The fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic

On the afternoon of 1 August 1919 the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of the capital met. A few hours earlier the party leadership and the Revolutionary Governing Council had decided that soviet rule in Hungary was at an end. The Romanian army had crossed the Tisza and was marching on Budapest, and the Hungarian Red Army was disintegrating in retreat. Béla Kun, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and the real leader of the republic, took the rostrum. He announced that the government was resigning and, in a bitter speech, reproached the Hungarian proletariat for not wanting to fight in defence of its own dictatorship. Power passed to a government led by the Social Democrat and trade unionist Gyula Peidl, soon dubbed the “trade union government”. That same day Kun and a dozen or so of his closest associates left Budapest on a special train bound for Austria, which had granted them asylum. After 133 days the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the first state after Soviet Russia to be ruled by Communists, ceased to exist.

The soviet republic

The republic had been proclaimed on 21 March 1919. The day before, the head of the Allied military mission in Budapest, the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix, had demanded on behalf of the peace conference a further withdrawal of Hungarian troops, and the government of President Mihály Károlyi, who had come to power in the Aster Revolution, refused to accept this and resigned. The Social Democrats merged with the Communists, and Kun was released from prison. The proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was meant to save the country from partition, since the new regime promised that, with the help of Bolshevik Russia, it would defend the borders the Entente was unwilling to leave Hungary. Formally the Revolutionary Governing Council was headed by the Social Democrat Sándor Garbai, but the decisions were taken by Kun, a former prisoner of war in Russia and a disciple of Vladimir Lenin.

Soviet rule brought the nationalisation of factories, banks, tenement houses and the great landed estates, a ban on the sale of alcohol, revolutionary tribunals and a struggle against the Church. The land was not distributed to the peasants but turned into state farms, which cost the republic the support of the countryside. Counter-revolutionary actions, peasant revolts and attempted coups were suppressed by force. The most hated symbol of this rule became Tibor Szamuely and his detachments, known as the “Lenin Boys”, who hanged people suspected of counter-revolution. According to historians’ present-day estimates, the Red Terror claimed between about 300–400 and almost 600 victims. The upper figure of 590 killed comes from an interwar compilation and, according to some historians, is inflated, since it also includes common criminals, deserters and soldiers killed in action.

Above all, however, the republic was at war. In April, in the Hungarian–Romanian War, the Romanians reached the Tisza, while the Czechoslovaks entered Hungary from the north. Yet the Red Army, commanded by the Social Democrat Vilmos Böhm and its chief of staff, Colonel Aurél Stromfeld, recaptured a large part of Slovakia in May and June. Many professional officers fought in its ranks not for communism but for the integrity of the country. When in June the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, demanded a withdrawal from Slovakia and promised that the Romanians would leave the territory beyond the Tisza, Kun agreed. The Hungarians pulled out, Stromfeld resigned in protest, and the Romanians stayed where they were.

The last days of July

In mid-July Böhm gave up his command and went to Vienna as the republic’s envoy. In reality, with the knowledge of the Social Democratic leadership – and, according to Hungarian studies, of Kun himself – he discussed with representatives of the Entente mission there the terms on which the Allies would lift the economic blockade and halt the Romanians. The answer was clear: only when the dictatorship of the proletariat in Budapest was replaced by a moderate Social Democratic government that would in time admit the middle-class parties to power and call elections. A statement by the Supreme Council of the peace conference to this effect was published on 30 July by the Social Democratic Népszava.

Kun staked everything on a single card. On 20 July the Red Army, led by its new chief of staff, Ferenc Julier, crossed the Tisza, but within a few days it was routed, and on the night of 29–30 July the Romanians crossed the river themselves and set off for Budapest. Kun asked Moscow for the Red Army to strike at Romanian Bessarabia, but the Bolsheviks, absorbed in the civil war in Ukraine, replied that they could not do so immediately. On 31 July Kun and several commissars travelled to the front near Cegléd. He saw that the army had virtually ceased to exist: soldiers were deserting in whole units, and Julier judged further resistance pointless. In the evening the leaders of the republic returned to the capital convinced that it was the end. That same day the trade union council came out in favour of handing power to a Social Democratic government.

1 August

On the morning of 1 August, at a joint meeting of the party leadership and the Revolutionary Governing Council, the decision to resign was taken. In the afternoon it was approved by the Budapest Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Kun said that the Hungarian proletariat had failed because it had not wanted to defend its own power. Garbai asked Peidl to form a government and handed him a list of ministers. Peidl, who in March had opposed the merger with the Communists, accepted reluctantly. The new government took power on 1 August itself and issued its first decrees the following day, which is why some studies date its formation to 2 August.

The cabinet consisted almost entirely of Social Democrats and trade union activists from the party’s right and centre. The miners’ leader Károly Peyer became Minister of the Interior, and Garbai, who that morning had still headed the Governing Council, took the Ministry of Education. Peidl was both prime minister and acting head of state, since there was no other.

