Matyas Rakosi

According to Shawcross, "he was an smooth scholar" (38). His family was sufficiently well-off to send him to England before the outbreak of the First World War where he was a jr. banker and dabbled in left-hand(a)-wing causes. He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915. Shawcross utter that after the October 1917 Russian Revolution, "the Bolsheviks took this clever, ambitious young capitalist to Moscow to make a clever, ambitious young Communist out of him" (38).

In 1918 Rakosi returned to Hungary with Bela Kun, a Hungarian officer-POW in Russia. Kun founded the HCP in November 1918. Rakosi served in various capacities in Kun's short-lived (133 day) Soviet Republic --as Deputy Commissar for traffic and as Commander of the Red Guards (Vail 33; & Hoensch 165). He fled to capital of Austria in August 1919 together with the rest of Kun's entourage and then went onto the Soviet Union. There he served as a party cloak-and-daggerary in the executive committee of the Comintern which the Bolsheviks formed to mete out communism abroad. Under various pseudonyms Rakosi was dispatched as a secret agent to various Western European countries in 1920-1921. Lindemann said he was known for his hardline opposition to including socialist 'deviationists' in Western communist parties (125 & 270).

In 1924 Rakosi was ordered back to Hungary which he

of Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1990.

Rakosi died in his sleep in Russia in 1971 at the age of 79

Teresa Rakowski-Hartstine & Andrew Gyorgy. Bloomington:

entered illegitimately and with false identity papers with instructions to reconstitute HCP which had been decimated during the washrag Terror of Regent Admiral Miklos Horthy. Rakosi was arrested in 1925 along with 53 other Communists and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. He ably but provocatively defended himself at his trial. At the Szeged penitentiary he fomented prisoner protests while maintaining clandestine tangency with outside revolutionaries. In 1934 or 1935 he was re-tried and sentenced to a living term.

During the latter phase of his imprisonment, Rakosi became a 'trusty,' with access to the prison program library where Shawcross said he engaged in "a exceptional(a) exercise in self-improvement" (39-40).

Rakosi was an unprincipled intriguer who feature and demonstrated above average survival skills amidst the Byzantine reality of postwar Soviet and Hungarian communism. Some of the same qualities that had facilitated his reverse to power, including his ideological obduracy and his serpentine ruthlessness, helped grease the skids for his ignominious proceeds after early 1953. In the end he left a record of slavish adherence to the wishes of his Soviet get the hang and presided over a degrading chapter in the history of his homeland.

approximately (at the senior level all but Nagy) of the Muscovites were Jews. This was a carryover from the Bela Kun government in which, according to Kovrig, 161 of 203 senior commissars were Jewish (162). Although Jews comprised less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population during the interwar period, they exercised much more limit in certain sectors such as finance than their be would warrant. As members of "the creditor class" and because they had played "a disproportionately extended part" in both the Bolshevik and Kun revolutions, "feeling ran in particular high agains
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