Matyas Rakosi (8 March 1892-5 February 1971) was the Chairman of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1945 to 18 July 1956, preceding Erno Gero. As the head of the Hungarian Working People's Party from 1948 to 1956, he a the Stalinist dictator of Hungary, and he is reviled by those who look back upon his cult of personality and dictatorial rule.
Biography[]
Matyas Rakosi was born on 8 March 1892 in Ada, Bacs-Bodrog County, Austria-Hungary (now in Serbia) to a Hungarian family. He was the fourth son of a grocer, and his grandfather had fought in the Hungarian War of Independence alongside Lajos Kossuth. His grandfather changed his family's Jewish name, Rosenfeld, to the Hungarian name "Rakosi", and Matyas Rakosi would become an atheist with no connection to his family's Jewish heritage. Rakosi was a good student, and he studied abroad in Hamburg, Germany and London, England from 1912 to 1913. During World War I, Rakosi was drafted into the military and forced to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and he was captured by the Imperial Russian Army while serving on the eastern front in 1915.
Rakosi escaped from the POW camp during the Russian Revolution of 1917, and he moved to Petrograd, the center of the communist movement. He would return to Hungary in 1919 to help in leading the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic under Bela Kun, fighting against Czechoslovakia and Romania. On 2 August 1919, he fled Hungary for the Soviet Union, and he became a Comintern official. In 1924, he was imprisoned upon returning to Hungary, and he was repatriated to the USSR in 1940 in exchange for the Soviets returning banners which had been captured from Hungary back in 1848 during the failed Hungarian uprising. On 30 January 1945, he returned to Debrecen to become the head of the Hungarian Communist Party as World War II drew to a close, and he became the party's General Secretary, as well as Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary.
Rakosi used "salami-slice tactics" to eliminate the opposition; he accused the conservative parties of being fascist, leading to them losing support. He then proceeded to root out social democrats and centrists in Hungary and force them to join his Hungarian Working People's Party or go into exile; in 1947, he told all of the opposition members to join the party or leave Hungary. From 1948 to 1956, 350,000 officials and intellectuals were purged by Rakosi's regime, and Rakosi claimed that he was Joseph Stalin's best pupil. In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pressured Rakosi to resign from leading the communists in Hungary, as Khrushchev sought to eradicate the extreme Stalinist ideology. Rakosi was then forced into exile in the USSR, ostensibly for medical care, and he was forced to live in the Kyrgyz SSR of the Russian SFSR until his death in 1971. He refused an offer to return to Hungary in 1970, as he refused to abstain from re-entering politics upon his return.