The proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic

On the evening of 21 March 1919 the Workers’ Council of the capital met in the council chamber of Budapest’s city hall. The speech was given by Sándor Garbai, a Social Democrat and veteran activist of the building workers’ union. He announced that the government had rejected the Allied ultimatum and resigned, and that the Social Democratic Party had merged with the Communists. If the West wanted to impose a dictated peace on Hungary, he said, there was no other course than to accept “a different kind of dictatorship”: what the West had refused them, the Hungarians would seek in the East, in alliance with Soviet Russia. The hall carried the motion with enthusiasm. At the same time the Communist leaders, headed by Béla Kun, were walking out of prison in the working-class district of Kőbánya, and late that evening, at the party headquarters on Erzsébet körút, the Revolutionary Governing Council was set up. Garbai became its chairman, but the real leader of the new regime was Kun, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Thus, without a shot being fired, the Hungarian Soviet Republic came into being – the first soviet state outside the borders of the former Russian Empire. It lasted 133 days.

A republic without land or an army

Five months earlier, in the last days of October 1918, the Aster Revolution had carried Count Mihály Károlyi to power. On 16 November the Hungarian People’s Republic was proclaimed, and in January 1919 Károlyi became its provisional president. The government was now headed by the lawyer Dénes Berinkey, and its ministers included Social Democrats: the War Minister Vilmos Böhm, the Education Minister Zsigmond Kunfi and the Commerce Minister Ernő Garami. The republic introduced freedom of the press and of assembly, an electoral law giving women the vote, and a land reform act. Elections to the National Assembly were set for 13 April 1919.

The new Hungary, however, could not defend its borders. The army, sent home in the autumn of 1918, had virtually ceased to exist. The military convention signed in Belgrade on 13 November 1918 had drawn a demarcation line, but the victors kept moving it. Czechoslovak troops occupied Slovakia, Serbian and French forces the south of the country, and the Romanian army Transylvania. By the end of the winter the government in Budapest controlled roughly a third of the territory of the former Kingdom of Hungary. Cut off from the coal, ore and grain of the lost lands, the country sank into unemployment and soaring prices, while tens of thousands of refugees, demobilised soldiers and prisoners of war returning from Russia poured into Budapest.

Among the last was Béla Kun, a journalist from Transylvania who had become a Bolshevik in Russian captivity and had met Vladimir Lenin. He returned home in November 1918 with a group of comrades and money from the Soviet government, and on 24 November he founded the Party of Communists in Hungary. Its newspaper, Vörös Újság (Red News), attacked the Károlyi government and the Social Democrats, while its agitators recruited the unemployed, disabled ex-servicemen, refugees and demobilised soldiers. On 20 February 1919 a Communist demonstration outside the offices of the Social Democratic Népszava ended in a shoot-out in which several policemen were killed. Kun and several dozen other leaders were arrested, and the police beat them in custody. When the press reported this, the Communists became martyrs. From 1 March they were allowed to receive visitors in prison and ran the party from behind bars. Among the visitors were more and more left-wing Social Democrats, above all the lawyer Jenő Landler, leader of the party’s left wing.

Lieutenant Colonel Vix’s note

Yet the fate of the republic was decided not in Budapest but in Paris. On 26 February 1919 the peace conference resolved to separate the Hungarian and Romanian forces by a neutral zone. The Romanians were to advance to the Satu Mare – Oradea – Arad railway line, the Hungarians to fall back westwards by anything from several dozen to about a hundred kilometres, and the ground in between, with Debrecen near its western edge, was to be occupied by Allied troops. The decision, finally approved in mid-March, was transmitted to Hungary by the command of the Allied armies in the Balkans, whose representative in Budapest since November 1918 had been the head of the inter-Allied military mission, the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix.

At around half past ten on the morning of 20 March Vix, accompanied by officers of the Allied powers, handed the note to Károlyi. The withdrawal of Hungarian troops was to begin on 23 March and be completed within ten days, and a reply was demanded by six o’clock the following evening – within some thirty hours. Formally the note drew a military line, but nobody in Budapest doubted that it foreshadowed the future frontier. It cut off from Hungary lands with a Hungarian majority, including such towns as Debrecen, Oradea and Satu Mare. Károlyi received the note in a fury. The heads of the War Ministry’s operations department, Colonels Aurél Stromfeld and Jenő Tombor, judged the demands impossible to meet and advised preparing for armed defence, and the commander of the Székely Division, Colonel Károly Kratochvil, declared that his men would not leave their positions without a fight.

