 But in the earlier and Hungarian phase of his life, Lakatos was a Stalinist revolutionary, the leader of a communist cell who persuaded a young comrade that it was her duty to the revolution to commit suicide, since otherwise she was likely to be arrested by the Nazis and coerced into betraying the valuable young cadres who constituted the group (Bandy 2009: ch. 5; Long 1998 and 2002; Congden 1997). So far from being a fallibilist, the young Lakatos displayed a cocksure self-confidence in his grasp of the historical situation, enough to exclude any alternative solution to the admittedly appalling problems that this group of young and mostly Jewish communists were facing in Nazi-occupied Hungary. (“Is there no other way?” the young comrade asked. The answer, apparently, was “No”: Long 2002: 267.) After the Soviet victory, during the late 1940s, he was an eager co-conspirator in the creation of a Stalinist state, in which the denunciation of deviationists was the order of the day (Bandy 2009: ch. 9). Lakatos was something close to a thought policeman himself, with a powerful job in the Ministry of Education, vetting university teachers for their political reliability (Bandy 2009: ch. 8; Long 2002: 272–3; Congden 1997). Later on, after falling afoul of the regime that he had helped to establish and doing time in a gulag at Recsk, he served the ÁVH, the Hungarian secret police, as an informant by keeping tabs on his friends and comrades (Bandy 2009: ch. 14; Long 2002). And he took a prominent part, as a Stalinist student radical, in trying to purge the University of Debrecen of “reactionary” professors and students and in undermining the prestigious but unduly independent Eötvös College, arguing passionately against the depoliticized (but covertly bourgeois) scholarship that Eötvös allegedly stood for (Bandy 2009: chs. 4 and 9; Long 1998 and 2002).