Second Hungarian Republic (feb 1, 1946 – aug 20, 1949)

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The Second Hungarian Republic (Hungarian: Magyar Köztársaság) was a parliamentary republic briefly established after the disestablishment of the Kingdom of Hungary on 1 February 1946 and was itself dissolved on 20 August 1949. It was succeeded by the Hungarian People's Republic.

The Republic was proclaimed in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation of Hungary at the end of World War II in Europe and with the formal abolition of the Hungarian monarchy in February 1946, whose throne had been vacant since 1918. Initially the period was characterized by an uneasy coalition government between pro-democracy elements—primarily the Independent Smallholders' Party—and the Hungarian Communist Party. At Soviet insistence, the Communists had received key posts in the new cabinet, particularly the Interior Ministry: despite the Smallholders' Party's landslide victory in the 1945 elections. From that position the Communists were able to use political intrigue to systematically eliminate their opponents segment by segment through political intrigue and fabricated conspiracy, a process that Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi called "salami tactics."

By June 1947 the Communist Party had gutted the Smallholders' Party as a political force through the mass arrests and forced exile of its main leaders and had gained effective control of the government, installing a fellow traveller as Prime Minister. New elections in August 1947 increased the Communists' share of the vote, though non-Communist parties won essentially the same number of votes as in 1945 and the elections were marred with fraud and intimidation. Regardless, further Communist machinations and intrigues managed to liquidate most of the remaining opposition parties within the next year. This culminated in their merger with the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in June 1948 to form the Hungarian Working People's Party; essentially an expanded Communist Party under a new name. The government instituted programs of nationalization of key industries as part of the Sovietization of the Hungarian economy and society as the country entered the Soviet sphere of influence. In August 1949, the country was formally proclaimed to be a people's republic with the Communists as the sole legal party. This arrangement would last, aside from a brief break in 1956, until the end of Communism in Hungary in 1989–90.

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