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Rabin, Yitzhak (1922-95), Israeli soldier and Prime Minister: born in Jerusalem, the son of Russian immigrants; his mother, who died when he was 15, was an active member of Haganah, the Jewish defence movement in Palestine. Rabin studied engineering and agriculture but, in revulsion at Nazi persecution, turned to a military career and completed his training as an officer cadet in England. He fought in defence of the new Israel in 1948-9, rising to become Chief of Staff in 1964 and led the army in the brilliantly successful Six-Day War (1967). From 1968 to 1973 General Rabin was ambassador in Washington, but then entered politics; he was head of the Israeli Labour Party and Prime Minister from 1974 to 1977 and Defence Minister in the PERES coalition of 1984. He returned as Prime Minister in July 1992 and, through American mediation, patiently negotiated a preliminary settlement of the Palestine Problem with King HUSSEIN and ARAFAT, despite threats from Jewish fundamentalists. On 4 November 1995 he was fatally wounded by a student gunman belonging to one of these extremist groups as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Y.Rabin: The Rabin Memoirs (1979); D.Horowitz (ed.): Kabin, Soldier of Peace (1996). Radi , Stepan (1875-1928), Croatian peasant leader: born to impoverished peasants near Zagreb, receiving his early schooling under church patronage but gaining admission to the Zagreb Gymnasium through his high intelligence. He visited and studied in Russia, France and Prague, developing ideas for reforming landownership. For participating in an anti-Magyar riot in Zagreb in 1895 he was banned from the city but had recovered his rights by 1902 when-with his brother Ante (who died young)—he founded the Croatian Peasant Party to safeguard national and sectional interests within Austria-Hungary. He supported war against the pan-Serbs of Belgrade in 1914 but from 1917 onwards accepted the need for a post-war South Slav state, provided it was a federal republic rather than an extension of Serbia. In 1919 he was arrested in Zagreb so as to prevent him from presenting a petition to the Paris Peace Conference. When elections were held for the Yugoslav parliament in 1923 the peasant party had a landslide victory within Croatia but Radi refused to participate in parliamentary affairs; he travelled through Europe, championing Croatian peasant independence and in Moscow backed the earliest of Communist ‘common fronts’, a Peasant International (July 1924). On his return to Zagreb in December 1924 he was

imprisoned as a ‘Bolshevik agent’ on PAŠI ’S orders. Seven months later he was transferred from prison to Belgrade and appointed Minister of Public Instruction in a coalition government. He resigned from this post on 1 April 1926, after a rousing speech which denounced his Cabinet colleagues as swine. For two years he encouraged his party to block parliamentary business in Belgrade until, on 20 June 1928, an exasperated Montenegrin Deputy fired his revolver at the Opposition benches, killing two Croat Deputies outright and wounding Radi , who died on 2 August. Civil war in Yugo slavia was narrowly averted: King ALEXANDER established a royal dictatorship; MA EK, Radi ’s successor, led the Croatian Peasant Party with greater circumspection. J.Tomasevich: Peasants, Politics and Economic Change in Yugoslavia (Stanford, Calif., 1965); I.Avakumoni : History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Vol. 1 (Aberdeen, 1964). Rafsanjani, Hoijatolesem Ali Akbar Hasehemi (1936-), Iranian President: born at Rafsanjan, educated at Qum and from 1978 onwards was a devoted supporter of KHOMEINI in the Islamic Republican Party. He became Speaker of the Majlis (Iranian parliament) and was largely responsible for drafting successive versions of the constitution, 1980-7. Although he was nominal Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in 1988-9 he favoured peace and cautiously sought improved relations with the West. Eight weeks after Khomeini’s death he was elected President of the Islamic Republic (28 July 1989); he was re-elected in June 1993, despite losing some popular support by promoting free market economic reforms. Rahman, Abdul, Tunku of Malaysia: see Abdul Rahman Putra. Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur (1920-75), founder of Bangladesh: born at Tongipara, east Bengal, became a lawyer and in 1954 set up the Awami League to campaign for a Bangladesh state in ‘East Pakistan’. He was arrested on several occasions and in August 1971 charged with high treason by the Pakistan authorities. Indian military intervention secured his release and he was welcomed in Dacca as de facto President of Bangladesh on 10 January 1972. He declined the presidency, preferring to be Prime Minister of his government in which he sought to give the new Bangladesh both parliamentary democracy and a socialist co-operative economic structure. To accomplish this double revolution at a time of grave famine was beyond him, however. In January 1975 he was forced to assume dictatorial powers in the hopes of imposing land reform but he aroused the hostility of landowning junior officers, who murdered him and many members of his family during a military coup on 15 August 1975. M.Rahman: Bangladesh Today: an Indictment and a Lament (1978); C.P.O’Donnell: Bangladesh: Biography of a Muslim Nation (Boulder, Colo., 1986). Rákosi, Matyas (1892-1971), Hungarian Communist leader from 1945 to 1956: born in Budapest of Jewish parentage, helped to establish the short-lived Communist regime of 1919 in Hungary, escaping to the Soviet Union. In 1925 he returned to Hungary to organize Communist cells of resistance to HORTHY. He was imprisoned for eight years in 1927 and re-arrested in 1935 and sentenced

to life imprisonment. In November 1940 he was one of two Communists exchanged in a deal with the Russians, the Hungarians receiving in exchange some national revolutionary flags captured by Tsarist troops in 1849. Rakosi became head of the committee of Hungarian exiles in Moscow in 1941. In 1945 he was appointed Vice-Premier in Hungary, in effect controlling Communist Party tactics, wearing down opposing factions in the progressive coalition governments, until in August 1952 he became Prime Minister himself. His rigid Stalinism and manipulation of the brutal secret police, AVO, made him both hated and feared. His policies were unacceptable to KHRUSCHEV and in the summer of 1956 he gave up all his posts in Hungary so as to take a health cure in the Soviet Union, he died where fifteen years later. H. Seton-Watson: The East European Kevolutions (rev. edn 1956); G. Mikeš: The Hungarian Revolution (1957). Rasputin, Grigori (1871-1916), Russian mystic leader; born near Tobolsk, at Pokrovskoye. By the age of 30 he was known as a ‘holy man’ with powers of healing. From November 1905 until his death he was frequently with the imperial Russian family because of a hypnotic healing power which he exercised over the haemophiliac heir to the throne, the Tsarevich Alexis (1904-18). From 1911 onwards it was believed in St Petersburg that Rasputin was influencing the appointment of ministers and generals. His dissolute private life, and especially his violent fits of drunkenness, were a major scandal by 1912, and he was known to be protected byNiCHOLASii and the Tsarina. Suspicion he was in German pay led in December 1916 to his murder by a group of aristocrats, headed by Prince Felix Yusupov (who was related by marriage to Tsar Nicholas). B.Pares: The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (1939); R.J.Minney: Rasputin (1972). Rathenau, Walther (1867-1922), German industrialist and politician: born of Jewish parentage in Berlin, becoming principal director of the vast electrical trust, AEG, which his father had founded. With Kaiser WILLIAM II’s support he was given control of Germany’s war economy in 1916, seeking to counter the effects of manpower shortage and blockade by systematic organization of labour needs and the distribution of raw materials. On the establishment of the Weimar Republic he founded a Democratic Party, to counter the parties of the Left, the Catholic Centre, and the anti-Weimar Right. From May to December 1921 he was Minister of Reconstruction, seeking for Weimar Germany the methods of recovery employed by ADENAUER and ERHARD after the Second World War. He continued this work as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1922 and within eleven months had gained valuable financial agreements with France and America, and established cautious co-operation between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia (Treaty of Rapallo, 16 April 1922). His dispassionate intellectual brilliance alienated many of his countrymen, and he was assassinated in a Berlin suburb by anti-Semitic proto-Nazis of 24 June 1922. H.Kessler: Walther Rathenau (1929); H.Pogge von Strandmann: Walther Rathenau, Notes and Diaries, 1907-1922 (Oxford, 1985).