Károly Grósz (1 August 1930 – 7 January 1996) was a Hungarian communist politician, who served as the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1988 to 1989. Early career Grósz was born in Miskolc, Hungary. He joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1945 at the age of 14. The Communists took full power in 1949, and Grósz rose through the party ranks, becoming an important party leader in his native region. He functioned as head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County branch of the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) from 1954. He also held the position during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he banned local journals from coverage of events and forced to remove Kossuth Coat of Arms from letterhead of local newspaper Észak-Magyarország. On 4 November 1956, after the revolution was crushed, Grósz was appointed head of the local party apparatus of the ruling communist party. In 1974 he was appointed head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the governing Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. In 1979 Grósz was elected first secretary of the party committee of his home county. In 1984 he returned to national prominence as the head of the party committee in Budapest. At the next Party Congress in 1985, he became a member of the Politburo. In 1987, he was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary - the second most powerful position after that of General Secretary) to succeed György Lázár, who had filled the post for more than eleven years. The appointment of the younger and more energetic Grósz was acclaimed both at home and abroad. As the country was facing economic troubles and growing discontent, the aging party leader János Kádár decided to resign, although originally he had planned to remain in office until 1990. In May 1988 a party conference was convened, which elected Grósz as general secretary of the party at Kádár's recommendation on 22 May 1988. He advocated moderate and measured changes in the political and economic spheres. As he put it, this would result in a careful reform of the Communist system without touching the latter's foundations. He liked to call this a "model change" (i.e. reforms and refinements within the Communist framework), as opposed to the total "system change", i.e. the replacement of Communism by a Western-style