Laszlo Rajk

(b. near Budapest, 9 March 1909; d. Budapest, 15 Oct. 1949) Hungarian; Minister of the Interior 1946 – 8, Foreign Minister 1948 – 9 Rajk was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He became a Communist while a student at Budapest University, and was expelled as a result. He became a building worker and trade unionist and in 1935 organized a major strike in the construction industry. He then fled arrest to Spain, where he served in the Civil War as party secretary of the Hungarian battalion of the International Brigades. After the collapse of the Republican cause in Spain in 1939 he fled to France, where he was interned. In 1940 he escaped to Hungary and served in the communist resistance, acting as a link between the Soviet leadership and the peace faction within Horthy's government. In 1945 he was party secretary for Budapest, charged with building up the party's organization. In February 1946 he was appointed Minister of the Interior, which gave him oversight of the Communist secret police, the AVO. He was closely involved in the terror which accompanied the Sovietization of Hungary. In August 1948 he left the Ministry of the Interior to become Foreign Minister. In May 1949 he was arrested, tortured, and faced with the trumped-up charges of "Titoism", of having worked for Horthy's secret police in the 1930s, and of intending to restore capitalism in Hungary. The real reason for his downfall was Stalin's desire to control over-powerful Communist leaders in Eastern Europe following Yugoslavia's withdrawal from the Soviet Bloc in 1948. In September 1949 Rajk's trial was widely publicized throughout Eastern Europe. He pleaded guilty, allegedly on Kádár's advice that he should act "for the sake of the Party", and was hanged. He was rehabilitated in March 1956.