.

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John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia