László Kardos, 1918–1980
Kardos graduated in Hungarian and Italian from Budapest University and then took a doctorate in ethnography, anthropology and sociology in 1943. He took part as a student in founding the Association of Peasant Colleges and Bolyai College. Kardos joined the illegal Hungarian Communist Party in 1941. He was conscripted into a punishment brigade in 1943. From 1942 to 1948, he was director of István Győrffy College. He then headed the education department of the Association of People’s College (NÉKOSZ), of which he later became general secretary, devising the system of people’s-college education. For his organizational and educational work with the peoples’ colleges, he was awarded a Kossuth Prize in 1948. He was a Hungarian Communist Party member of Parliament in 1947–8. In the latter year, he served as a government commissioner for the land redistribution in Tolna and Baranya counties. After NÉKOSZ was dissolved, he worked in the scientific department of the Ministry of Religion and Public Education from 1948 to 1950. From 1950 to 1957, he was a department head and then director-general of the Ethnographical Museum in Budapest. His main fields of research were the culture and way of life of rural people, Hungarian folk eating habits, and the development of religious activity among the rural population. During the 1956 revolution, Kardos was active in the National Committee of the Hungarian Intelligentsia. After the defeat of the revolution, he collaborated in smuggling abroad the 1955–6 polemics of Imre Nagy. Arrested in 1957, he was given a sentence of life imprisonment in 1958. From his release in 1963 until his death, he then worked as a senior researcher at the Ethnographical Museum, doing sociological and ethnographical researches and working on the history of the people’s-college movement.
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