It should be noted that this is from a revisionist edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and therefore has a very obvious bias against Rákosi as a “Stalinist.”
– E.S.
Rákosi, Mátyás
Born Mar. 9, 1892; died Feb. 5, 1971. Hungarian political figure.
During the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), Rákosi was deputy people’s commissar of trade and people’s commissar of social production. He was a member of the Communist International from 1921 to 1924 and helped reestablish organizations of the Communist Party of Hungary. In September 1925 he was arrested and sentenced to a long prison term. He was released in October 1940.
After Hungary’s liberation from fascism (1945), Rákosi held several high posts in the Communist Party and the Hungarian government. While serving in these posts, he committed errors in socialist construction, unjustifiably increasing plan assignments and violating Leninist norms of party life and socialist legality. In July 1956, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party removed Rákosi from his post as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party and from the Central Committee’s Politburo. In August 1962 the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party expelled Rákosi from the party.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Espresso Stalinist 