Shortly before Australian broadcaster SBS was about to screen “Grandfathers and Revolutions” on state television in 2000, an outraged group of Hungarian-Australians, many of them refugees and their descendants from 1956, wrote a protest letter, asking the station to ban the program.
“They said the film is about one of Hungary’s worst dictators,” Peter Hegedüs tells the Budapest Business Journal on a visit to Budapest in September.
“At one point, Violet [a 1956 revolutionary, who appears in the film], wanted to leave because of the pressure. It’s very funny now, looking back, but at that time, I was a bit nervous. It was very much my first [long] film,” Hegedüs admits today.
SBS stood its ground; the film was broadcast, then released to the world, garnering a clutch of awards on the way. But why all the fuss? Just who was this “worst dictator”? And was this epithet justified?
The answer to the second query was easy enough; the “culprit” was András Hegedüs, the young filmmaker’s paternal grandfather and Hungary’s prime minister from 1955-56. But for answers to the other questions, Peter had to make the documentary. To understand, one must begin with 1956.
On Oct. 24, one day after the famed Hungarian Uprising broke out, András Hegedüs, Hungary’s communist prime minister, resigned, bowing to the demands of the freedom fighters. This enabled the hero of the hour, Imre Nagy, to take the reins of government. Hegedüs and his family were whisked away to Moscow for their safety.
While fighting raged, Nagy was in charge, at least nominally, until Nov. 4, when the Soviet military, employing overwhelming firepower, restored communist rule. They cited an “invitation letter,” dated Oct. 24 and signed by Hegedus, as justification for their “assistance.”
The new regime, under János Kádár, immediately began retributions, spurring some 200,000 Hungarians to flee the country.
Fast forward to 1990, when that spring was, for millions of Hungarians, a time of inestimable joy, despite a struggling economy. For the first time, the adult population had voted in a secret, free and fair election, and that May, a truly sovereign government was formed in Budapest. Many proclaimed it the fulfillment of the hopes of the freedom fighters of 1956.
But the democratic changes also released pent-up loathing for those seen as “on the enemy side,” which at times extended to family members, including Peter Hegedüs, his two sisters and their divorced mother.
Signs of these suppressed emotions first surfaced in the late 1980s. School kids and adults made comments, occasionally hissed hatred. Grandfather Hegedüs had ruled on executions, ordered massacres, and sold out to the Russians, or so many believed.
“It wasn’t very intense, but we did hear it. My mother was [already] having a difficult time dealing with the family situation. I think every time there was mention [of 1956] she took it really hard,” the filmmaker recalls.
So once again, the events of 1956 spurred flight: in 1991, Peter, aged 14, his mother and family, took off for a new life in Australia. Though the Hungarian community initially welcomed them, the family’s history still lingered, appearing at times like a cold, chilling winter mist.
Confused and seeking to separate myth from reality, the budding Australian filmmaker returned to Hungary in 1998, aged 22, to quiz his grandfather and document his version of events. He found an old man, in the twilight of life, a former servant of a Stalinist-like regime, who describes his early life in the harsh economic years following WW1.
“I was pretty gentle with him. He came from a very difficult background, growing up in a small village. He understood what it was like being part of the working class and poor,” says Peter.
Indeed, in the film Hegedüs Snr. describes being mocked by kids from better-off families for having no money and tatty clothes, experiences which made him fertile ground for an ideology professing a vision of equality and an end to human exploitation. András Hegedüs turned to communism in 1942 as a student, and in the early 50s he began to rise through the party ranks, becoming prime minister in 1955.
In the film, he is seen rubbing shoulders with the likes of hard-line party secretary Mátyás Rákosi. For Gergely Pongrátz, one of the most famous 1956 insurgents, that alone is enough to condemn him.
As Pongrátz comments in the film: “You don’t become prime minister overnight. He must have played a determining role within the Communist Party [in a period when] dozens of people were being executed on a daily basis.”
Perhaps. But is Hegedüs guilty of his biggest alleged crime, inviting the Soviet forces to quash the revolution? British author Bob Dent, who has studied the revolution in depth, thinks the Soviets, needing a fig-leaf justification for the suppression, most likely had the ex-prime minister sign the letter a few days after the event, post-dated to Oct. 24.
Perhaps the film’s biggest weakness is that this question is not clearly addressed, although towards the end, Hegedüs denies calling in the Soviets, saying “They were already here [.…] I only signed the letter later.”
Hegedüs returned from Moscow and turned down a position in the party, even becoming a pioneer in the opposition movement and openly criticizing the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a brave stand to take at the time. He died, perhaps appropriately, on Oct. 23, 1999, a few days short of his 77th birthday.
For the filmmaker, the project “Allowed me to get close to my grandfather [….] I’ll continue to process this [his role] to the end of my life,” he says.
Gábor Demszky, better remembered today as Mayor of Budapest from 1990-2010, was a leading dissident in the last two decades of Hungary’s communist era, arrested several times for his (non-violent) anti-government activities, chiefly in samizdat, illegal, underground publications.
Speaking to the BBJ, Demszky was dismissive of allegations against András Hegedüs, and his alleged role in requesting Soviet forces to quell the Hungarian revolution.
“Writing a letter? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that important. The Russians would have invaded anyway, letter or no letter. It was decided in Moscow,” Demszky says. The former liberal mayor said he once attended an illicit lecture Hegedüs gave in the communist era.
“He was very appreciated as a scholar, a very intelligent [social] scientist. He wrote a book about socialist bureaucracy and the system. He was an insider, so he knew it,” he continued.
True, Hegedüs was a communist when he was young, a “true believer,” in Demszky’s estimation, but he later swung toward social democracy, and his work in sociology was groundbreaking.
“He was a pioneer. Sociology did not exist in Hungary at that time,” Demszky says.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of October 19, 2026.
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