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Kende, Péter (1927) |
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He was born in Budapest to parents who were doctors. His father, Zsigmond Kende was a bourgeois radical politician and a Hungarian Radical Party member of Parliament in 1947-9. He studied at the German Reichsschule in Budapest, which was an enlightened establishment. In 1944, he took part in the resistance movement and went into hiding after the Arrow-Cross coup, arriving in Szeged in February 1945. That autumn, he began studying law in Budapest, but transferred to history and sociology. In March, he joined the communist young movement MADISZ, and in May, the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) as well. He edited two communist periodicals in 1945-6. In March 1947, he joined the staff of the central communist daily Szabad Nép, becoming its foreign editor in 1949. He completed a party school and then himself taught Marxism-Leninism at university level. In 1953, he supported the New Course of Prime Minister Imre Nagy. He joined the management of Szabad Nép, becoming party secretary there in 1954. He attacked the editors of the paper and the policy of the party leadership at a party meeting in October 1954 and was dismissed by the paper in December. During the revolution, he edited the paper Magyar Szabadság (Hungarian Freedom). After the Soviet reoccupation of November 4, 1956, he became a member of the Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement and joined the staff of the illegal paper Október 23. He fled from Hungary on January 30, 1957, as the wave of arrests built up. Settling in Paris, he continued his sociology studies at the Sorbonne, and obtained a doctorate in 1964. Meanwhile he helped to compile a volume of documents, The Truth about Imre Nagy. He worked at the Imre Nagy Institute in Brussels from 1959 to 1964. He was at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique from 1961 to 1993, from 1974 as research director. He also began teaching at the university in 1969. He contributed regularly to the emigré Irodalmi Újság (Literary News) from 1962 to 1989. In 1978, he established a pamphlet series Magyar Füzetek in Paris and edited it until 1989. He became vice-chairman of the Hungarian League of Human Rights in 1983. In 1989, he took part in founding the Budapest 1956 Institute and became chairman of its trustees in 1994. He was elected a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1993. In 1993-2000, he was a guest professor in the political science department of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He was awarded the Imre Nagy Plaque in 1991 and the Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 1996, and made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 1997. |
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Kende, Péter: 'We wouldn't have survived without the Budapest contributors'