Bela Kiraly

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Bela Kiraly, one of the military leaders of Hungary’s short-lived anti-Soviet revolution in 1956, has died, the government said. He was 97.

A brief defense ministry statement provided no other details, including the cause of death or where and when it occurred. However, the daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet reported that Kiraly died Saturday morning in Budapest.

Kiraly served in the Hungarian army during World War II and later led its military academy.

In 1952, he was sentenced to death on trumped-up conspiracy charges by Hungary’s Stalinist regime, but the sentence was later commuted to life in prison.

The October 1956 revolution, aimed at overthrowing the communist regime, lasted less than two weeks before it was crushed. Kiraly had been freed from prison just weeks before the revolution, and during it he was named as Budapest’s military commander and head of the National Guard.

Kiraly’s task was to organize the police, army and individual groups of insurgents into a cohesive body meant to help Prime Minister Imre Nagy’s newly minted multiparty government stabilize the country.

But when more than 100,000 Soviet troops and some 4,500 tanks overran the country from Nov. 4 and quickly crushed the revolution, the Hungarians could do little to stop their advance.

According to historian Ignac Romsics, Kiraly “judged that any resistance would be suicidal” and decided to flee to Austria with his staff.

After the revolution, Kiraly continued to advocate for the revolution’s cause and testified at the United Nations about the 1956 events and Soviet brutality.

“It wasn’t the revolution that failed,” Kiraly said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2006. “The Soviets’ unprecedented superiority of force defeated the revolutionary government in an undeclared war, but nobody in Hungary wanted to overthrow Imre Nagy.”