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For
one hundred and thirty-three days, from 21st March to 1st August 1919 Bela
Kun and his associates held the Hungarian people in a state of abject terror
that has rarely been surpassed for cruelty and horror. Hungary has often suffered at the
hands of foreign invaders, but by a strange paradox her worst suffering was
at the hands of a countryman.
Aaron
Cohen, alias Bela Kun, was the son
of the notary of a village near the town of Nagyvarad. In his early youth he became a reporter
on a small newspaper in that town, but was imprisoned for making a seditious
speech. After his release he became secretary to a working-men's institute in
Kolozsvar, in which position he was subsequently accused of embezzling a
considerable amount of money. Dismissed from his appointment, it was only the
intercession of friends that saved him from trial and a further period of
imprisonment. Shortly afterwards the Great War broke out, and he joined the
colours as a non-commissioned officer. He is said to have fought well in the
trenches, but was soon taken prisoner by the Russians. Always a socialist,
Bela Kun found himself in his spiritual home in the Russia of 1917, and when he was
released by the Revolution he quickly made friends with Kerensky and later
with Lenin. The latter appointed him head of a School
of Propaganda in Moscow,
and from there he directed the process of bolshevizing the Hungarian soldiers
still in Russia.
In 1918 he was sent back to Hungary
to prepare for the coming world revolution.
So
well did Bela Kun acquit himself that he soon became leader of an early
Popular Front, which rapidly attracted the morally confused and disillusioned
of the nation. One of his first crimes was the murder of the aged Count
Tisza, for the sole reason that he was the only statesman of sufficient
stature to be capable of guiding Hungary through the chaos that
threatened her. The successor to Count Tisza, Count Karolyi, proved totally
unfit to cope with an ever-deteriorating situation of strikes and riots,
which were being deliberately caused by returning prisoners-of-war spreading
the then unknown evangel of communism throughout the country. Something of a
mystic, and obsessed with the idea that he was destined to be a second Moses
who would lead the masses to a New Jerusalem, he soon came under the
influence of the increasingly powerful Bela Kun. After six months of hopeless
muddle, and in the face of drastic demands made by the Allied Powers for the
surrender of Hungarian territory, [1] Count Karolyi resigned on 21st March
1919 and made over the government to Bela Kun, whose only Fatherland was the
proletariat. The aftermath was catastrophe.
His
first act as Head of Government was a proclamation to the Hungarian people to
"initiate the work of expropriating the robber-knight system of
capitalism". The work of initiation quickly followed. The jails were
immediately opened, and all prisoners who had been guilty of such capitalist
crimes as robbery or theft were liberated. Courts of law were suspended and
revolutionary tribunals were set up in their place with power of life and
death, which was frequently exercised after a trial in which the accused was
allowed exactly one minute for his defence by the judge's watch. Private
houses were declared to be the property of the State; no adult was allowed
more than one room, and no family more than three. Bourgeois householders had
reliable proletarians quartered on their premises. Banks were placed under
direct government control, and an embargo was laid on safe deposits. More
than a million pounds in foreign currency was sent abroad for the purpose of
propaganda. Weapons were seized in private houses by persons who described
themselves as authorised by the Hungarian Soviet to search for them. Some of
the searchers were children, others were criminals; women and children were
maltreated, and not only weapons but anything else of value was taken.
Soon
a levy of hostages began, amongst whom were six former ministers, several
bishops, and many leading business men. "There is nothing to be obtained
without blood," exclaimed Bela Vago, one of the judges of the
Revolutionary Tribunal. "Without blood there is no terror, and without
terror there is no dictatorship." Bela Kun was of the same mind;
"We must inspire the revolution with the blood of the bourgeois
exploiters," he cried. In May 1919 the army was "democratised"
(i.e., the officers were shot and
agents of Moscow
put in their place), while the teaching of patriotism was abolished from
schools. Religion was derided and blasphemed. Priests were murdered in the
streets, and the Host was spat upon by young communists when it was being
carried through the streets of Old Buda on the day of Corpus Christi in 1918. The press became a
purveyor of filth, the following being a specimen of "proletarian
poetry":--
Europe fat slimy
Whore with
whisky eyes
The sweat
of perfume factories
Christ
pants between your breasts
Sailors
stroke your belly
Freedom
Equality Motherhood
A host of
priests spring from your thighs
And crosses
blossom in the shade of cows. [2]
In
the last few months of the regime, the technique of terror grew worse. While
Bela Kun remained in Budapest
terrorizing the unfortunate inhabitants of the capital, his principal
lieutenants were sent further afield to spread the gospel of the
"Proletarian Revolution". They blazed a trail of horror wherever
their journeys took them. It was the special task of Szamuelly -- self styled
Hungarian Soviet Kommissar of Agriculture -- to frighten the recalcitrant peasants
into submission. He travelled in a train painted a brilliant red, from whose
windows victims were thrown after their executioners had grown tired of
torturing them. Peasants condemned to death were compelled to dig their own
graves and then jump off a table with a noose round their necks, often in the
presence of their family. If they hesitated, Szamuelly's men prodded them
with bayonets. A woman who refused to reveal details of an alleged
counter-revolutionary plot had her teeth dug out with a chisel; another had a
nail hammered into her skull and yet another had her tongue sewn to the end
of her nose for refusing to submit to violation. In Szolnok, Szamuelly hung
twenty-four people (including the President of the Court of Chancery) without
even the semblance of a trial, and shot dead a schoolboy whom he overheard
saying that "these people are wild beasts, not men". It was little
wonder that Baron Kaas described Szamuelly as "haggard and of
corpse-like pallor". Nor were the others any better. Joseph Pogany,
Kommissar of Education, who led a notoriously profligate life, made no
attempt to carry out his responsibilities, and apart from a decree forbidding
on pain of death the use of "reactionary bourgeois" text books in
schools (which meant in effect that children were not allowed the use of any
educational aids whatsoever), but concentrated his talents on other things.
