In Mátyás Rákosi, First Secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party, Josef Stalin had a devoted acolyte.
The young Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) loved London. The son of a Jewish shopkeeper in southern Hungary, he had made his way there via Hamburg in 1913. Already a socialist, Rákosi had immediately joined the Communist Club in London’s Fitzrovia, whose Hungarian members...