Word: rakosi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...control of a country Matyas Rakosi once wrote, is to demand a little more each day, like cutting up a salami, thin slice after thin slice." Rakosalami tactics made Hungary one of the most useful of Soviet satellites. Slice by slice, Hungarian agricultural productivity was cut down to make way for industrial projects. Forced collectivization of farmlands drove farm workers into the factories, and the fertile country, once one of Europe's breadbaskets, had to import grain. But Hungarian steel and aluminum fattened the Soviet war potential and bulletheaded Boss Rakosi was so well regarded in Moscow that...
Talking Big. When Malenkov took over, Rakosi was ordered to get away from the salami. He yielded the premiership to rotund Imre Nagy (rhymes with budge), another oldtime Hungarian Communist, who was a Hungarian language broadcaster in Moscow during World War II. Nagy talked big: "The decision to make Hungary a country of steel and iron was an expression of megalomaniac economic policy." Past faults of the party he ascribed to "one-man leadership which relied on a narrow circle, and the silencing of criticism and self-criticism." Nagy ordered more consumer goods, relaxed police controls and let the collectivization...
...works. It accused Nagy of deceiving "the working classes with cheap demogogic promises" which caused them to loll idly "waiting for the plums to drop into their mouths," charged him with "rightist deviationism" and with "encouraging nationalism and chauvinism." The language of the communiqué might have been Rakosi's, but the message was straight from Moscow...
...Hungary, September 1949, Laszlo Rajk, lifelong Communist, top party theoretician, onetime all-powerful Hungarian Interior Minister and later Foreign Minister, pleaded guilty to plotting to assassinate Communist Boss Matyas Rakosi. And who got Rajk into the gory plot? "Noel Field," cried the prosecutor, "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements." Verdict: hanging (and burial in unmarked graves) for Laszlo Rajk and four others; life imprisonment...
...Communists themselves fell to quarreling openly. Some complained that "the kulaks have become impertinent"; the Communist Central Committee had to announce that it would not tolerate the "recurrent anti-peasant mood." Pudgy, bullet-headed Old Bolshevik Matyas Rakosi, no longer undisputed boss of Hungary, decried the "danger of right-wing tendencies," but the party organ Szabad Nep criticized instead "the narrow-mindedness and sectarianism of certain left-wing individuals...