Portrait of a Red

Matyas Rakosi is the kind of old Communist revolutionary who left talk about civil liberties, land reform and the like to the parlor set. At 27 he was a hard-bitten commissar in the regime of Hungarian Red Terrorist Bela Kun; at 28 he was in Moscow as a secretary of the Comintern Executive, perfecting methods for smuggling agents into foreign lands, and capturing control of trade unions.

At 34 he went back to his native Hungary for illegal work, was captured, twice .sentenced to long jail terms. Tried on 25 charges of murder, another 17 cases of inciting to murder, Rakosi spat at the court: "I do not intend to justify my actions. I honestly pursued my Communist convictions. I have no cause whatever to relent."

In 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, Moscow persuaded Germany to pressure Hungary into releasing Rakosi after 15 years in jail, mostly in solitary. He went straight to Russia, was dubbed a Soviet colonel-general, and 4 1/2 years later was back in war-battered Budapest with the advancing Red armies.

There, Rakosi began applying his famed salami tactics: "Demanding a little more each day, like cutting up a salami, thin slice after thin slice." While the rest of the government was dominated and run by the Smallholders and the Socialists, Rakosi demanded and got for his party the Interior Ministry (and thereby control of the police). Then his police trumped up charges against the Smallholders and Socialists, one by one, in two years eliminated them entirely. Though Rakosi's-Reds never won more than 17% of the vote in free elections, they took over the government in 1947 and have been turning down the screws ever since.

Last week, on Hungary's warmest summer day, sweat gathered on Rakosi's bulging, bald head and poured down his round face as he took the last slice of the salami. The puppet Hungarian National Assembly, which usually meets for a few dutiful days twice a year, held a special session and crowned Matyas Rakosi Premier of Hungary. Appropriately, Rakosi was clad in black.

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