Mátyás Rákosi

• 1. Introduction

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  Mátyás Rákosi ran Hungary's Communist state with a grip so total that, by the late 1940s, no meaningful opposition remained. Born on the 9th of March 1892 in Ada, a small village in Bács-Bodrog County, he would die in Soviet exile in 1971, never permitted to set foot in his homeland again. Between those two dates lies a story of prison cells and palaces, of battle flags traded for a man's freedom, and of a country dismantled slice by slice.

  What made a grocer's son from the Hungarian countryside one of the most feared rulers in postwar Europe? How did a man who spent over fifteen years behind bars come to control an entire nation? And what does the name Rákosi still mean to Hungary today?

• 2. A Family Shaped by History

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  József Rosenfeld, Rákosi's father, was known in Ada as "Kossuth's Jew" because of his outspoken membership in the oppositionist Party of Independence and '48. His father-in-law, Rákosi's paternal grandfather, had himself fought in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and was forced to flee the village after it was defeated. The family carried politics in its blood across generations.

  József changed the family surname from Rosenfeld to Rákosi in 1903. The household was large: Mátyás was the fourth son, and his mother Cecília Léderer bore seven more children after him. Three of his siblings, József, Béla, and Hajnal, were killed during the Holocaust. One younger sibling, born in 1904, became an administrator who served for a time as General Manager of the Mátyás Rákosi Steel and Metal Works during his brother's rule.

  Rákosi was a diligent student. He completed his final exams at the High Technical Gymnasium of Szeged in 1910, where one of his teachers was the poet and later literary giant Mihály Babits. He went on to study external trade at the Eastern Commerce Academy and won scholarships to spend a year in Hamburg in 1912 and another in London in 1913. Even before leaving Hungary he had joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and the anarcho-syndicalist Galilei Circle, both in 1910.

• 3. Prison, Exile, and the Comintern

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  Captured on the Eastern Front in 1915 while serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Rákosi spent the war years as a prisoner in Far Eastern POW camps. He escaped during the chaos following the Bolshevik Revolution and made his way to Petrograd. Back in Hungary, he served as a commissar in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 before that government collapsed on the 2nd of August and he fled across the Austrian border.

  In Moscow he reported personally to Lenin about the fallen Hungarian republic, a meeting he described as defining and later commemorated with a painting made in the 1950s. He spoke twice at the Second Congress of the Comintern and was elected a secretary of its Executive Committee at the Third Congress, largely through the support of Grigory Zinoviev. He traveled extensively on Comintern business, organizing in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, where he worked to exclude moderate factions from their parties.

  Returning secretly to Hungary in 1924 to rebuild the underground Communist network, he was arrested. The first trial, held between the 12th of July and the 4th of August 1926, sentenced him to eight and a half years. When that sentence expired on the 24th of April 1934, he was immediately tried again, this time on charges including high treason, rebellion, 27 counts of murder as an accomplice, 17 counts of murder as an instigator, and counterfeiting of currency. The second conviction brought a life sentence. He became a cause célèbre in international Communist circles; the predominantly Hungarian Rákosi Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War bore his name.

  His release finally came on the 30th of October 1940, in exchange for Hungarian revolutionary banners captured by Tsarist Russian forces at Világos in 1849. He left Hungary on the 2nd of November and did not return. In Moscow on the 6th of November, the train carrying Rákosi arrived, and the following day he watched the anniversary parade on Red Square as a guest of honor beside Stalin.

• 4. Salami Tactics

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  Rákosi returned to Debrecen on the 30th of January 1945, selected by Soviet authorities to organize the Hungarian Communist Party. The party suffered a crushing defeat in Hungary's postwar free election at the hands of the Independent Smallholders' Party, yet Moscow insisted the Communists receive key positions, including the Interior Ministry. Rákosi became deputy prime minister and used that post as his fulcrum.

  From 1947 onward, he pressed other parties to purge members deemed insufficiently cooperative, labeling them fascists or fascist sympathizers. Smallholder Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy was forced to resign in favor of a more pliable Smallholder, Lajos Dinnyés. By October 1947, Rákosi gave remaining parties a blunt ultimatum: join a Communist-dominated coalition or go into exile. In the summer of 1948, the Communists forced the Social Democrats to merge with them into the Hungarian Working People's Party, then quickly expelled the independent-minded members who remained.