He is believed himself to have killed a total of a hundred and fifty people,
mostly schoolteachers, during his "educational" tours of inspection.
Sigismond
Kunfi was a man of different mettle; clever, bold, ambitious, and an
inveterate turn-coat, he was first a Jew, then a Protestant, and finally a
militant atheist. Originally he called himself a Social Democrat, but he
never had any doubt about his hatred of society. "Your efforts on behalf
of your workmen," he said, in an unusual outburst of sincerity to an
employer of Budapest,
"are just what we don't want, for they frustrate the class war. What we
want is a discontented mass of labourers." And Kunfi concentrated his
attention on deliberately making the masses discontented. Possessed of the
gift of oratory, his frenzied inflaming of the lowest passions was
responsible for the sickening massacres that took place in many of the large
towns. His speeches were as embittered as the writings of Marx.
The
Chief of the Political Investigation Department was a hunchback by the name
of Otto Korvin-Klein. He was of a vindictive nature, and his favourite
pastime was to push a ruler down the throat of his victim during an
interrogation. He had himself been a bourgeois, and in former days had owned
a sawmill and timber depot in the north of Hungary, where he exploited and
half-starved his employees. It is said that thousands lost their lives
through his merciless investigations on behalf of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.
But
it soon became clear that a crash was coming. A Provisional Government of
true Hungarian patriots was constituted at Szeged,
and slowly but surely the Allied Powers came to realise that it was Szeged, and not Budapest,
that represented the will of the majority of the Hungarian people. But how
could they remove Bela Kun? They did not want to attack him themselves, for
Bolshevism was an infectious disease and greatly feared in all the capitals
of Europe. The issue was resolved by the
Rumanian Army. Experiencing the beginning of the same symptoms that had
ravaged Hungary, Rumania suddenly decided to march on Budapest and put an end
to the propaganda of Bela Kun once and for all.
Map from Hungarian Historical Atlas
showing pre-Trianon Hungary, Entente-established demarcation lines, limits of
the territory controlled by Hungarian Soviet government as well as Rumanian
and Czechoslovakian military expansion
of 1918-19.
Click on the map for higher resolution
On
31st July, Bela Kun issued a manifesto demanding the support of the workers
of the world for Hungary;
but next day there were tears in his eyes and his words came with difficulty,
when he spoke for the last time before his flight. "I should have liked
the Proletariat to fight it out on the barricades and to declare that it
would sooner die than give up power. I have asked myself: 'Shall we mount the
barricades ourselves, with no masses at our back?' We would gladly sacrifice
ourselves, but would such a sacrifice benefit the cause of the International
Proletarian Revolution?" Without undue delay he decided against the
barricades, and after transferring fifty thousand pounds to Basle, he fled
with his principle lieutenants to Vienna
on 1st August. [3] So ended the hundred and thirty-three days of terror.
Hungary to-day -- with the rest of Eastern
Europe -- lies at the mercy of the Russian conqueror. What news
has filtered through leads us to believe that the disciples of Bela Kun are
still carrying on his infamies, but this time under the protection of the Red
Army. It is quite within the bounds of probability that the last ten years
have seen the virtual extinction of a thousand years of Hungarian culture.
But one day a new political idea, a new approach to world problems, will set
the ancient lands of Europe free again, among them the land of Stephen
the Holy. Once more the region of Sopron,
where Francis Liszt was born, will be Hungarian; Czenk, where the builder of
modern Hungarian culture, Count Stephen Szechenyi, lies buried, will be
revered; the ancient town of Pressburg
will echo with the traditional cry of Hungarian fidelity Moriamur pro rege nostro!
Notes
[1]
By the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary
was deprived of two-thirds of her land. Rumania
received more Hungarian land (103, 000 square kilometres) than was left to Hungary
herself (93, 000 square kilometres).
[2]
Bolshevism in Hungary, by Baron Albert Kaas
and Fedor de Lazarovics.
[3]
Bela Kun's subsequent history is obscure. After a period of comfortable
internment in Austria, he
was freed by his Social Democrat friends and returned to his masters in Moscow. In 1936 he was
sent to Barcelona,
but was a failure there, and is believed to have died in a Russian lunatic
asylum soon afterwards.
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