MATYAS RAKOSI This essay summarizes the life an

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 Fer

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abandoned gradualism and reversed his earlier advocacy of independent 'national roads to socialism'" (Burant 50). Sometime during that same winter, Stalin let Rakosi know that "the 'era of parliamentary pirouetting' must come to an end" (Gati 372). Rakosi, who needed little prompting to obey Stalin's every wish, arranged matters so that HCP had by no later than the time of the rigged March 15, 1949 general elections a monopoly on political power. A one party State called the Hungarian People's Republic with a Soviet style Constitution was announced in August 1949. Rakosi as Stalinist Dictator (1948-1953) During the popular front period Rakosi preferred to remain in the background as a Deputy Prime Minister under non-communist Prime Ministers. He did not become the official leader of the government until 1952, but long before that he manipulated the levers of power. Sisa described the Rakosi dictatorship as follows: it "was characterized by police terror; the dreaded 'midnight knock' on the doors of terrified victims' the forced collectivization of agriculture; and the nationalization [along Soviet lines and in subordination to Soviet interest] of practically the entire economy" (275). Hungary's primarily agriculture economy w
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)