Sallai, Imre

Born Dec. 17, 1897, in Erdõfülle, in the megye (county) of Baranya; died July 29, 1932, in Budapest. Figure in the Hungarian working-class movement.

Sallai helped found the Communist Party of Hungary (CPH) in 1918 and became a member of its Central Committee. Under the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he was deputy director of the political department of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.

From 1921 to 1923 Sallai engaged in party work in Vienna. He was on the staff of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow from 1924 until 1928, when, at the behest of the Central Committee of the CPH, he organized an underground press in Hungary. Sallai returned to the USSR in 1929 and stayed there until 1931. In the spring of that year he became the head of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPH. Captured by the police in Budapest in July 1932, Sallai was executed together with S. Fürst.