Dezso Nemes

Born Sept. 6, 1908, in Lőcse. Hungarian political and public figure; historian. Academician of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1964).

Of working-class origin, Nemes joined the Communist Party of Hungary in 1926 and became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League in 1928. Imprisoned from 1928 to 1931, he was made a secretary of the Budapest committee of the Communist Party in 1933 and was a member of the party’s Central Committee from 1934 to 1936. Nemes lived in emigration in the Soviet Union from 1931 to 1933 and again from 1936 to 1945, and he returned to his homeland in 1945. He was a secretary of the Council of Trade Unions of Hungary (1945–48), head of a main administration of the Ministry of Public Education (1950–53), director of the Szikra publishing house (1953–56), director of the Higher Party School (1956), and chief editor of the newspaper Népszabadság (1957–61).

Elected a member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) in 1957 and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the HSWP in 1959, Nemes was a secretary of the Central Committee of the HSWP from 1961 to 1965, the director of the Institute of Party History from 1965 to 1967, and the rector of the Higher Political School under the Central Committee of the HSWP from 1967. Nemes is the author of several works on modern and contemporary Hungarian history, in particular on the history of the Hungarian labor movement; he was the chairman of the editorial board of the three-volume History of the Hungarian Revolutionary Labor Movement. He was a recipient of the Kossuth Prize in 1954.