The Hungarian Soviet Republic

The Aster Revolution and Károlyi’s People’s Republic

On 23 October 1918, as Austria-Hungary fell apart, Mihály Károlyi’s Party of Independence and ’48, Oszkár Jászi’s Radicals and the Social Democrats formed the Hungarian National Council. When King Charles appointed the establishment politician János Hadik prime minister on 30 October, soldiers in Budapest tore the roses from their caps, put in asters and swore allegiance to the National Council, and the Soldiers’ Council took over strategic points in the city; the revolution is named the Aster Revolution after that flower. Hadik resigned after seventeen hours, Károlyi became prime minister on 31 October, and the same day the former prime minister István Tisza was killed by soldiers. After Charles withdrew from affairs of state on 13 November, the Hungarian People’s Republic was proclaimed on 16 November with Károlyi also serving as provisional head of state. Free elections were never held. 1 2

The Károlyi government pinned its hopes on President Wilson’s peace principles and on 2 November, under War Minister Béla Linder, began disarming an army that still had more than 1.4 million men. The Belgrade military convention of 13 November drew a demarcation line inside Hungary, and Serbian and French troops crossed the southern border, Czechoslovak troops the northern and Romanian troops the eastern. Under Károlyi’s government Hungary lost control of about 75 per cent of its pre-war territory without armed resistance. As an example Károlyi gave his own family estates to his tenants, but no other transfer of land followed. In January 1919 he became president, and Dénes Berinkey prime minister. 3 4 5

Béla Kun, who had embraced communism in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, came home in November 1918 with a large sum of money provided by the Soviets and founded the Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) on 24 November. The party published Red News and attacked the Károlyi government and the Social Democrats; its membership in February 1919 is put at 30,000 to 40,000 (the article on Kun gives fewer than 30,000, against the Social Democrats’ 700,000). On 20 February Communist demonstrators attacked the offices of the Social Democratic daily Népszava; seven people, some of them policemen, were killed, and the government arrested Kun and other leaders. Reports that the police had beaten them won the party sympathy, and from his cell Kun directed the party, receiving hundreds of visitors a day. 6 7

The Vix note and the merger of 21 March

On 20 March 1919 the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix, head of the Entente military mission, handed the Károlyi government a note ordering Hungarian troops to withdraw beyond the line of the Belgrade convention. Its contents had been decided at the Paris Peace Conference in late February, but only eighteen hours remained for its implementation once it was delivered. It was widely assumed that the new military line would become the post-war frontier. Károlyi and Berinkey concluded that accepting the note would endanger the country’s territorial integrity but that they were in no position to reject it, and the Berinkey cabinet resigned. Károlyi told the ministers that only the Social Democrats, with their support among the urban working class, could form a new government. 8 6 3

The Social Democrats hoped to use Kun’s Bolshevik connections to obtain help from the Russian Red Army, and that hope let Kun, a prisoner, dictate the terms. On 21 March Jenő Landler agreed with Kun and his comrades in prison on introducing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the two parties merged as the Hungarian Socialist Party; Ottó Korvin typed the text of the merger in his cell. That evening, without Károlyi’s knowledge, word spread that the president and the government had resigned of their own accord and handed power to the proletariat, and the papers reported it so the next morning. A proclamation in Károlyi’s name appealed, against the decision of the Paris conference, “to the proletariat of the world for justice and help”. Károlyi did not disavow it at the time but later denied having made such a statement. 7 9 10

On 21 March the Social Democrat Sándor Garbai and the Communist Béla Kun proclaimed the Republic of Councils — the second Communist-led regime in Europe after Russia. By radiotelegraph Kun told Lenin that a dictatorship of the proletariat had been established in Hungary and asked for a treaty of alliance with the Russian SFSR, which, tied down by the Civil War, declined. On 22 March Lenin radioed greetings “to the proletarian government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and especially to Comrade Bela Kun”; the next day he asked “what real guarantees” Kun had that the new government would actually be communist and not simply socialist, “i.e., one traitor-socialists”, and whether the Communists had a majority in it. In the same message he warned that it would be a mistake merely to imitate Russian tactics in all details in the specific conditions of the Hungarian revolution. 6 7 11 12

The Revolutionary Governing Council and socialisation

The new government, the Revolutionary Governing Council, was chaired by Garbai, with Kun as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, but real power lay with Kun, who was in direct radio contact with Lenin. Of its thirty-three commissars fourteen were former Communists, seventeen former Social Democrats and two non-party; with the exception of Kun every commissar was a former Social Democrat and every deputy commissar a former Communist. Landler took the interior, Vilmos Böhm socialisation and Jenő Varga (later the Soviet economist Evgeny Varga) finance, and György Lukács became deputy commissar for education. The provisional constitution of 2 April vested the making, execution and adjudication of laws in the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils. In the council elections of 7 April women voted for the first time in Hungary, but employers, the clergy and others were disenfranchised and only the merged Socialist Party could field candidates. At Garbai’s suggestion “soviet” in the state’s name gave way to the Hungarian word tanács (council), and the final constitution of 23 June named the state the Socialist Federative Republic of Councils in Hungary. 7 6 9