  The practice later became associated with the phrase "salami tactics," describing how opponents were removed not all at once but in pieces, like slices of salami. No verified source for an exact quotation by Rákosi has ever been found; historian Norman Stone suggested the term may have been coined by Zoltán Pfeiffer, leader of the Hungarian Independence Party. By 1949, elections were held with a single list of candidates, and a new Soviet-style constitution was written. Rákosi described himself as "Stalin's best Hungarian disciple" and "Stalin's best pupil."

• 5. Terror and Show Trials

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  Approximately 350,000 officials and intellectuals were purged under Rákosi between 1948 and 1956. He arrested, jailed, and killed both real and imagined opponents across multiple waves of political purges, declaring that "he who is not with us is against us." His government orchestrated show trials modeled on those of the USSR.

  Among the most prominent victims was László Rajk, Rákosi's own former lieutenant. Rákosi also built a cult of personality around himself, modeled on Stalin's. In August 1952, he added the post of Prime Minister to his existing role as General Secretary, concentrating power still further.

  The Hungarian National Bank had estimated in 1946 that war reparations alone amounted to between 19 and 22 percent of the country's annual national income. Hungary owed approximately 300 million US dollars to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and was required to support Soviet garrisons. Military spending surged after the outbreak of the Korean War, squeezing consumer goods further and deepening public discontent. Forced savings through state bond sales and wage increases set below the inflation rate became standard tools of economic control.

• 6. The Fall of a Stalinist

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  Stalin's death in 1953 changed the ground beneath Rákosi's feet. In June of that year, the Soviet leadership summoned Rákosi and other Hungarian party leaders to Moscow and berated them for Hungary's poor economic performance. On the 13th of June 1953, Rákosi accepted collective leadership and handed the premiership to Imre Nagy, though he kept the office of First Secretary.

  Nagy's more humane governing approach set the two men on a collision course. On the 9th of March 1955, the Central Committee condemned Nagy for "rightist deviation," and on the 18th of April the National Assembly unanimously removed him. Rákosi's ally András Hegedüs replaced him.

  The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, convened on the 14th of February 1956, proved fatal to Rákosi's position. On the 25th of February, Khrushchev delivered his secret speech condemning Stalin's use of the concept of the "enemy of the people" to justify reprisals against anyone who disagreed with him. The speech circulated through Hungary via unofficial channels. Articles in publications including Irodalmi Újság and Magyar Nemzet and debates in the revived Petőfi Circle put increasing pressure on the party leadership. A letter from Gábor Péter, imprisoned and writing from his cell, named Rákosi directly as responsible for unlawful show trials.

  Soviet envoy Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Budapest with instructions to ease the situation around the Rajk case. On the 18th of July 1956, the Central Committee formally relieved Rákosi of his position as First Secretary, citing his own letter of resignation. He was flown to the Soviet Union within days under the cover story of seeking medical attention. His successor Ernő Gerő held the position only until the 23rd of October 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution erupted.

• 7. Exile and Aftermath

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  János Kádár, the new leader who came to power after Soviet troops crushed the 1956 uprising, identified Rákosi's personality cult as one of the root causes of what the new government called the "counter-revolution." Khrushchev and later Leonid Brezhnev agreed, and Rákosi was moved progressively further from Moscow to prevent any political lobbying on his behalf. On the 9th of May 1957, the Hungarian National Assembly stripped him of his membership in the Presidential Council and his parliamentary mandate.

  From 1964 to 1968 he lived in Tokmok, a town in Soviet Kirghizia, where he worked as a manager in a wallpaper factory. He was later moved to Arzamas and then to Gorky. In 1970 he was offered permission to return to Hungary on the condition that he abstain from political activity. He refused and stayed in the Soviet Union.

  Rákosi died in Gorky on the 5th of February 1971. His ashes were returned to Hungary in secret and buried in the Farkasréti Cemetery in Budapest. His gravestone shows only his initials, left that way to discourage vandalism. In Hungary, his name remains a byword for tyranny and oppression.