Béla Kun (born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian
communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...
revolutionary and politician who governed the
Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After attending
Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today
Cluj-Napoca,
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, a ...
), Kun worked as a journalist before the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fig ...
. He served in the
Austro-Hungarian Army
The Austro-Hungarian Army (, literally "Ground Forces of the Austro-Hungarians"; , literally "Imperial and Royal Army") was the ground force of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867 to 1918. It was composed of three parts: the joint arm ...
and was captured by the
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army (russian: Ру́сская импера́торская а́рмия, Romanization of Russian, tr. ) was the armed land force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the earl ...
in 1916, after which he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the
Urals. Kun embraced communist ideas during his time in Russia, and in 1918 he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the
Russian Communist Party Communist Party of Russia might refer to:
* Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, founded in 1898 – the forerunner of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
* Communist Party of the Soviet Union, formally established in 1912 and known origina ...
in Moscow. He befriended
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
and fought for the
Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
in the
Russian Civil War
{{Infobox military conflict
, conflict = Russian Civil War
, partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I
, image =
, caption = Clockwise from top left:
{{flatlist,
*Soldiers ...
.
In November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and set up the
Party of Communists in Hungary
The Hungarian Communist Party ( hu, Magyar Kommunista Párt, abbr. MKP), known earlier as the Party of Communists in Hungary ( hu, Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja, abbr. KMP), was a communist party in Hungary that existed during the interwar ...
. Adopting Lenin's tactics, he agitated against the government of
Mihály Károlyi and achieved great popularity despite being imprisoned. After his release in March 1919, Kun led a successful coup d'état, formed a Communistic-
Social Democratic coalition government and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though the ''
de jure
In law and government, ''de jure'' ( ; , "by law") describes practices that are legally recognized, regardless of whether the practice exists in reality. In contrast, ("in fact") describes situations that exist in reality, even if not legall ...
'' leader of the republic was prime minister
Sándor Garbai, the ''
de facto
''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with '' de jure'' ("by l ...
'' power was in the hands of foreign minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radiotelegraph and received direct orders and advice from the Kremlin.
The new regime collapsed four months later in the face of
Romanian advance and great dissatisfaction among the Hungarian populace. Kun fled to
Soviet Russia
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR ( rus, Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, Rossíyskaya Sovétskaya Federatívnaya Soci ...
, where he worked as a
functionary
An official is someone who holds an office (function or Mandate (politics), mandate, regardless whether it carries an actual Office, working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority, (either th ...
in the
Communist International
The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was a Soviet-controlled international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by ...
bureaucracy as the head of the
Crimea
Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a p ...
n
Revolutionary Committee from 1920. He organised and actively participated in the
Red Terror
The Red Terror (russian: Красный террор, krasnyj terror) in Soviet Russia was a campaign of political repression and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It started i ...
in Crimea (1920–1921), following which he participated in the 1921
March Action
The March Action ( German "März Aktion" or "Märzkämpfe in Mitteldeutschland," i.e. "The March battles in Central Germany") was a 1921 failed Communist uprising, led by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Communist Workers' Party of Germ ...
, a failed Communist uprising in
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...
.
During the
Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
, arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously
rehabilitated by Soviet leadership in 1956, following the death of
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...
and the
De-Stalinization period under
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev ...
.
Biography
Early life
Béla Kohn, later known as Béla Kun, was born on 20 February 1886 in the village of Lele, located near
Szilágycseh,
Szilágy County,
Kingdom of Hungary
The Kingdom of Hungary was a monarchy in Central Europe that existed for nearly a millennium, from the Middle Ages into the 20th century. The Principality of Hungary emerged as a Christian kingdom upon the coronation of the first king Stephe ...
(today part of
Hodod,
Satu Mare County,
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, a ...
). His father, Samu Kohn was a lapsed
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
village
notary
A notary is a person authorised to perform acts in legal affairs, in particular witnessing signatures on documents. The form that the notarial profession takes varies with local legal systems.
A notary, while a legal professional, is disti ...
, while his mother, Róza Goldberger, was a Jewish convert to
Protestantism
Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...
. Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was educated at the Silvania Főgimnázium in Zilah (present-day
Silvania National College
Silvania National College ( ro, Colegiul Național Silvania, hu, Silvania Főgimnázium) is a bilingual high school in Zalău, Romania, with both Romanian and Hungarian language classes. In 2002 it had 949 students, of whom 747 participated in Ro ...
,
Zalău) and a famous
Reformed ''kollegium'' (grammar school) in the city of Kolozsvár (now
Cluj-Napoca,
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, a ...
).
At the ''kollegium'' Kun won the prize for best essay on
Hungarian literature that allowed him to attend a
gymnasium. His essay was on the poet
Sándor Petőfi and the concluding paragraphs were:
The storming rage of Petőfi's soul… turned against the privileged classes, against the people's oppressor… and confronted them with revolutionary abandon. Petőfi felt that the country would not be saved through moderation, but through the use of the most extreme means available. He detested even the thought of cowardice… Petőfi's vision was correct. There is no room for prudence in revolutions whose fate and eventual success is always decided by boldness and raw courage… this is why Petőfi condemned his compatriots for the sin of opportunism and hesitation when faced with the great problems of their age… Petőfi's works must be regarded as the law of the Hungarian soul… and of the… love of the country".[Tokes, Rudolf ''Béla Kun: The Man and the Revolutionary'' pp. 170–207, from ''Hungary in Revolution'' edited by Ivan Volgyes, Lincoln: ]University of Nebraska Press
The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the Uni ...
, 1971 p. 173.
In 1904 he began to study law at
Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Béla
magyarized his birth surname, ''Kohn,'' to ''Kun'' in 1904, although the almanac of the University still referred to him in print by his former name as late as 1909.
[Borsányi, ''The Life of a Communist Revolutionary,'' pg. 2.] There is no archival evidence that he took any formal action to change the spelling of his name, although it is clear that from 1904 all those around him referred to him as Béla Kun rather than Kohn, and he likewise used the Magyar variant in his signature.
Before
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
, he was a
muck-raking journalist with sympathies for the
Hungarian Social Democratic Party in Kolozsvár. In addition, Kun served on the Kolozsvár Social Insurance Board, from which he was later to be accused of embezzling. He had a fiery reputation and was involved in duels several times. In May 1913 he married Irén Gál, a music teacher of middle-class background from Nagyenyed (today
Aiud,
Alba County); they had two children, Ágnes, born in 1915, and Miklós, born in 1920.
Early political career
During his early education at
Kolozsvár, Kun became friends with the poet
Endre Ady, who introduced him to many members of
Budapest
Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...
's left-wing
intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the i ...
.
Kun fought with the
Austro-Hungarian Army
The Austro-Hungarian Army (, literally "Ground Forces of the Austro-Hungarians"; , literally "Imperial and Royal Army") was the ground force of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867 to 1918. It was composed of three parts: the joint arm ...
in
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
, and was captured and made a
prisoner of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of ...
in 1916 by the
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army (russian: Ру́сская импера́торская а́рмия, Romanization of Russian, tr. ) was the armed land force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the earl ...
. He was sent to a
prisoner of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of ...
camp in the
Ural Mountains, where he was exposed to
Communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society ...
. The
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire which began during the First World War. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government ...
in March 1917 and the subsequent
Bolshevik coup the following November not only set him free, but provided him with unforeseen opportunities.
In March 1918, in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
, Kun co-founded the Hungarian Group of the
Russian Communist Party Communist Party of Russia might refer to:
* Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, founded in 1898 – the forerunner of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
* Communist Party of the Soviet Union, formally established in 1912 and known origina ...
(the predecessor to the
Party of Communists in Hungary
The Hungarian Communist Party ( hu, Magyar Kommunista Párt, abbr. MKP), known earlier as the Party of Communists in Hungary ( hu, Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja, abbr. KMP), was a communist party in Hungary that existed during the interwar ...
) with other former Hungarian POWs.
He travelled widely, including to
Petrograd
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
and Moscow. He came to know
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
there, but inside the party he promoted ultra-radical left-wing political opposition to Lenin and the mainstream
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
s. Kun and his friends, such as the Italian
Umberto Terracini and the Hungarian
Mátyás Rákosi, aggregated around
Grigory Zinoviev or
Karl Radek. Whereas Lenin advocated making peace with the
Central Powers
The Central Powers, also known as the Central Empires,german: Mittelmächte; hu, Központi hatalmak; tr, İttifak Devletleri / ; bg, Централни сили, translit=Tsentralni sili was one of the two main coalitions that fought in ...
