István Kovács, politician ( b. 1911)
Born in Gyergyóditró (Ditrău, now in Romania), Kovács had five years of schooling before starting work as an upholsterer's assistant. He held office in the communist youth organization Kimsz (Hungarian Federation of Communist Youth) from 1927, joining its Central Committee in 1930. In 1930-31 he was the Kimsz representative on the Communist Youth International in Moscow, where he attended the Lenin School [?& for foreign cadres]. On his return to Hungary in 1933, he was elected secretary of Kimsz. Kovács was arrested in 1934 and released in 1942. In September of that year, he joined the Secretariat of the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee and became secretary of the Budapest District Party Committee. He was arrested again in 1943 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment. In the autumn of 1944, he volunteered for mine detection, but managed to escape and join the Secretariat of the illegal Communist Party again. From January 1945 until June 1949, he headed the Central Committee Organization Department of the Hungarian Communist Party, later the HWP. He was elected a Political Committee member in May 1945 and an alternate Political Committee member in September 1946. He was also a member of the Steering Committee, of which he later became deputy head and then head. In June 1948, he was elected to the HWP Central Committee, joining its Secretariat in November. From 1949 to 1950, Kovács was first secretary of the HWP Budapest Committee. He then headed the Cadres Department of the HWP until 1953. Meanwhile, in April 1951, he became a member of the committee investigating the cases of János Kádár and Gyula Kállai [?&, who had been arrested on trumped-up charges]. Later, Kovács was dismissed from his positions and appointed on February 28, 1953 the first secretary of Borsod County HWP Committee. From June 18, 1954 to October 30, 1956, he was first secretary of the Budapest HWP Committee. In April 1955, he was restored to membership of the Political Committee, and in November 1955, he rejoined the Central Committee Secretariat. He supervised the cadres group operating alongside the Central Committee, and from July 1956, the Cadres Department. A speech by Kovács on December 16, 1955 formed the basis of demands that the writers be brought to heel. On September 28, 1956, he was appointed to the committee organizing the reburial of [?& the show-trial victims] László Rajk, György Pálffy, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai. Kovács travelled to Yugoslavia on October 15, 1956 as a member of the party and government delegation. On October 23, 1956, he became head of the Military Committee of the HWP Central Committee and met on the following day with Anastaz Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, who arrived in Budapest as the special envoys of the Soviet leadership. Kovács, with other politicians, was taken to Moscow on October 28, 1956. On the morning of October 30, he was dismissed in his absence from the post of first secretary in Budapest and replaced by József Köböl. Under the resolution of the Provisional Executive of the HSWP passed on February 19, 1957, Kovács was not allowed to return from Moscow until August 1958. Thereafter, he became a department head at the Ministry of Light Industry. He was expelled from the HSWP in 1962, but successively applied to have his membership restored by the Central Supervisory Committee in 1966. At the time of his retirement in 1974, he was director of the Light Industrial Organization Institute.
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