Rudas, László

Born Feb. 21, 1885, in Sárvár; died Apr. 29, 1950, in Budapest. Hungarian labor and political figure. Philosopher; academician of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1949).

Rudas was the son of a mechanic. He became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in 1903. He was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Hungary (CPH) in November 1918 and was editor in chief of the party’s central organ, the newspaper Vörös Ujság. He was the delegate of the CPH at the First Congress of the Comintern (March 1919). He lived abroad from August 1919. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Rudas helped to reconstitute the organizations of the CPH. He lived in the USSR from 1922. Rudas participated in the debates with the mechanists in the 1920’s, lectured at the Institute of the Red Professors and at the Lenin School, was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), and taught at the International Antifascist School.

Rudas returned to Hungary in 1945 and was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPH; he became a member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party in June 1948. In 1948 he became rector of the Budapest K. Marx University of Political Economy. Rudas’ book The Materialist Worldview (1947) was the first systematic presentation of dialectical materialism in Hungary. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1949.