, despite the harsh conditions they imposed, in order to "save the revolution", Kun and his group took the side of
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Буха́рин) ( – 15 March 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician, Marxist philosopher and economist and prolific author on revolutionary theory. ...
, who wanted to continue and expand the war to transform it into an international revolutionary struggle to impose Communism on the rest of Europe.
Lenin often called them "kunerists", and said of Kun, “We can see that this man comes from a country of poets and dreamers.”
In the
Russian Civil War
{{Infobox military conflict
, conflict = Russian Civil War
, partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I
, image =
, caption = Clockwise from top left:
{{flatlist,
*Soldiers ...
in 1918, Kun fought for the Bolsheviks. During this time, he first started to make detailed plans for a Communist revolution in Hungary. In November 1918, with at least several hundred other Hungarian Communists and with a large sum of money provided by the Soviets, he returned to Hungary.
Hungarian People's Republic
In Hungary, the resources of a shattered government were further strained by refugees from lands lost to the
Allies during the war, and which were due to be lost permanently under the
Treaty of Trianon
The Treaty of Trianon (french: Traité de Trianon, hu, Trianoni békeszerződés, it, Trattato del Trianon) was prepared at the Paris Peace Conference and was signed in the Grand Trianon château in Versailles on 4 June 1920. It formal ...
. Rampant inflation, housing shortages, mass unemployment, food shortages and coal shortages further weakened the economy and stimulated widespread protests. In October 1918, the
Aster Revolution saw the inauguration the Hungarian People's Republic, under an unstable coalition government of Socialists and other radicals. Led by Béla Kun, the inner circle of the freshly established party returned to Budapest from Moscow on 16 November 1918. On 24 November they created the Party of Communists from Hungary (Hungarian: Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja).
He immediately began a highly energetic
propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loa ...
campaign against the government of President
Mihály Károlyi, and his
Social Democrat
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote soc ...
ic allies, accusing them of betraying the working class, of lack of class consciousness, of not wanting to continue the expropriation of large domains and the big capital. His aim was to copy the tactics Lenin had used so successfully, which included pandering to the demands of all the discontented in society: unemployed, pensioners, veterans, employees; relentlessly denouncing the Government and the parties that supported it; as well as infiltrating the trade unions, discrediting their executives, and undermining the Socialist Party by dividing the more moderate leaders from the more extreme ones.
His speeches had a considerable impact on his audiences. One who heard such a speech wrote in his diary:
Yesterday I heard Kun speak… it was an audacious, hateful, enthusiastic oratory. ..He knows his audience and rules over them… Factory workers long at odds with the Social Democratic Party leaders, young intellectuals, teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks who came to his room… meet Kun and Marxism.[Tokes, Rudolf ''Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic'' New York: F.A. Praeger, 1967 pp. 111–2.]
In addition, the Communists held frequent marches and rallies and organised
strikes
Strike may refer to:
People
*Strike (surname)
Physical confrontation or removal
*Strike (attack), attack with an inanimate object or a part of the human body intended to cause harm
*Airstrike, military strike by air forces on either a suspected ...
. Desiring to achieve a revolution in Hungary, he communicated by
telegraph
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...
with
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
to garner support from the Bolsheviks, which would ultimately not materialise.
[Borsanyi, Gyorgy ''The life of a Communist revolutionary, Béla Kun'' Boulder, Colo: Social Science Monographs; 1993, pp. 146–7.]
Despite Kun's efforts, by February 1919 the Communists had fewer than 30,000 members, compared with the 700,000 of the Social Democrats. Kun knew that if the upcoming elections went ahead, they would be a disaster for the Communists. Therefore, the Communist press launched a campaign against a fictitious "reactionary conspiracy" which they claimed the Károlyi government was either unaware of, or unwilling to crush. On 20 February 1919 the Communists invaded and pillaged the headquarters of the Socialist daily newspaper. The attack left a few dead and many injured, primarily policemen who had tried to stop the Communist aggression. Kun and 67 other Communist leaders were arrested.
