Tibor Szamuely

Hungary Communism 1890–1919 ✕ Suicide (disputed)

Communist deputy war commissar of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and a leading figure of its Red Terror

Born to a Jewish family in Nyíregyháza, he became a journalist and was taken prisoner by Russia during the First World War. After the October Revolution he organised Communist Hungarian prisoners of war in Moscow with Béla Kun, and in December 1918 he took part in founding the Spartacist League in Germany. In the Soviet Republic he was deputy people’s commissar of war and commissar of public education, and his guards became known as the Lenin Boys. A central figure of the Red Terror, which executed suspected counter-revolutionaries without trial, he flew to Moscow in late May to see Lenin. He died on 2 August 1919 after being caught crossing into Austria; the authorities reported that he had shot himself.