The government abolished aristocratic titles and privileges, separated church and state and, from its first day, imposed nationwide prohibition. Housing, hotels, shops, department stores, foreign trade, financial institutions, schools, theatres, cinemas, pharmacies and industrial, mining and transport firms with more than twenty workers were socialised without compensation; the threshold for confiscated land is given as more than 100 hold (about 57 hectares) or more than 40 hectares depending on the source. The eight-hour day was introduced, rents were cut by 20 per cent and working-class families were moved into large bourgeois flats. Management of the factories was entrusted to the workers and factory councils, and social insurance was extended. But rent cuts and wage rises were soon wiped out by inflation, and within three weeks the Communists had been edged out of economic affairs by the former Social Democrats. Prohibition provoked resistance in the wine regions and ended after four months, with wine exports allowed in April and half a litre of wine a day for workers in July. 6 9 7

The agrarian question was the republic’s greatest weakness. The government did not divide the confiscated estates among the peasants but kept them as co-operatives and state farms, often retaining the former owners, managers and bailiffs as their managers. It declared that no one who did not work the land could own it, but the farmhands and poor peasants waiting for land were disappointed, and smallholders afraid of further expropriation turned against the regime; garden plots were handed out to poor peasants only from the end of June. Because the government paid for farm produce in a new paper currency the peasants did not trust, food supply to the towns worsened, and armed detachments such as the Lenin Boys requisitioned food in the countryside. The regime’s real base remained the workers of Budapest and the other big industrial centres, while in the countryside its authority was often nonexistent. 7 9 6

The Smuts mission and the Romanian and Czechoslovak intervention

Alarmed by the new republic, the Paris Peace Conference sent the South African general Jan Smuts to Budapest on 4 April. Smuts offered a more favourable line than the Vix note and promised that if it were accepted the blockade would be lifted and Hungary invited to the peace negotiations. The Revolutionary Governing Council made its acceptance conditional on Romanian troops returning to the line of the Maros (Mureș), on the occupying forces not interfering in economic and political affairs and on the restoration of the proletarian dictatorship in Szeged and Arad, and Smuts broke off the talks and left. Meanwhile the old elite formed an Anti-Bolshevik Committee in Vienna around István Bethlen, and on 30 May a counter-revolutionary government under Gyula Károlyi was set up in French-occupied Szeged. The former admiral Miklós Horthy became its war minister and commander of its National Army, arriving in Szeged on 6 June. 9 13 14

On 16 April the Romanian army crossed the demarcation line and attacked. On 26 April the elite Székely Division, commanded by the counter-revolutionary Károly Kratochvil, laid down its arms after a week of talks with the Romanians, opening 130 kilometres of front, and by 1 May the Romanians held everything east of the Tisza. In the north Czechoslovak troops entered Miskolc on 2 May. At a rally on 19 April Kun declared that “we do not profess the doctrine of territorial integrity” and that the struggle was one between international revolution and international counter-revolution; on 22 April he wrote to Lenin that if need be he would sign a peace “à la Brest-Litovsk”. On 26 April he publicly admitted that rejecting the Allied proposals had been a mistake and spoke of resigning. The Romanians stopped at the Tisza because on 1 May the Soviet foreign commissar Georgy Chicherin threatened to attack unless Romania withdrew from Bessarabia, and Romania agreed a truce with Budapest on 2 May. 9 13 7 15

From the start the leadership counted on joining hands with the Russian Red Army. On 18 May Tibor Szamuely flew to Kyiv to confer with the Ukrainian war commissar Podvoisky and commander Antonov-Ovseenko, then held several talks with Lenin in Moscow, proposing a joint operation against Romania. But on his return on 31 May he reported that the Whites were threatening Moscow and the Ukrainian Red Army was fighting the Whites and the Poles, so no effective help could be expected. In his “Greetings to the Hungarian Workers” of 27 May Lenin praised the Hungarian proletariat for apparently having “excelled us” in organisation and called for the “ruthlessly severe, swift and resolute use of force” to crush the resistance of the exploiters. 9 16