However, despite the apparent failure of this adventure, there were two factors that worked to Kun's advantage. First, the press, even the non-socialist press, claimed that the imprisoned Communists had been mistreated by some members of the police force that supposedly wanted to avenge the death of their colleagues, and also publicised the supposedly courageous attitude of prisoner Béla Kun, a man previously little known outside his circle of followers. This greatly increased the popularity of Kun and sympathy toward the Communists among the general public. Concerned by this unintended shift in public opinion, the government gave orders that while in prison Kun be allowed to carry out any political activity he wished, which meant he was able to continue directing the Hungarian Communist Party from his cell. There were days in which Kun received up to four hundred visitors, mainly far-left Social Democrats who now considered Kun, whose stature was already increased by the prestige of participating in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a martyr.
The second was that on 19 March 1919, French Lt-Col Fernand Vix presented the "
Vix Note
The Vix Note or Vyx Note ( hu, Vix-jegyzék or ) was a communication note sent by (or Vyx), a French lieutenant colonel and delegate of the Entente, to the government of Mihály Károlyi of the First Hungarian Republic of the alliance's intention ...
", ordering Hungarian forces to be pulled back further from where they were stationed, clearing the areas of
Debrecen
Debrecen ( , is Hungary's second-largest city, after Budapest, the regional centre of the Northern Great Plain region and the seat of Hajdú-Bihar County. A city with county rights, it was the largest Hungarian city in the 18th century and i ...
and
Makó. It was assumed that the military lines would be the new frontiers that would be established by the peace conference between Hungary and the Allies. Károlyi resigned, perhaps in order not to link his name to the acceptance of that imposition, and soon after a proclamation was made public in his name stating that he had voluntarily given up his powers to a “new government of the proletariat”, i.e., the Socialists. Later in his life Károlyi denied that he had made such a statement, though he did not disavow it at the time or in the following years during which he remained quietly in Hungary. The Vix Note created a massive upsurge of nationalist outrage, and the Hungarians resolved to fight the Allies rather than accept the new demarcation lines.
The Social Democrats approached Kun on the subject of a coalition government, hoping he would be able to use his Bolshevik connections to bring the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian language, Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist R ...
to Hungary's aid. So desperate were they for support from Moscow that it was Kun, a captive, who dictated the terms to his captors. This was despite the Red Army's full involvement in the Russian Civil War and the unlikelihood that it could be of any direct military assistance. Kun proposed the merger of the Social Democrat and Communist parties, the establishment of a Soviet Republic and several other radical measures, which the Social Democrats agreed to.
Hungarian Soviet Republic
On 21 March 1919, the
Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second Communist regime in Europe after Russia itself, was proclaimed; the Social Democrats and the Communists merged under the interim name Hungarian Socialist Party, and Béla Kun was released from prison and sworn into office.
The nominal head of the Soviet Republic was a Socialist leader,
Sándor Garbai, but in practice power rested with Kun, although officially he was only People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and from April 1919 also People’s Commissar for Defence.
As he told Lenin, "My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me."
[Janos, Andrew, ''The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary'', Princeton: ]Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent Academic publishing, publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, ...
, 1982, p. 197.
The Social Democrats continued to hold the majority of seats in government. Of the thirty-three
People's Commissar
Commissar (or sometimes ''Kommissar'') is an English language, English transliteration of the Russian language, Russian (''komissar''), which means 'commissary'. In English, the transliteration ''commissar'' often refers specifically to the pol ...
s of the Revolutionary Governing Council that ruled the Soviet Republic, fourteen were former Communists, seventeen were former Social Democrats and two had no party affiliation. With the exception of Kun, every Commissar was a former Social Democrat and every Deputy Commissar a former Communist. Despite the fact that the Socialists were by far more numerous, they passively accepted the leadership and the programme of the smaller but far more active and determined Communist Party, which claimed to represent the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
In the hope of placating the new Hungarian regime, the victorious Entente expressed willingness to bring the military demarcation to the line specified by the armistice of Belgrade the previous November, stating however that it would have no relevance to the final clauses of the peace treaty. This gesture was an undeniable success for the Socialist-Communist government which was thus offered some badly needed breathing space. However Kun rejected the proposal, declaring during a rally on 19 April:
Comrades, we do not profess the doctrine of territorial integrity, but we want to live, and this is why we did not accept that our freed proletarian brothers living in the neutralised zone be rejected under the yoke of capitalism. To do so would deprive the Hungarian proletariat of the physical means necessary to live. ..It is a matter, therefore, which concerns the struggle between the international revolution and the international counter-revolution.
