Coming from a poor family, he finished high school in Sopron at the Evangelical Academy. Hegedüs first became involved in the underground communist movement during his university years when he studied railway engineering at Budapest Technical University in 1942. He was not able to finish his studies and was put under house arrest in the August 1944 for two years but managed to escape at the end of November. He became part of the interim government on 24 June 1945.
1945–1990
In 1947 he married Zsuzsanna Hölzel ; they had six children. From 1948 onwards Hegedüs became involved with the Hungarian Working People's Party eventually taking on leading roles. From the early 1950s he took on numerous ministerial portfolios. This culminated on 18 April 1955, when he was named Prime Minister after party leader Mátyás Rákosi forced out Imre Nagy. When the Kremlin frowned on Rákosi returning to the state post he'd held from 1952 to 1953, Hegedüs succeeded him. He was 32 years old at the time of his appointment, making him the youngest Prime Minister in Hungarian history. After signing the document asking Soviet troops for assistance during the revolution on 24 October, the government and people overwhelmingly supported him handing power back to Nagy. He became the most hated man in Hungary and was advised to flee by Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov to the Soviet Union along with other Hungarian hardliners such as Ernő Gerő. In Moscow, he worked as part of the philosophy department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences between 1957 and 1958. In the November 1956 the interim committee of the Communist party shut him out of the party but by September 1958 he was able to return home. From the late 1950s he held numerous academic posts and worked in various research institutes: 1958–61: Hungarian Academy of Sciences Economic Institute 1961–63: Central Statistics Institute 1963–68: Founded and led the HAS Sociology Research Institute 1966: Karl Marx Economics University 1968–73: Industry Studies In 1968 he objected to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. He was dismissed from his position at the Sociology Research Institute and later in 1973 was shut out of the Communist Party for his differing political and ideological views. He became a pensioner from 1975 to 1982 when he was allowed to teach at the Economics University.
Post-communism
Following the collapse of Communism in 1990, Hegedüs founded the Worker's Academy. He was often interviewed about the events of 1956 by local and foreign news teams, as he was one of the few survivors from the government of that time. He died on the anniversary of the start of the Hungarian revolution.
