György Ádám, 1911–1974
The son of the leading coal merchant in Western Hungary, Ádám was a contemporary of the historian Ferenc Fejtő (François Fejtő) at the Piarist Grammar School in Nagykanizsa. He entered the Economic Academy in Vienna, but he was obliged by his father’s death to break off his studies and return to run the family firm. Ádám joined the illegal communist movement in the 1930s and was arrested several times. In 1938, he emigrated to South America, where he was active in the left-wing movements in Bolivia. On his return to Hungary after the Second World War, Ádám became a senior journalist and foreign-policy expert on the communist-party daily Szabad Nép (Free People), and then successively on Hungarian Radio and with the Hungarian News Agency MTI. He contributed regularly to the Társadalmi Szemle (Social Review). Ádám acted as an interpreter during the Maort trial of 1948 and was appointed the principal of one of the Nékosz people’s colleges in the same year. However, he was soon arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for spying, as one of the co-defendants in the Rajk trial. Released in the spring of 1954, he regained his party membership and was appointed a senior researcher in the Faculty of International Relations at the Budapest Karl Marx University of Economics. In 1956, he was among the organizers of the reburial of László Rajk. On October 28, 1956, Ádám became one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Intelligentsia established at the central building of Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest. After November 4, he was active in the opposition movement of those known as the revisionist and social democratic intellectuals (Sándor Fekete, Pál Justus, György Litván, Ferenc Mérei, Jeno Széll, Zoltán Zsámboky etc.) He became a leading light in the Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement that emerged after the second Soviet intervention, helping to edit and duplicate its paper, Október Huszonharmadika (October 23). Ádám was arrested in November 1957. He received a life sentence from the Supreme Court on July 4, 1958, but was freed under the 1963 amnesty. After that, he worked as an editor for KJK, the economics and law publishers, and after obtaining a candidacy degree, as a senior research fellow with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Computer Technology and Automation Research Institute (Sztaki). He published numerous scientific papers and studies.
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