However he stated in a letter to Lenin a few days later, on 22 April, possibly to exculpate himself from the suspicion of harbouring nationalist sentiment:
Whatever happens, all our actions will be dictated by the interests of the world revolution. We do not think even for a moment to sacrifice the interests of the world revolution to those of one of its components. Even if we were obliged to sign a peace ‘à la Brest-Litovsk’, we would do it with the clear conscience which inspired you when you made the Brest-Litovsk peace, concluded against my will and against the will of the Left Communists.
Given the disparity in power between Hungary and the Allies, Hungarian chances for victory were slim at best. To buy time, Kun tried to negotiate with the Allies, meeting the South African General
Jan Smuts at a summit in Budapest in April. Agreement proved impossible, and Hungary was soon at war later in April with the
Kingdom of Romania
The Kingdom of Romania ( ro, Regatul României) was a constitutional monarchy that existed in Romania from 13 March ( O.S.) / 25 March 1881 with the crowning of prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as King Carol I (thus beginning the Romanian ...
(as part of the
Hungarian–Romanian War) and
Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי,
, common_name = Czechoslovakia
, life_span = 1918–19391945–1992
, p1 = Austria-Hungary
, image_p1 ...
, both aided by France.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was characterised from almost the beginning by harsh measures not only against the old ruling classes, but also against the peasants.The first action of the new government was the
nationalization
Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to priv ...
of the large majority of private property in Hungary. Despite their promises, Béla Kun's government chose not to redistribute land to the peasantry. Instead, all land was to be converted into
collective farms
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of, "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member- ...
and former estate owners, managers, and
bailiffs were to be retained as the new collective farm managers.
The Communists remained highly unpopular in the Hungarian countryside, where they had little to no actual authority, and from which the communist paramilitary group the
Lenin Boys
__NOTOC__
The Lenin Boys ( hu, Lenin-fiúk) were the paramilitary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. The group consisted of about 800.000 soldiers, it was a formed subdivision of the Soviet Army. Their unit commander was . The Lenin Boys ...
confiscated food for the cities.
Furthermore, the initial measures of the government in the military field included the elimination of "non-proletarians" from the new Hungarian Red Army, the abolition of conscription and the introduction of voluntary recruitment. The result was catastrophic: in three weeks only 5,000 “workers” had asked to enlist. Equally ineffective were the social measures, beginning with the reduction of the rental fees and wage increases immediately negated by inflation. The failures of the Communists in economic issues meant that in three weeks they were excluded from economic affairs by the ex-Socialists. The Communists, however, retained control of the political police. They unleashed terror gangs of thugs called the Lenin Boys who went hunting for “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionaries”, and committed armed robberies, kidnappings, shootings, and hangings.
This indiscriminate terror, in which Kun’s friends,
Tibor Szamuely and
Ottó Korvin, proved especially bloodthirsty, attracted protests from the sole representative of the Allied governments in Budapest, Italian lieutenant colonel
Guido Romanelli, which Kun rejected. It also had the effect of splitting the government and dividing the Communists themselves, some of whom doubted the usefulness of the atrocities committed. Kun proved unable to control his more extreme followers, particularly Ferenc Jancsik,
Ferenc Münnich, Szamuely, and
Mátyás Rákosi. Members of the government demanded Kun either stop the atrocities committed by his men, or face the hostility of organised workers and unions. In response Kun sent his friends as political commissars to the front where, however, the situation was not much better.
The Romanian Army had launched an offensive on 17 April 1919 and by the end of the month they were only from Budapest. On 26 April Kun was forced to admit publicly that he had made a mistake in rejecting Allied Power's proposals, and spoke of resignation. The leaders of the trade unions still controlled by ex-Socialists recruited an army of 50,000 men who managed to halt the Romanian troops and to reoccupy the most important cities which had been lost in
Upper Hungary. However, this victory was attributed to the People’ Commissar for Defence,
Vilmos Böhm, and his soldiers, all from the Socialist Party, and not to the Communist political commissars Rákosi and Münnich.
