25 February
Day the Victims of the Communist Dictatorship

At the end of the Second World War, by 1945, Hungary had come under full Soviet occupation.

However, the presence of the Red Army did not only symbolise military occupation, but also guaranteed the establishment of a communist dictatorship. On Moscow’s orders, the insignificant Hungarian Communist Party immediately began to seize power.

The occupying Soviet forces provided support to the party leadership throughout this process. By the end of the 1940s, the dictatorship had been fully established in Hungary. The communists eliminated their political opponents, persecuted churches, nationalised private property, and then began collectivising land ownership.

From the very beginning, the dictatorship revealed its true nature. During the Soviet occupation, more than seven hundred thousand Hungarians were deported to the camps of the Gulag archipelago. Of those condemned to a life of forced labour, three hundred thousand never returned home. Meanwhile, Soviet-style courts reorganised in Hungary issued thousands of convictions based on false charges. Hundreds of innocent people were sentenced to death and executed as a result of show trials, while the number of prison sentences exceeded seventy thousand during this era. The oppression and arbitrariness knew no limits. Tens of thousands of people were deprived of their homes, and families were interned for years in designated forced residence locations in the countryside. It did not take long before the first forced labour camps were established in Hungary.

Prisons overcrowded with political prisoners were soon supplemented by camps at Recsk, Kazincbarcika, Tiszalök, and Kistarcsa. Following the suppression of the 1956 revolution and war of independence, the communist dictatorship was restored with Moscow’s support. Like its predecessor, the Kádár regime was born of violence. After 1956, 228 people were executed for political reasons, tens of thousands sentenced to prison, or interned in one of the newly opened camps.

Additionally, more than 200,000 people were forced to flee their homeland. Thirty-three years later, as it became clear that the party-state had relinquished its monopoly on violence and could no longer rely on Soviet intervention—both in Hungary and Central Europe—the communist dictatorships were overthrown one after another by the people oppressed by the regime.

The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Communist Dictatorship was established by a resolution of the Hungarian Parliament on 13 June 2000. The proposal was submitted by Béla Horváth, a parliamentary representative of the Independent Smallholders’ Party. Béla Kovács, secretary general of the Independent Smallholders’ Party, was arrested by Soviet authorities on 25 February 1947 due to his opposition to the communists and taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent eight years in captivity. His arrest and imprisonment marked the first step in the communist party’s elimination of dissenters.