This essay summarizes the life and career of Matyas
Rakosi (1892-1971) (Rakosi). After experiencing the harsh privations of life as a professional revolutionary between 1917 and 1944, Rakosi served as Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) boss from 1945 to 1956. During the period 1948-1953 and again in 1955-1956, he ruled Hungary with an iron hand as a Stalinist type dictator. Rakosi was an adroit, shrewd, energetic and strong leader who utterly lacked scruples. Adept at political infighting within brutal internecine Communist party conflicts, Rakosi ultimately fell from power in July 1965 because he failed to adapt to new external and internal realities which followed upon the death of his patron, Josef Stalin, in March 1953. Rakosi's hardline stance and policies helped pave the way for the abortive Hungarian Revolution of October-November 1956, but he himself faded into the background a few months before it erupted. He spent the rest of his life in obscurity.
Rakosi was born in rural Hungary on March 9, 1892. His father was probably a Jewish small-town grocer, haberdasher or other type of petty bourgeois shopkeeper (Sisa 271; Ignotus 195; & Shawcross 38). As was common in fin de siecle Hungary, Rakosi was named after illustrious figures in Hungarian history --i.e. King Matyas Corvinus (r. 1458-1490), the last Hungarian-born King (before Hungary was conquered by the Ottoman Turks after 1526 and nearly three centuries of Habsburg rule; and Ferenc Rakoczi, who led an unsuccessful popular rebellion against Austrian rule in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. According to Shawcross, "he was an excellent scholar" (38). His family was sufficiently well-off to send him to England before the outbreak of the First World War where he was a junior banker and dabbled in left-wing causes. He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915. Shawcross said that after the October 1917 Russian Revolu...