In the second half of June,
Georges Clemenceau proposed a memorandum that promised a cessation of hostilities by the
Entente
Entente, meaning a diplomatic "understanding", may refer to a number of agreements:
History
* Entente (alliance), a type of treaty or military alliance where the signatories promise to consult each other or to cooperate with each other in case o ...
in return for an immediate evacuation of Upper Hungary by the Hungarian Army, which Kun accepted, though he stated in a speech that “The imperialist peace that we are forced to conclude will not last longer than that of Brest-Litovsk, because of the revolution that will inevitably burst out in other European countries.” One of these "inevitable" revolutions was to be the insurrection Hungarian Communist agents were planning in neighbouring Austria. However, Austrian police discovered the plot and arrested the organisers the day before the coup was to be carried out.
The domestic situation was rapidly worsening as a result of the regime's actions, with not only former army officers and Catholic and Protestant clergy but urban workers, the Communist's primary base of support, becoming increasingly disaffected. On 24 June, an uprising against the regime in Budapest was suppressed after twenty hours of fighting in the streets. At the same time an anarchist conspiracy was uncovered and suppressed (its members shot) in Budapest and other cities.
The government retaliated with secret police,
revolutionary tribunals and semiregular detachments such as
Tibor Szamuely's bodyguards, the Lenin Boys; this renewed campaign of repression became known as the
Red Terror
The Red Terror (russian: Красный террор, krasnyj terror) in Soviet Russia was a campaign of political repression and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It started i ...
. Of those arrested, an estimated 370 to about 600 were killed;
[Borsanyi, Gyorgy ''The life of a Communist revolutionary'' pp. 197–8.] others place the number at 590.
At the front, the Hungarians had suffered repeated defeats at the hands of the Romanians. In the middle of July 1919, Hungary launched a major counter-offensive against the Romanian invasion. The Allied Commander in the
Balkans
The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the who ...
, the French Marshal
Louis Franchet d'Esperey, wrote to Marshal
Ferdinand Foch on 21 July 1919: "We are convinced that the Hungarian offensive will collapse of its own accord... When the Hungarian offensive is launched, we shall retreat to the line of demarcation and launch the counteroffensive from that line. Two Romanian brigades will march from Romania to the front in the coming days, according to General Fertianu's promise. You see, Marshal, we have nothing to fear from the Hungarian army. I can assure you that the Hungarian Soviets will last no more than two or three weeks. And should our offensive not bring the Kun regime down, its untenable internal situation surely will."
[Borsanyi, Gyorgy ''The life of a Communist revolutionary'', pp. 435–6.]
The Bolsheviks promised to invade Romania and link up with Kun and were on the verge of doing so, but military reversals suffered by the Red Army in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian invas ...
halted the invasion of Romania before it began. When the Romanian Army crossed the river
Tisza
The Tisza, Tysa or Tisa, is one of the major rivers of Central and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and ...
at the end of July they met virtually no opposition. However by this point the regime was facing, in Kun's own words, a “crisis of power, economy and morale” and most fatally, of popular support. The former Social Democrats had withdrawn completely from government; the rural peasantry were disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of land redistribution and by the decision of the regime to pay for agricultural products in a new paper currency they did not trust. Most fatally, the “industrial proletariat” in whose name the dictatorship had been established refused to fight for a cause they no longer considered their own.
The only hope for saving the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been "the military intervention of the Red Army or a revolution in one or more other European countries."
Both these hopes had now failed. On the 1st of August, Kun gave his last speech in Hungary, stating:
The Hungarian proletariat betrayed not their leaders but itself. ..If there had been in Hungary a proletariat with the consciousness of the dictatorship of the proletariat it would not collapse in this way ..I would have liked to see the proletariat fighting on the barricades declaring that it would rather die than give up power. ..The proletariat which continued to shout in factories, ‘Down with the dictatorship of the proletariat’, will be even less satisfied with any future government.”
He fled to Austria a few hours after, and the
Romanian forces took Budapest three days later. Historian and former Italian diplomat to Hungary Alberto Indelicato attributed the downfall of the regime not to external military intervention by the allies, but to the regime's own internal flaws, stating
Whereas the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could be proclaimed as a result of international political events which weighed heavily on the whole affair, the fall of “the Republic of Councils” did not occur because of the intervention of the reactionary circles of the Entente or of the “White” Hungarian counter-revolution (as a Communist legend maintains and is still affirmed by some partisan historians), but because of its inherent weaknesses, the consequence of its internal, social and economic policies.
