László Rajk

László Rajk (March 8, 1909 – October 15, 1949) was a Hungarian Communist politician, who served as Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was an important organizer of the Hungarian Communists' power (for example, organized the State Protection Authority (ÁVH)), but he eventually fell victim to Rákosi's show trials, probably, apart from the Communist parties' endemic power struggles, because he was a homegrown Communist, as opposed to the Stalin-backed Rákosi.

Background

Born in Székelyudvarhely as the ninth of eleven children to a family of Transylvanian Saxons, his ties to Communism began at an early age when he became a member of the Communist Party of Hungary (KMP). Later he was expelled from his university for his political ideas and would become a building worker, until 1936 when he joined the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War. He became commissar of the Rakosi Battalion of XIII International Brigade. After the collapse of Republican Spain, he was interned in France until 1941, when he was finally able to return to Hungary, where he became Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, an underground Communist movement.