In the afternoon the leaders of the Social Democratic Party met, followed later by the council of ministers. Károlyi told the ministers that since the Paris conference had rejected the principles of President Woodrow Wilson, Hungary needed a new orientation in foreign and domestic policy. The coalition government could not go on governing; the Social Democrats alone should take power, and if the country was to avoid anarchy they had to come to terms with the Communists. The council of ministers unanimously decided to resign and to reject the note. None of the middle-class politicians imagined that the next day power would pass not to a Social Democratic government backed by the Communists but to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

21 March

At ten o’clock on the morning of 21 March the enlarged leadership of the Social Democratic Party met together with the trade union leaders. Böhm argued that rejecting the note meant war, and that war could be waged only if there was no civil war in the rear – in other words, only after an agreement with the Communists. Garami opposed this fiercely. He warned that the Bolsheviks were not a fraternal party but a hostile one, and that an alliance with them would destroy the entire labour movement. In the middle of the meeting Landler returned from the prison with the news that the Communists were ready to reach an agreement. In the vote only Garami, Manó Buchinger, Gyula Peidl and Sándor Propper were against. “We have just buried the Hungarian Social Democratic Party,” Garami is said to have remarked. The editor of Népszava, Jakab Weltner, admitted that union with the Bolsheviks was suicide, but believed that standing aside would be an equally fatal sentence for the party, and that the workers must not be left on their own.

A five-man delegation – Kunfi, Weltner, Landler, József Pogány and József Haubrich – went to the Budapest central prison (Gyűjtőfogház) in Kőbánya. There were no negotiations in any real sense. Weltner opened by declaring that the policy of the government and of the Social Democratic Party had failed. The imprisoned Communists set their terms: a merger of the two parties, soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and an alliance with Soviet Russia. Kunfi still tried to preserve the separate identity of the two parties, but nobody supported him. All the Social Democrats achieved was that the word “Communist” did not appear in the name of the united party, which was called the Hungarian Socialist Party. Kunfi later wrote that the document signed in the prison amounted to the “complete capitulation” of his party.

Events were now moving faster than decisions. The Soldiers’ Council, led by Pogány, recognised the dictatorship of the proletariat before evening fell. Its men requisitioned cars and occupied the city’s most important buildings. At the last meeting of the council of ministers Kunfi, arriving an hour and a half late, announced that the party was taking power with Communist support “with revulsion, but yielding to compulsion”, and proposed Garbai as prime minister. He kept quiet about the fact that under the document signed that afternoon power was to belong to the soviets. Garami and Peidl left the party leadership. At the demand of Böhm and Kunfi, the government decided to release the arrested Communists that same evening. Between eight and nine p.m. the deputy chief prosecutor, Albert Váry, freed 48 people from the prison, and a cheering crowd awaited them at the gate. A few minutes before the deadline expired, Vix was handed the reply that Hungary would not accept the note.

In the evening the Workers’ Council met at the city hall, where Garbai made his speech about turning to the East for what the West had refused. Böhm later called these words an expression of “national Bolshevism”. Many Hungarians, including officers and people far removed from Marxism, supported the new regime because it promised a war for the borders alongside the Red Army, which was just then advancing through Ukraine towards the Carpathians. At the opera the performance was interrupted and the audience was told of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Late that evening the leaders of both parties met at the Social Democratic headquarters, many of them for the first time. Weltner read out the agreement made in the prison. On the motion of Dezső Bokányi, although the idea had come from the Communists, the government was given the Russian-style name of Revolutionary Governing Council and the ministries became people’s commissariats. Garbai became chairman, Kun took foreign affairs, Landler internal affairs and Pogány war, with the Communists Béla Szántó and Tibor Szamuely as his deputies. Kunfi headed the Commissariat of Education, with the philosopher György Lukács as his deputy. The economist Jenő Varga took finance and Böhm socialisation, and one of the deputy commissars for trade was the 27-year-old Communist Mátyás Rákosi. Formally the Social Democrats predominated, since only two of the sixteen commissars belonged to Kun’s party. But the Communists had a majority among the deputies, and many left-wing Social Democrats, such as Landler, Pogány and Varga, had long shared their views. The council adopted the proclamation “To Everyone!”, written by Kun and Pogány, which announced the dictatorship of the proletariat; it offered Soviet Russia an offensive and defensive alliance by radio, and introduced summary courts and a ban on the sale of alcohol.

