Mátyás Rákosi (Hungarian: Rákosi Mátyás; pseudonym, real surname Rosenfeld; 1892, the village of Ada, now a town in Vojvodina, Serbia — 1971, Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod; buried in Budapest) was a Hungarian political and state figure, General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1945 to 1953, and the de facto ruler of the country from 1948 to 1956. He spent the last years of his life in Soviet exile and died in Gorky.[1][2]
Biography
He was born into the family of a small-time merchant. After graduating from the Szeged Realschule in 1910, he entered the Oriental Academy in Budapest, from which he graduated in 1912; that same year he joined the Social Democratic Party. From 1912 to 1914 he worked as a bank clerk in Hamburg and London and took part in the socialist movement.[2]
In the summer of 1914 he returned to Hungary, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, and was sent to the Russian front. From April 1915 to February 1918 he was held in Russian captivity and became one of the organizers of the pro-Bolshevik movement among Hungarian prisoners of war. In October 1918 he returned to Hungary and was among the founders of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP), serving as its organizational secretary. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), he held the posts of Deputy People's Commissar for Trade, People's Commissar for Public Production, and commander-in-chief of the Red Guard.[2]
After the fall of the Soviet republic he emigrated to Austria, where he was arrested and deported. From 1920 to 1924 he worked in the Executive Committee of the Comintern, and in 1921 he was elected one of its secretaries. In December 1924 he returned to Hungary to organize an underground party; in September 1925 he was arrested and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison — the death penalty demanded by the prosecutor was averted thanks to protests from the European leftist intelligentsia, including Romain Rolland. In 1934, after serving his term, he was tried again, and in 1935 he was sentenced to life at hard labor. In October 1940 the Soviet government exchanged him for captured banners that Russia had seized while suppressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849.[2]
Power and Repression in Hungary
From 1940 to 1945 Rákosi was in Moscow, heading the foreign bureau of the HCP Central Committee. In February 1945 he returned to Hungary together with Soviet troops. He reorganized the party (from 1948 the Hungarian Working People's Party) and led it from 1945 to 1956 (until 1953 as General Secretary, then as First Secretary). From 1945 to 1952 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and in 1952–1953 he simultaneously headed the government.[2]
Rákosi and his circle imposed a totalitarian regime on the Soviet model in Hungary: forced industrialization, violent collectivization, and political show trials. Over two and a half years, in a country with a population of 9.5 million, the prosecutor's office opened cases against 1.5 million people.[1]
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Rákosi was summoned to Moscow, criticized for his economic policy, and forced to resign as prime minister, while retaining control of the party. In July 1956, amid de-Stalinization and a deep crisis in Hungarian society, a Central Committee decision removed him as First Secretary and from the Politburo — officially on grounds of ill health. At the request of the Hungarian party leadership, he left for the USSR "for medical treatment."[2]
Exile and Final Years in Gorky
In August 1962, Rákosi was expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party "as the person bearing chief political responsibility for the violation in Hungary of the Leninist norms of party life and socialist legality." Until then he had been listed as a "guest of the Central Committee of the CPSU"; after the expulsion he effectively became an exile — first in Tokmak (Kyrgyzstan, for about a year and a half), then in Arzamas, Gorky Region.[1][2]
From 1966 to 1971, Rákosi lived in Gorky. At Rákosi's own request to the Gorky Regional Party Committee, he was given an apartment in the center of the city — on Vera Figner Street (now Varvarskaya Street), opposite the Lenin Regional Library: access to the library's holdings was essential for his work on his memoirs. According to the First Secretary of the Gorky Regional Party Committee, Nikolay Ivanovich Maslennikov, who met with Rákosi on numerous occasions, Rákosi was under constant KGB surveillance as an exile.[1]
During this period, Rákosi spoke several times before students of the Gorky Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the CPSU. The claim that he worked at the Higher Party School as a professor in the Department of CPSU History has not been confirmed: his name — neither under the pseudonym Rákosi nor under his real surname Rosenfeld — does not appear in the school's records (the personnel department or the Department of Social Sciences); moreover, he had been expelled from the party since 1962, which ruled out teaching the history of the CPSU.[1]
The Hungarian leadership never allowed Rákosi to return to his homeland. He died in Gorky in 1971, in the same apartment on Varvarskaya Street. The funeral service was held at Bugrov Cemetery, but because Gorky had no crematorium, the body was taken to Moscow for cremation. The urn with his ashes was transported by relatives to Budapest and buried in the family grave without official honors.[1][2]
Sources
- svpressa.ru — How in the USSR the exile of the Hungarian Communist Party's General Secretary served as a punishment for the undesirable
- eleven.co.il — Rákosi Mátyás — ORT Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia