Act 2. of 1946 about the Protection of the Republic and the Democratic State Regime

Abstract

The article introduces in detail both the act of law mentioned in the title of the article and the path leading to its enactment. Therefore, it deals in detail with the regulation related to political crimes of the Act 5. of 1878, the so-called Code Csemegi and with the chapters of the following act on criminal law, Act 3. of 1921, the so-called Act on Order. In the main part of his article the author focuses on the chapters Act 2. of 1946 that defined the main characteristics of the Hungarian criminal law after the overtaking of the state power by the Communist Party. This act provided the possibility for the liquidation and imprisonment of the regime’s political enemies. According to the new criminal law developed according to the Stalinist ideology the number of the political enemies to be liquidated, increased immensely. The so-called „reactionists”, the members of the noble class and of the noble-Christian middle class, the kulak’s, the rich peasant families, the owners of mills, the members of the middle peasant class, the factory owners, the gentry, bureaucrats, suspected intellectuals, priests, members of the clerical reaction and all those people
who were declared to be the enemies of the Soviet Union and the former social democrats were put on this list. The article shows in detail their persecution based on the statistical data containing the number of the condemned persons.