Litván, who was a university lecturer and a researcher at the institute, died on Wednesday.
Litván was born in Budapest on February 19, 1929. He studied history and political economics in Budapest in 1946-50 and worked as a secondary school teacher until 1957. As a researcher, he focused on the early history of the Hungarian workers? movement. He was a member of the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) and the Hungarian Workers Party (MDP) between 1947 and 1956, and he was actively involved in the youth movement and later in party education. He joined the party opposition that formed around Imre Nagy in 1954, and on March 23, 1956, he was the first to publicly demand the removal of Mátyás Rákosi from power. He was involved in the Petőfi Circle, and during the 1956 revolution he was a member of the Hungarian Intellectuals? Revolutionary Committee as well as the 12th District National Committee.
After the 1956 Revolution was crushed, he helped found the Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement. He was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released, however, in 1962.
Between 1963 and 1971, he was a teacher and librarian at Budapest?s Árpád Secondary School. Afterward, he started working as a historian at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences? Historical Institute. He became a founding member of the Historical Justice Committee in 1988 and director of the History of the Hungarian Revolution Documentation and Research Institute in 1991. He was a university lecturer at the Sociology Institute of ELTE in Budapest from 1995 until his retirement in 1999.
His areas of specialty included social and political thinking in the early 20th century, the democratic, socialist and national movements at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the democratic revolution of 1918, the political and diplomatic background of the Trianon peace treaty and emigration between the two world wars.
Litván made a significant contribution to the evaluation and analysis of the 1956 Revolution through his research at the 1956 Institute. He received numerous acknowledgements of his work, including the Academy of Sciences Award (1992), the Ferenc Deák Award (1994), the István Bibó Memorial Award (2000), the Pál Demény Memorial Plaque (2000) and the Imre Nagy Memorial Award (2004). He received the Pro Urbe Award in 2005 and the Széchenyi Award in 2006. Only a few weeks before his death, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, he was presented with the Hero of Liberty Memorial Award by the 1956 Memorial Committee.
Source: Múlt-kor / Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
