#740: Nyet Nyet Soviet (Soviet Jewellery) by B.B. Gabor
Peak Month: June 1980
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
3 weeks Hitbound on CKLG
YouTube.com link: “Nyet Nyet Soviet (Soviet Jewellery)”
Lyrics: Nyet Nyet Soviet (Soviet Jewellery)”
Gabor Hegedus was born in Hungary in 1948. His childhood was spent in the context of the repressive Hungarian Communist regime as a satellite of Stalin’s USSR. The Hungarian Communist Party had received only 17% of the vote in November 1945 and 17% of the vote in national elections in August 1947. Hungarian Communist part leader, Mátyás Rákosi, forced the Social Democrats to merge with the Communists. Next, all the other political parties were declared illegal and many politicians were charged with “conspiracy against the Republic.” This included Rákosi’s main rival in the Hungarian Communist Party, László Rajk, the Minister of the Interior of Hungary who had established the State Protection Authority. László was executed after a show trial in May 1949. Under the regime as many as 1.5 million Hungarians were imprisoned at some point between 1949 and 1956, out of a population of 9.5 million. The highly unpopular Rákosi was removed from office in the July 1956, after a speech by Nikita Khrushchev on February 25, 1956, had begun a process of destalinization. Khrushchev had denounced the cult of personality that Joseph Stalin had established and Rákosi had emulated. Reforms and revolution were sparked in the fall of 1956 and László Rajk was cleared of all charges on October 6, 1956. On October 19, 1956, the new reformist Hungarian Communist Party leader, Imre Nagy, won concessions for a reduction of Soviet troops in Hungary. Students and others pushed for even more reforms and on November 4th Soviet tanks entered Budapest. The Hungarian Revolution ended on November 11, 1956. Gabor Hegedus and his parents fled to England. In a 1980 interview with Paul McGrath of the Globe and Mail, BB Gabor recalled that his family escaped Hungary just “one step ahead of the Russian tanks.”