As a major general in the Hungarian Army, in 1951 Kiraly was arrested on political charges and sentenced to death. But in 1956 he was released from prison — weeks before the Hungarian Revolution of October 23, when the people of Hungary spontaneously revolted against the harsh Stalinist regime.
Kiraly tried to marshal various Hungarian security forces into a National Guard to fight the Soviets, but “to tell the truth,” he said long afterward, “there was no central command of the freedom fighters; it was spontaneous fighters, here and there. Freedom, liberty, was the idea, everyone fought for that — and independence.”
Despite knowing the tiny country couldn’t repel the huge Soviet army — “Not for a moment” did he think they could win, he said — Kiraly fought back anyway. It was not in vain, he said: “The Hungarian Revolution was an inspiration for resistance against Bolshevik rule, resistance against Soviet imperialism” — the first step that led to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. Kiraly fled, first to Austria and then to the U.S., where he received a PhD from Columbia and taught history at Brooklyn College. When the communist bloc finally withdrew in 1989, Kiraly returned and was elected to parliament in the country’s first free elections after the Soviet era. He died July 4, at home in a free Hungary, at 97.