[1] Pursuant to the 1944 Moscow Conference, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had agreed that after the war Hungary was to be included in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Geographically, it bordered Romania and the Soviet Union (via the Ukrainian SSR) to the east; Yugoslavia (via SRs Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia) to the southwest; Czechoslovakia to the north and Austria to the west.

[12] The process was more or less completed in 1949, when a newly elected legislature chosen from a single Communist-dominated list adopted a Soviet-style constitution, and the country was officially recast as a "people's republic."

[13] Political repression and economic decline led to a nationwide popular uprising in October–November 1956 known as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which was the largest single act of dissent in the history of the Eastern Bloc.

Those influences remained supreme until the late 1980s, when turmoil broke out across the Eastern Bloc, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union's dissolution.

[15] Using force, the Red Army set up police organs to persecute the opposition, assuming this would enable the Soviet Union to seize the upcoming elections, together with intense communist propaganda to attempt to legitimize their rule.

Communist Interior Minister László Rajk established the ÁVH secret police, in an effort to suppress political opposition through intimidation, false accusations, imprisonment and torture.

[22] At the September 1949 trial, Rajk made a forced confession, claiming that he had been an agent of Miklós Horthy, Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz Tito and Western imperialism.

[24] Dubbed the "bald murderer", Rákosi imitated Stalinist political and economic programs, resulting in Hungary experiencing one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe.

Despite its poor resource base and its favorable opportunities to specialize in other forms of production, Hungary developed new heavy industry in order to bolster further domestic growth and produce exports to pay for raw-material import.

In addition to some beneficial effects such as better education for the poor, more opportunities for working-class children and increased literacy in general, this measure also included the dissemination of communist ideology in schools and universities.

Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had opposed the German Nazis and the Hungarian Fascists during the Second World War, however, did support the Miklós Horthy dictatorship,[28] and was arrested in December 1948 and accused of treason.

[citation needed] His government became increasingly unpopular, and when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Mátyás Rákosi was replaced as prime minister by Imre Nagy.

However, he retained his position as general secretary of the Hungarian Working People's Party and over the next three years the two men became involved in a bitter struggle for power.

As Hungary's new leader, Imre Nagy removed state control of the mass media and encouraged public discussion on changes to the political system and liberalizing the economy.

Hungarian newspapers joined the attacks and Nagy was accused of being responsible for the country's economic problems and on 18 April he was dismissed from his post by a unanimous vote of the National Assembly.

On 3 October 1956, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People's Party announced that it had decided that László Rajk, György Pálffy, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai had wrongly been convicted of treason in 1949.

On 28 October, Nagy and a group of his supporters, including János Kádár, Géza Losonczy, Antal Apró, Károly Kiss, Ferenc Münnich and Zoltán Szabó, managed to take control of the Hungarian Working People's Party.

Nagy's most controversial decision took place on 1 November when he announced that Hungary intended to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and proclaim Hungarian neutrality.

[citation needed] Imre Nagy was arrested and replaced by Soviet loyalist János Kádár as head of the newly formed Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt, MSZMP).

Other government ministers and supporters who were either executed or died in captivity included Pál Maléter, Géza Losonczy, Attila Szigethy and Miklós Gimes.

He declared a general amnesty, gradually curbed some of the excesses of the secret police, and introduced a relatively liberal cultural and economic course aimed at overcoming the post-1956 hostility towards him and his regime.

By the early 1980s, it had achieved some lasting economic reforms and limited political liberalization and pursued a foreign policy which encouraged more trade with the West.

Hungary remained committed to a pro-Soviet foreign policy and openly criticized US president Ronald Reagan's deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

In 1983, Vice President George H. W. Bush and the foreign ministers of France and West Germany visited Budapest, where they received a friendly welcome, but the Hungarian leadership nonetheless reiterated their opposition to US missile deployment.

In 1988, Kádár was replaced as General Secretary of the MSZMP by Prime Minister Károly Grósz, and reformist communist leader Imre Pozsgay was admitted to the Politburo.

In 1989, the Parliament adopted a "democracy package", which included trade union pluralism; freedom of association, assembly, and the press; and a new electoral law.

A Central Committee plenum in February 1989 agreed in principle to give up the MSZMP's monopoly of power, and also characterized the October 1956 revolution as a "popular uprising", in the words of Pozsgay, whose reform movement had been gathering strength as Communist Party membership declined dramatically.

The revised constitution guaranteed human and civil rights, and created an institutional structure that ensured separation of powers among the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government.

[38] The near-total emphasis on large low quality prefabricated apartment blocks, such as Hungarian Panelház, was a common feature of Eastern Bloc cities in the 1970s and 1980s.