Mátyás Rákosi

(b. Ada, Serbia, 9 March 1892; d. Gorky, USSR, 5 Feb. 1971) Hungarian; leader of the Hungarian Communist Party 1940 – 56 Rákosi was born as Mátyás Rosenkrantz in Serbia, the son of middle-class Jewish parents, who moved to Budapest during his childhood. He showed early intellectual promise and a skill for foreign languages, of which he could speak eight. In the years immediately before the First World War he worked in a London bank. He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and sent to the Eastern Front, where he was soon captured. He became a Communist while still a prisoner of war in 1918. In 1919 he was Commissar for Socialist Production in Béla Kun's Soviet Republic of Hungary. He escaped to Russia, where he worked for the Comintern. In 1924 he secretly returned to Hungary with the task of developing the illegal Communist Party. He was arrested in 1925 and tried and imprisoned for eight years in 1927. Upon his release in 1934 he was re-arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Were it not for an outcry by European intellectuals he would have been executed. In November 1940 Horthy's regime exchanged Rákosi and another Communist for Hungarian national flags which had been held in Moscow since their capture in 1849. Upon his return to Moscow, Rákosi was made General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party.

Rákosi returned to Hungary with the Red Army in 1944. He later described the piecemeal destruction of his political opponents as "salami tactics". After 1947 he encouraged the forced collectivization of agriculture, which led to near famine in the countryside, and an all-pervading terror throughout Hungary. He moved to concentrate power in his own hands, becoming Prime Minister in 1952. Rákosi was weakened by Stalin's death in 1953. In July 1953, at the instigation of Malenkov, Imre Nagy replaced Rákosi as premier, though he retained leadership of the party. After Malenkov's fall in 1955, Rákosi briefly regained power, dismissed Nagy, and reintroduced Stalinist policies. In July 1956, the Soviet leadership had him removed from all his offices, in order to please his enemy, Tito. He was replaced as General Secretary by a fellow Stalinist, Gerö. Later in 1956, as unrest in Hungary mounted, he went to the Soviet Union, apparently for a health cure. He never returned to Hungary. He was expelled from the party in 1962.