"Socialist Legality"

In the courtyard of a Budapest prison one chilly October morning in 1949, Laszlo Rajk died Hungarian-fashion. He stood on a low stool while the hangman placed a noose round his neck and pulled the rope taut round a hook overhead. Then the stool was kicked out from under him. At that precise moment, from a ladder behind, the executioner reached a hand round the victim's forehead and pulled backward, breaking his neck. It was the final act of obedience to a cause Laszlo Rajk had ruthlessly served.

Laszlo Rajk was a firebrand Communist who was wounded fighting in the Spanish civil war, worked in Hungary's World War II Red underground, and as Interior Minister in Hungary's postwar regime helped to prepare the Communist coup. Unfortunately for his ambitions, he was not one of the inner group of Moscow-trained Hungarian Communists. Less than a year after becoming Foreign Minister, he.was arrested and accused of plotting to overthrow the government.

In open court, after three months of imprisonment and brainwashing, he stood up, gaunt and listless, to swear that he had plotted with Communist Renegade Tito "to lead and organize an anti-Soviet movement in every people's democracy." When the prosecutor asked for the death sentence, Laszlo Rajk said: "I fully agree with your statements, Mr. Prosecutor, and want to state in advance that I will consider the verdict of the court justified." He died a convicted spy and traitor.

Until last week this interpretation of history was Communist gospel. But now the rewriting of the Stalin period and Moscow's wooing of Tito--top projects of the Great Reviser Nikita Khrushchev--require a new version wherever Communists read of the past. Last week the same bulletheaded Premier Matyas Rakosi who sent Rajk to his death announced in a speech at Eger that Laszlo Rajk and four fellow defendants had been posthumously cleared of the charges against them.

"After the exposure of the imperialist agent Beria," intoned Rakosi, "our party leadership revised the Rajk trial. It established that the trial had been based on provocation. For this reason the Supreme Court rehabilitated Comrade Rajk and other comrades." Had he been around to hear the news, Comrade Rajk might have been grateful.

Rakosi, who has kept his feet at every slippery turn of the Moscow line, managed, like his Kremlin masters, to blame somebody else for the murders. Rajk's trial, he said, was engineered by former Secret Police Chief Gabor Peter, who was jailed for life two years ago for crimes against "Socialist legality."

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