The Hungarian People's Republic (HPR) was a landlocked country in Central Europe from its formation on 20 August 1949 until the establishment of the current Republic of Hungary on 23 October 1989. It was a professed communist state, governed first by the Hungarian Working People's Party and after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. Both governments were closely tied to the Soviet Union as part of the Eastern Bloc.
The state considered itself the heir to the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was formed in 1919 as one of the first communist states created after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR). It was designated a "people's democratic republic" by the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Geographically, it bordered Romania and the Soviet Union (via the Ukrainian SSR) to the east; Yugoslavia (via SRs Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia) to the southwest; Czechoslovakia to the north and Austria to the west.