László Rajk

After his arrest on 30 May 1949 the investigation required a script from the outset. Rajk at first refused to testify, and interrogation by the state protection apparatus under Gábor Péter produced evidence too weak to support an indictment. With the case stalled, Rákosi travelled to Moscow for advice, and Soviet advisers soon entered the affair. They ended the physical abuse of the suspects, but the direction of the case was reworked to match Soviet policy toward Yugoslavia. After the Yugoslav Communist Party was expelled from the Cominform in 1948, confrontation with Tito demanded tests of loyalty across Eastern Europe, and Rajk was the first figure placed on that test.

Accordingly the charges combined spying for Western imperialism with collusion with the Yugoslav communists. Mátyás Rákosi himself drafted the indictment, which Stalin approved, and Péter Jankó, who had presided over numerous people's court cases, led the proceedings. The trial ran from 16 to 24 September 1949 in the large assembly hall of the Metal and Engineering Workers' Trade Union headquarters in Budapest and was broadcast by radio. Rákosi watched and directed the proceedings through a speaker and telephone line installed in his study, exerting the same pressure on defendants and defence counsel. Eight people were charged alongside Rajk, and Rajk, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai were sentenced to death. In all, fifteen people were executed and seventy-eight imprisoned in connection with the case; the sentence was carried out on 15 October 1949.

The trial did not end with one man's destruction. Rajk was already known in the Rákosi system as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the underground resistance and as the founder of the state security apparatus, so convicting him damaged the regime's own claim to legitimacy. This case in fact opened the internal party purge, and the denunciation of Yugoslavia extended to the cancellation of the treaties the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states had signed with it. Repression reached the family as well: his wife, Júlia Földi, received five years, and their son was placed in an institution and raised under the name István Kovács. After the revolution was crushed in 1956, the Kádár government deported the widow and their son, László Rajk Jr., to Romania for two years.

What the record shows is that Rajk was victim and executioner at once. The institution he founded and oversaw produced the interrogations and the courtroom that destroyed him, and his trial became the first of a series of show trials that would be repeated in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and elsewhere.

Rajk's rehabilitation came with de-Stalinisation after Stalin's death. Andrea Pető's study refers to a Communist Party resolution on rehabilitation in November 1955, while the English Wikipedia dates the rehabilitation to 28 March 1956, after numerous demonstrations. Rákosi had used Rajk's guilt to justify the purges that followed, so even this unpublicised rehabilitation speech did him great damage.

After her release his widow Júlia fought for her husband's rehabilitation and for the return of their son, who had been placed in a children's home at five months old under the name István Kovács. From 1954 she demanded a public reburial. Pető argues that her campaign became a political link between Imre Nagy's group and the reformist intellectuals of the Petőfi Circle.

On 6 October 1956 Rajk was reburied together with Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai, executed with him. Accounts of the crowd differ: the English and Russian Wikipedia give more than 100,000, while Pető writes that 350,000 people filed past the bier and stood around the grave. The Russian Wikipedia adds that the authorities sent quotas to factories so that workers would attend in organised fashion, and calls the ceremony the largest public demonstration before the uprising. Pető judges that Júlia's insistence on the widest publicity made the funeral a psychological dress rehearsal for the revolution. The Hungarian Revolution began seventeen days later, on 23 October.

His political and family life, trial, execution and reburial were dramatised in Robert Ardrey's 1958 play Shadow of Heroes.