Béla Kun (, born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who in 1919 governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Kun had worked as a journalist until World War I. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, and was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Ural Mountains. In Russia, Kun embraced communist ideas, and in 1918 in Moscow he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the Russian Communist Party. He befriended Vladimir Lenin and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.
In November 1918 Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and set up the Party of Communists in Hungary. 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 Communist-Social Democratic coalition government, and proclaimed a Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though the Republic's de jure leader was Prime Minister Sándor Garbai, de facto power was held by Foreign Minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radiotelegraph and received orders and advice from the Kremlin.
Four months later, the new regime collapsed in the face of a military offensive by the Kingdom of Romania. Kun fled to Soviet Russia, where from 1920 he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy as head of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee. He organised and actively participated in the Red Terror in Crimea (1920–1921), following which he participated in the 1921 March Action, a failed Communist uprising in Germany.
During the late-1930s Great Purge, Kun was accused of Trotskyism and was arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. In 1956, following Joseph Stalin's death and the Soviet Union's de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet leadership.
Life 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 (today part of Hodod, Satu Mare County, Romania). His father, Samu Kohn, was a lapsed Jewish village notary. His mother was Hungarian, but converted to Judaism upon marriage.György Borsányi, The Life of a Communist Revolutionary: Béla Kun. Mario D. Fenyo, trans. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs/Atlantic Research and Publications, 1993; pg. 1. Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was educated at the Silvania Főgimnázium in Zilah (present-day Silvania National College, Zalău) and a famous Reformed kollegium (grammar school) in the city of Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania).
At the kollegium Kun won the prize for best essay on Hungarian literature, which 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, 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, 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's left-wing intelligentsia.
Russian civil war Kun fought with the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, and was captured and made a prisoner of war in 1916 by the Imperial Russian Army. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Tomsk, where he was exposed to Communism. The Russian Revolution 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, Kun co-founded the Hungarian Group of the Russian Communist Party (the predecessor to the Party of Communists in Hungary) with other former Hungarian POWs. He travelled widely, including to Petrograd and Moscow. He came to know Vladimir Lenin there, but inside the party he promoted ultra-radical left-wing political opposition to Lenin and the mainstream Bolsheviks. 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, despite the harsh conditions they imposed, in order to "save the revolution", Kun and his group took the side of Nikolai Bukharin, 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 in 1918, Kun fought for the Bolsheviks and had a large recruitment network. Many Hungarians who were driven by prior socialist sympathies along with other factors such as oppression under Tsarist guards, coming from peasant backgrounds and willingness to fight the Czechoslovak Legion caused 80-100,000 Hungarians to end up in the Bolshevik Internationalist Army. These internationalist Hungarians played a key role in the Bolshevik victory and the defeat of the Czechoslovak Legion. 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. 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 campaign against the government of President Mihály Károlyi, and his Social Democratic 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. Desiring to achieve a revolution in Hungary, he communicated by telegraph with Vladimir Lenin 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.