Activity in Crimea
Béla Kun went into exile in
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
, then controlled by the
Social Democratic Party of Austria. He was captured and interned in Austria, but was released in exchange for Austrian prisoners in Russia in July 1920. He never returned to Hungary. Once in Russia, he rejoined the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Kun was put in charge of the regional Revolutionary Committee in
Crimea
Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a p ...
, which during the
Russian Civil War
{{Infobox military conflict
, conflict = Russian Civil War
, partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I
, image =
, caption = Clockwise from top left:
{{flatlist,
*Soldiers ...
changed hands numerous times and was for a time a stronghold for the anti-Bolshevik
White Army. It was in Crimea that the White Russians led by
General Wrangel fell to the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian language, Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist R ...
in 1920. About 50,000 prisoners of war and anti-Bolshevik civilians who had surrendered after they had been promised amnesty, were subsequently executed, on Kun's and
Rosalia Zemlyachka's order, with Lenin's approval.
Mass arrests and executions were carried out under Kun's administration. Between 60,000 and 70,000 inhabitants of the Crimea were murdered in the process.
The "March Action" in Germany
Kun became a leading figure in the
Comintern as an ally of
Grigory Zinoviev. In March 1921, he was sent to Germany to advise the
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany (german: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, , KPD ) was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West German ...
(KPD) and encouraged the KPD to follow the "Theory of the Offensive" as supported by Zinoviev,
August Thalheimer,
Paul Frölich, and others which in the words of
Ruth Fischer meant ""the working class could be moved only when set in motion by a series of offensive acts."
[Hallas, Duncan ''The Comintern'' pp. 62-64, Haymarket Books, 2008]
On 27 March, leaders of the Communist Party of Germany decided to launch a "revolutionary offensive" in support of miners in central Germany. Kun along with Thallheimer were among the driving force behind the attempted revolutionary campaign known as "Märzaktion" ("
March Action
The March Action ( German "März Aktion" or "Märzkämpfe in Mitteldeutschland," i.e. "The March battles in Central Germany") was a 1921 failed Communist uprising, led by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Communist Workers' Party of Germ ...
"), which ultimately ended in failure.
In the end, Lenin blamed himself for appointing Kun and charged him with responsibility for the failure of the German revolution. He was considerably angered by Kun's actions and his failure to secure a general uprising in Germany. In a closed Congress of the Operative Committee — as
Victor Serge writes — Lenin called his actions idiotic ("''les bêtises de Béla Kun''"). But Kun did not lose his membership in the Operative Committee, and the closing document accepted at the end of the sitting formally acknowledged the "battle spirit" of the German Communists.
Kun was not stripped of his Party offices, but the March Action was the end of the radical opposition and of the theory of "Permanent Offensive". Lenin wrote
"The final analysis of things shows that Levi was politically right in many ways. The thesis of Thallheimer and Béla Kun is politically totally false. Phrases and bare attending, playing the radical leftist.".[ Lenin's letter to G. Zinoviev]
Throughout the 1920s Kun was a prominent Comintern operative, serving mostly in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, but his notoriety ultimately stopped him from being useful for undercover work.
Later career
Kun's final undercover assignment ended in 1928 when he was arrested in Vienna by the local police for travelling on a forged passport. Back in Moscow, he spent much of his time feuding with other Hungarian Communist émigrés, several of whom he denounced to the Soviet secret police, the
OGPU
The Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU; russian: Объединённое государственное политическое управление) was the intelligence and state security service and secret police of the Soviet Union ...
, which arrested and imprisoned them in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the Comintern's "Third Period" from 1928 to 1935, Kun was a prominent supporter of the
Social Fascism line that revealed the Social-Democrats' role as "social fascism" because they sought the preservation of capitalism precisely when it was in crisis, an animosity in large part owing to Kun's strained relations with the Hungarian Social Democrats, whom he believed had betrayed him sixteen years earlier.
