Béla Kun
Kun Béla
133 days of the second Soviet state in Europe, and the execution cellar 19 years later
“The Hungarian proletariat betrayed not their leaders but itself.” — last speech before the Republic's fall, 1 August 1919
A Transylvanian-born Jewish journalist turned revolutionary, Béla Kun founded and led the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Europe's second proletarian dictatorship. In 133 days he nationalised industry, but his refusal to distribute confiscated land to peasants, turning estates into state farms, lost the countryside; Entente-backed armies crushed the Republic. In Soviet exile he became a key Comintern figure, ECCI Presidium member and head of Agitprop, backing the ultra-left "Third Period" and resisting the 1935 Popular Front turn, clashing with Dimitrov. Swept up in the Great Purge in 1937, tortured, shot in 1938, and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.
Career timeline
- 1902Joins the Hungarian Social Democratic Party; organises Transylvanian branch
- 1916Taken prisoner by the Russian Army in WWI; exposed to Bolshevism in the Urals camp
- 1917Joins the RSDLP(b); works in the Tomsk party committee and Bolshevik press
- 1918.03Co-founds the Hungarian Group of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow — precursor to the KMP
- 1918.11Returns to Budapest; founds the Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) and becomes CC chair
- 1919.03–08People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and de facto leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
- 1920Chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee
- 1921Directs the March Action in Germany — uprising fails
- 1921–1936Member of the ECCI and its Presidium
- 1924–Head of the ECCI Agitprop Department
- 1937Arrested on charges of leading a counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation
- 1938.08.29Sentenced to death and shot — Kommunarka, Moscow