Kun and his comrades left the city on a special train. The Austrian government of Chancellor Karl Renner agreed to take them in but, for their own safety, interned them, first in the castle at Karlstein an der Thaya and later in Vienna’s Steinhof hospital. The armed Red Guards who escorted them were disarmed at the border and sent back into the country, and, according to the memoirs of Kun’s wife, many of them later went to the gallows. Szamuely tried to escape to Austria on his own. On 2 August he crossed the border river Leitha illegally, and when Austrian gendarmes detained him and brought him to Lichtenwörth, he shot himself before they could search him. Mátyás Rákosi, in the final days commander of the Red Guard, also escaped. Only a few remained in the country to rebuild the party underground, among them the philosopher György Lukács, the People’s Commissar for Education.

Six days of the trade union government

Peidl’s government wanted to prove to the Allies that it had broken with the dictatorship. On 2 August the Prime Minister signed Decree No. 1, which restored the name the state had borne before March: the form of the Hungarian state was a people’s republic, and its official name was accordingly “the Hungarian People’s Republic”. Over the following days the government dissolved the revolutionary tribunals and released political prisoners, restored the old courts, disbanded the Red Guard and began to rebuild the police, returned nationalised tenement houses, factories and shops to their owners, withdrew from circulation the money printed by the soviet republic, and opened talks with the middle-class and peasant parties about a coalition.

But it had neither an army nor support. On 2 August the Supreme Council in Paris, under pressure from Clemenceau, refused to recognise a government made up solely of socialists, and merely “asked” Romania to halt its troops. The Romanians pressed on. On the evening of 3 August the first squadrons of their cavalry rode into Budapest, and on 4 August the main forces of General Traian Moșoiu marched through the city. The Romanian command presented the government with armistice terms that included a heavy levy for the costs of the war and the occupation, which Peidl did not accept. Most of the capital’s inhabitants, exhausted and frightened, placed no hope in the socialists. Many officials no longer obeyed the ministers, and opponents of the Communists who had been released from prison were openly preparing a coup.

The conspirators gathered in the right-wing White House Comradely Association struck on 6 August. They took over the police, arrested Peyer, the minister, and – with the Romanian troops looking on passively – surrounded the Sándor Palace in Buda, where the government was in session. Under threat of arrest, and in return for a promise that a coalition government would be formed, the ministers resigned. Power was taken by the industrialist István Friedrich, and the next day Archduke Joseph August proclaimed himself regent of Hungary. The trade union government had lasted six days.

Why the republic fell

The Hungarian Soviet Republic fell above all because it lost the war. It had promised to defend the borders with the help of world revolution, but Soviet Russia, fighting for its own survival, could not help it, and the revolutions in Germany and Austria on which Kun had counted either did not break out or were crushed. The Entente’s economic blockade deepened the shortages in the towns, while requisitions and the nationalisation of the land alienated the peasants. The workers and Social Democrats were disillusioned too: they had entered into alliance with the Communists in March to save the country, not to build a dictatorship on the Russian model. When the agreement to withdraw from Slovakia showed that the borders could not be defended, the officers stopped believing that the fight made sense. In the end the fate of the republic was sealed by the July defeat on the Tisza and the Romanian march on Budapest.

The long shadow

The fall of the Communists did not bring Hungary democracy. Within a few weeks the right took power, and in the part of the country not occupied by the Romanians the officer detachments of Admiral Miklós Horthy’s National Army began the White Terror. Its victims were Communists and Social Democrats, peasants suspected of sympathising with soviet rule and, above all, Jews. Estimates of the number killed in 1919–1921 vary from about a thousand to several thousand, and tens of thousands were sent to prisons and internment camps. Because many of the people’s commissars, Kun among them, were of Jewish origin, the new regime identified communism with the Jews. As early as 1920 Hungary became the first state in post-war Europe to pass a law restricting the number of Jews at universities.

The memory of the 133 days became the foundation of the regime that ruled Hungary for a quarter of a century. Horthy’s regime presented itself as a shield against Bolshevism and outlawed the Communists. This anti-communism, combined with the drive to revise the Treaty of Trianon, drew Hungary first towards Italy and then towards Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In February 1939 Hungary joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, and in June 1941 it went to war with the Soviet Union, a war presented as a crusade against Bolshevism. The antisemitism born in 1919 found expression in the successive anti-Jewish laws of 1938–1941 and, in 1944, under German occupation, in the deportation of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews, most of them to Auschwitz.

The fates of the men of 1919 completed the story. Kun never returned to Hungary. He worked in the Comintern and in 1938 (in 1939, according to some sources) perished in Moscow in Joseph Stalin’s purges. Rákosi returned to Hungary secretly in 1924, was imprisoned a year later and spent almost fifteen years behind bars; in 1940 the Hungarian authorities exchanged him with the USSR for banners dating from the Springtime of Nations of 1848–1849. At the beginning of 1945 he came from Moscow to a country being occupied by the Red Army and, as leader of the Communist Party, built a Stalinist-style dictatorship in Hungary. For his regime 1919 was a source of pride; for its opponents, proof that communism was alien violence. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was short-lived, but the fear it left behind shaped Hungarian politics up to the Second World War and beyond.