Lukács, György (1885–1971)
Philosopher and communist politician. Lukács joined the Hungarian Party of Communists in December 1918. he was education commissar under the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and after its fall, lived in exile in Vienna and Berlin. In 1933, he went to Moscow and worked as a researcher in several institutes. He was arrested by the secret police (NKVD) in 1941 but released after a short time. He returned home in 1945 to become a member of Parliament, a university professor and a cultural policy-maker. The so-called Lukács debate of 1949–50 centred on his concept of democracy. He was obliged to ‘exercise self-criticism’. During the 1956 Revolution, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party (MDP) and he was education minister in the national government of Imre Nagy from October 23 to November 3. On October 31, he joined the Executive Committee preparing for the founding congress of the new Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Like Nagy, he asked for political asylum at the Yugoslav Embassy on November 4. He, Zoltán Szántó and Zoltán Vas left the Embassy on November 18, only to be arrested by the Soviets and interned in Romania on November 23. He was allowed back to Hungary in April 1957 and retired in 1958. In 1967, his party membership was retrospectively reinstated. In 1968, he protested against the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.
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