The northern campaign and the Slovak Soviet Republic

Faced with the Romanian and Czechoslovak advance, the government appealed for the defence of the country rather than for class war, and the Red Army grew to 200,000 by the end of May. Its commander-in-chief was Vilmos Böhm, while the chief of staff, Colonel Aurél Stromfeld, directed operations in practice; many officers and soldiers of the old royal army returned, not to fight for the Communists but to defend their country. On 20 May the Red Army counter-attacked the Czechoslovaks, retook Miskolc and drove a wedge between the Czechoslovak and Romanian armies. In the northern campaign that followed it took Košice (Kassa) on 6 June and within three weeks reached the Nitra–Zvolen–Košice line and the Polish border at Bardejov (Bártfa). 9 15

The flag raised over the recaptured towns was not the Hungarian tricolour but the red flag. On 16 June the Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Prešov (Eperjes), headed by the Czech journalist Antonín Janoušek. It decreed the socialisation of the means of production and the nationalisation of factories with more than twenty workers, large estates and financial institutions, and set up revolutionary tribunals and a Slovak “Red Army”, but it depended on Budapest, and it was never clear whether it was part of Hungary or independent, or where its borders lay. Kun told a meeting in Košice on 10 June that “we Bolsheviks are for the integrity of Hungary”, and the Czech historian Jaroslav Šebek sees the state partly as a cover for renewing Hungarian influence in Slovakia. Hungarian nationalists and professional officers, on the contrary, took its proclamation as a sign that the Communist government had no intention of recovering the lost territories. 9 17 6

On 7 June the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau telegraphed a demand to halt the offensive, and on 13 June he communicated Hungary’s northern and eastern frontiers as fixed by the conference, promising that if the Red Army withdrew behind them the Romanians would evacuate the land east of the Tisza. After long debate the leadership accepted, Kun declaring that “the imperialist peace that we are forced to conclude will not last longer than that of Brest-Litovsk”. Fighting stopped on 24 June, the withdrawal began on 30 June, and on 7 July the Slovak Soviet Republic ceased to exist. But the Romanians did not move from the Tisza. Stromfeld resigned in protest at giving up the ground won at such cost, officers and men left in large numbers, and the Red Army began to disintegrate. 4 15 7 9 17

The Red Terror

On 21 March the Revolutionary Governing Council imposed martial law and set up revolutionary tribunals, replacing the police and gendarmerie with the Red Guard. The Communists kept the political police, and from June Ottó Korvin headed its political investigation department. In a speech at Győr on 20 April Szamuely declared, “We must not be afraid of blood.” A band of some two hundred men organised by József Cserny, calling themselves the “Lenin Boys”, toured the country on Szamuely’s armoured train and executed people without trial wherever counter-revolution was suspected. In April hostages taken at Makó, among them the former Speaker Lajos Návay and the mayor of Makó, were shot on the way to Budapest. As political commissar of the Red Army’s Fifth Division, Lukács ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers at Poroszló in May. 9 18 19 20) 21

The terror divided the government itself. The commissars who had been Social Democrats demanded that Szamuely and Cserny be reined in, and the defence commissar Böhm ordered the paramilitaries and tribunals dissolved at the end of April; Szamuely ignored him and continued his tribunals at Szolnok and Abony in May. On 19 May the army disarmed the Cserny group at Gödöllő, but 43 of its men were assigned to Korvin’s political investigation department as the “second Cserny group”. On 24 June cadets of the Ludovika Academy rose in Budapest and river monitors on the Danube shelled the Hotel Hungária where the commissars lived; the rising was crushed within a day. At the same time peasant revolts around Kalocsa and Dunapataj were put down bloodily by Szamuely’s punitive detachment and the Lenin Boys, with public hangings. The Italian Lieutenant Colonel Guido Romanelli, the only Entente representative in Budapest, protested against the terror and saved the participants of the June rising from reprisals. 18 19 9 7

Estimates of the Red Terror’s death toll differ. The Hungarian Wikipedia summarises various sources as putting it at 300 to 600; English-language accounts say the revolutionary tribunals executed between 370 and 587 people, or give 590 following Albert Váry’s 1922 book The Victims of Red Terror in Hungary. In December 1919 Cserny and thirteen other Lenin Boys were executed in the Budapest military prison, and Korvin was hanged the same month. The White Terror that followed is estimated to have killed 1,500 to 6,000 people, ten times as many as the Red Terror according to the article on Kun. 9 20) 19 10 22) 7

Collapse: from the Tisza offensive to the occupation of Budapest

On 20 July the Red Army crossed the Tisza and attacked the Romanians, who halted the offensive within days and broke through the Hungarian lines. Meanwhile Böhm, who had arrived in Vienna as envoy on 23 July, agreed with the Entente missions, on behalf of the Social Democratic leadership, on the removal of the council government. The Council of Five of the Paris conference declared that it would send food, lift the blockade and make peace only if a new government acceptable to it were formed, and Népszava printed the statement on 30 July. On 27 and 30 July Kun asked the party leadership in Moscow, and on the 30th Lenin personally, to open a front against Romania in Bessarabia; on 31 July the answer came that the situation in Ukraine made an immediate relief offensive impossible. On 29–30 July the Romanians crossed the Tisza and headed for Budapest. 6 9 23