[Chase, William "Microhistory and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities, and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun" pp. 454-483 from '' The Russian Review'', Volume 67, Issue # 3, July 2008 page 462.] In 1934, Kun was charged with preparing the agenda for the 7th Congress of the Comintern, in which the Social Fascism line was to be abandoned and the
Popular Front was to be the new line for Communists all over the world, a policy change that Kun opposed. Instead of submitting to party discipline, Kun did his best to sabotage the adoption of the Popular Front policy, which led to his formal sanction for insubordination.
In 1935-36, the leadership of the émigré Hungarian Communist Party was thrown into crisis as Kun sought to prevent the adoption of the Popular Front policy, which occasioned a vigorous round of party in-fighting. Beyond policy, there was also a clash of personalities as Kun's abrasive and autocratic leadership style had left him with many enemies. These individuals saw the dispute over whether the Hungarian Communist Party was to adopt the Popular Front strategy as a chance to bring down Kun, whom many Hungarian émigrés deeply hated. His embattled position led Kun to denounce one of his leading enemies in the Comintern,
Dmitry Manuilsky, to the NKVD as a "Trotskyite"; in turn, Manuilsky, who was sympathetic to the anti-Kun faction, had also denounced Kun to the NKVD as a "Trotskyite".
Death and legacy
During the
Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
and arrested on 28 June 1937.
[L.I. Shvetsova, et al. (eds.), ''Rasstrel'nye spiski: Moskva, 1937-1941: ... Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskii repressii.'' (The Execution List: Moscow, 1937-1941: ... Book of remembrances of the victims of political repression). Moscow: Memorial Society, Zven'ia Publishing House, 2000; pg. 229.] Little was known about his subsequent fate beyond the fact that he never returned. Even an official Hungarian Communist biographer with official access to the Communist International's archives in Moscow was denied information during the mid-1970s.
Only some time after the
fall of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...
and the opening of certain archives in the aftermath did Kun's fate become public: after a brief incarceration and interrogation, he was hauled before a judicial troika on charges of having acted as the leader of a "counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation." Kun was found guilty and
sentenced to death at the end of this brief secret trial. The sentence was carried out later that day at the
Kommunarka shooting ground.
When Kun was politically
rehabilitated in 1956, as part of the
de-Stalinization process, the Soviet Communist Party told its Hungarian counterpart that Kun had died in prison on 30 November 1939. In 1989, the Soviet government announced that Kun had actually been executed in the
Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the State Political Directorate, GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= ...
more than a year earlier than that, on 29 August 1938.
["New information about death of Bela Kun," from BBC transmission of Hungarian Telegraph Agency in English, 14 February 1989]
After
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
the Soviets set up the
Marxist-Leninist Hungarian People's Republic under the leadership of
Mátyás Rákosi, one of Kun's few surviving colleagues from the 1919 coup.
Notes
Further reading
Hungary (The Virtual Jewish World) - Jewish Virtual Library* György Borsányi,
The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Béla Kun' translated by
Mario Fenyo
is a character created by Japanese video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. He is the title character of the ''Mario'' franchise and the mascot of Japanese video game company Nintendo. Mario has appeared in over 200 video games since his creat ...
,
Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Monographs; New York: Distributed by
Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by Jennifer Crewe (2014–present) and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fi ...
, 1993.
* Andrew C. Janos and William Slottman (eds.), ''Revolution in perspective: essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919'': Published for the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, Center for Slavic and East European Studies, Berkeley, California:
University of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...
, 1971.
*
* Béla Menczer, ''Béla Kun and the Hungarian Revolution of 1919'' pages 299–309 from ''History Today'', Volume XIX, Issue #5, London:
History Today Inc., May 1969.
* Rudolf Tőkés, ''Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic: the origins and role of the Communist Party of Hungary in the revolutions of 1918–1919'' New York: published for the
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford, California, by
F. A. Praeger, 1967.
* Iván Völgyes, (ed.), ''Hungary in Revolution, 1918–19: nine essays'' Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press
The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the Uni ...
, 1971.
* Louis Birinyi, ''The Tragedy of Hungary, An Appeal for World Peace'' Cleveland, 1924.
External links
Béla Kun Internet Archiveat
Marxists Internet Archive
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich En ...
.
Wireless Message to Béla Kun 23 March 1919.
* Crimean government on th
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kun, Bela
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