tion, "the Bolsheviks took this clever, ambitious young capitalist to Moscow to make a clever, ambitious young Communist out of him" (38).
In 1918 Rakosi returned to Hungary with Bela Kun, a Hungarian officer-POW in Russia. Kun founded the HCP in November 1918. Rakosi served in various capacities in Kun's short-lived (133 day) Soviet Republic --as Deputy Commissar for Commerce and as Commander of the Red Guards (Vail 33; & Hoensch 165). He fled to Vienna in August 1919 together with the rest of Kun's entourage and then went onto the Soviet Union. There he served as a party secretary in the executive committee of the Comintern which the Bolsheviks formed to spread communism abroad. Under various pseudonyms Rakosi was dispatched as a secret agent to various Western European countries in 1920-1921. Lindemann said he was known for his hardline opposition to including socialist 'deviationists' in Western communist parties (125 & 270).
In 1924 Rakosi was ordered back to Hungary which he entered illegally and with false identity papers with instructions to reconstitute HCP which had been decimated during the White Terror of Regent Admiral Miklos Horthy. Rakosi was arrested in 1925 along with 53 other Communists and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. He ably but provocatively defended himself at his trial. At the Szeged penitentiary he fomented prisoner protests while maintaining clandestine contact with outside revolutionaries. In 1934 or 1935 he was re-tried and sentenced to a life term. During the latter phase of his imprisonment, Rakosi became a 'trusty,' with access to the prison library where Shawcross said he engaged in "a prodigious exercise in self-improvement" (39-40).
In 1940 during a breathing spell in the hostile relations between Soviet Russia and Horthy's Hungary produced by the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, Rakosi and another Hungarian Communist prisoner, Zoltan Vas, were exchanged for Hungarian flags captured ...