Imre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic from 1953 to 1955. In 1956 Nagy became leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government, for which he was sentenced to death and executed two years later.
Nagy was a committed communist from soon after the Russian Revolution, and through the 1920s he engaged in underground party activity in Hungary. Living in the Soviet Union from 1930, he served the Soviet NKVD secret police as an informer from 1933 to 1941, denouncing over 200 colleagues, who were then purged and arrested and 15 of whom were executed. Nagy returned to Hungary shortly before the end of World War II, and served in various offices as the Hungarian Working People's Party took control of Hungary in the late 1940s and the country entered the Soviet sphere of influence. He played a key role in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Hungarians from 1945 to 1946 as Interior Minister of Hungary.