On 31 July Kun and other leaders went to Cegléd near the front and came back, and on 1 August a joint meeting of the party leadership and the Revolutionary Governing Council decided to resign. In his last speech Kun said that “the Hungarian proletariat betrayed not their leaders but itself”, adding that workers who had shouted “Down with the dictatorship of the proletariat” in the factories would be even less satisfied with any future government. The commissars left for Vienna by special train and were interned in Austria. Kun left Lukács and Korvin behind to organise the underground party; Korvin was arrested in August and tortured. Szamuely was caught on 2 August after crossing the Austrian border by car; Hungarian and Austrian authorities reported that he had shot himself, though some believe he was shot by the border guards. 9 7 21 10 18

The Budapest Workers’ Council entrusted the government to the printers’ union leader Gyula Peidl. At its first meeting on 2 August this “trade-union government” abolished the Republic of Councils and restored the People’s Republic, disbanded the revolutionary tribunals and released political prisoners, and on 4 August it dissolved the Red Guard. Socialised property was returned to its former owners, though as a gesture to the peasantry the estates were not handed back to the landowners. Despite the Entente’s prohibition, Romanian cavalry entered Budapest on 3 August and the main force on the 4th, and the American General Harry Hill Bandholtz prevented the looting of the National Museum. The Allies refused to recognise a purely socialist government, and on 6 August István Friedrich of the right-wing White House Comrades’ Association, backed by the Romanian army, drove out the Peidl government. The next day Archduke Joseph August declared himself regent and appointed Friedrich prime minister. 6 24 25 3 13 9

Romania occupied all of Hungary except the area around Lake Balaton and withdrew in early 1920, taking food, factory equipment and rolling stock with it. Horthy, who had built up the National Army in Szeged, led it into Budapest in November 1919 and four months later, on 1 March 1920, became regent of the re-established Kingdom of Hungary. In the meantime officers of the National Army carried out the White Terror against Communists, Social Democrats and Jews. 13 22) 14

Assessment

In May 1919 Lenin held that the transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat had been “incomparably easier and more peaceful” in Hungary than in Russia, praising the voluntary resignation of the bourgeois government and the instantaneous unity of the working class on a communist programme. After the defeat his judgement changed. In his theses for the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 he warned that admitting reformists threatened “a repetition of the same acts of treachery as were perpetrated by the Hungarian Social-Democrats, who so hastily assumed the title of Communists”. At the same congress he cited Varga’s book to the effect that the proletarian dictatorship had hardly changed anything in the Hungarian countryside, that the day-labourers saw no changes and the small peasants got nothing; unless part of the confiscated estates went to the small peasants, he argued, they would see no difference between the old order and Soviet rule, and the proletarian state would be unable to retain power. 16 26 27

In Hungarian historiography the view now prevails that the Communist assumption of power was closer to a coup than a revolution. Ignác Romsics writes that whereas the October 1918 revolution was preceded and accompanied by elemental mass movements, the transfer of power in March 1919 came about “almost like a coup” through a behind-the-scenes agreement among a few leaders, surprising the population of the capital and the provinces alike. It is also pointed out, however, that the change took place under the pressure of foreign armies and successive notes and ultimatums, when a quickly mobilisable army had become urgently necessary. The Italian diplomat and historian Alberto Indelicato attributes the downfall not to intervention by the Entente or the Whites but to the regime’s own social and economic policies; other accounts see the Entente blockade and isolation, the wars with the neighbours and the impossibility of joining forces with the Red Army during the Russian Civil War compounding the failure of internal reform. 9 7 6

The fact that many of the leaders were of Jewish origin fuelled antisemitism after the fall. Romsics writes that the share of commissars and deputy commissars of Jewish origin reached 60 and probably 70–75 per cent, yet most Hungarian Jews were not supporters of the Bolsheviks. The White Terror robbed and massacred Jews on the assumption that all were communists, and the American historian Andrew C. Janos judged that it was more savage than the random violence of the Red Guard and often became an instrument for settling personal accounts and for personal gain. The Communist regime enshrined the memory of the Republic of Councils in a law of 1959, which was repealed in 1993, and in November 2019 a reconstruction of a 1934 Horthy-era monument to the victims of the Red Terror was erected in Budapest. Rákosi, one of the republic’s commissars, led the second Communist state from 1949 to 1956, while Kun was executed in the Soviet Great Purge in 1938. 9 14 22) 20) 6 7