The next day the newspapers printed a proclamation over Károlyi’s name in which the president announced that he was handing power to the proletariat. Károlyi later maintained that he had never signed it, and it remains disputed to this day how far he stepped down voluntarily and how far he bowed to accomplished facts. He was not invited to the meeting of the Workers’ Council. He stayed in the country as a private individual and went into exile in July.

The first weeks

Lenin, when he learned of the takeover by radiotelegraph, was cautious. On 23 March he asked Kun what guarantees he had that the new government would be genuinely communist and not merely socialist. Kun assured him that Communist influence was decisive, and over the following weeks it did indeed grow. As early as 25 March the government dissolved the old army, police and gendarmerie, and replaced the courts with revolutionary tribunals. Banks, larger enterprises, tenement houses and the great landed estates were nationalised. The land, however, was not distributed to the peasants; instead the estates were turned into production co-operatives, often run by the former stewards, which turned the countryside against the new regime. On 23 March ten daily newspapers were closed, and in May the entire non-socialist press ceased to appear. At the beginning of April a provisional constitution was promulgated, and on 7–10 April elections to the soviets were held in which people could vote only for the list of the united party, while clergy and “exploiters” were deprived of the vote. From 3 April the deputy commissars became full commissars, which strengthened the Communists further.

The Allied officers in Budapest found themselves in an awkward position. Red Guards took the mission’s cars and weapons, and its communications were cut. On the evening of 26 March Vix and all the Allied representatives left by train for Szeged, in the French-occupied zone. On 4 April an envoy of the conference, General Jan Smuts, arrived in Budapest with the offer of a more lenient line, but Kun rejected it. A few days later, on 7 April, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Munich. For a few weeks the world revolution on which the Bolsheviks and the Comintern, founded in Moscow at the beginning of March, were counting seemed close at hand.

The Red Terror

From the outset the new regime announced that it would deal with counter-revolution, and the Communists were in charge of this. Ottó Korvin, head of the political investigation department, built up a network of informers, while Szamuely, the most ruthless of the Communist leaders, held extraordinary powers from 21 April to fight “counter-revolutionaries” behind the front. He toured the country in an armoured train, accompanied by József Cserny’s detachment of some two hundred armed men known as the “Lenin Boys”. In April the government ordered several hundred members of the old elites to be arrested as hostages. The greatest number of victims came from the suppression of peasant revolts in May and June 1919 and from the reprisals after the failed rising of the Ludovika Academy cadets in Budapest on 24 June. People were often killed without trial, and the perpetrators had themselves photographed beside those they had hanged. According to historians’ present-day estimates, the Red Terror cost the lives of between about 300–400 and almost 600 people. The upper figure, which some historians regard as inflated, comes from a list published in 1922 by the same Albert Váry who had opened the prison gate to the Communists on 21 March and who later, as a prosecutor, pursued them for their crimes. The White Terror that followed the fall of the republic was far bloodier.

War and fall

The Soviet Republic was at war from the start. Kun hoped that the Red Army in Ukraine would come to Hungary’s aid, but it never arrived. In mid-April the Romanian army launched an offensive and reached the Tisza within two weeks, while the Czechoslovaks came in from the north. Yet the Budapest workers mobilised by the trade unions, together with officers of the old army who wanted to defend the borders, made it possible to rebuild the front. In May and June the Hungarian Red Army, led by Böhm and Stromfeld, recaptured part of Slovakia, where the Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 16 June. Under pressure from Paris, Kun withdrew his troops from Slovakia in return for a promise that the Romanians would leave the territory beyond the Tisza – a promise that was not kept. On 20 July he threw his army into an offensive across the Tisza, which collapsed after a few days; the Romanians crossed the river and marched on Budapest, deciding the Hungarian–Romanian War. On 1 August 1919 the Revolutionary Governing Council resigned, and Kun left for Austria with his closest associates. Power passed to Peidl’s Social Democratic government, and a few days later the Romanian army entered the capital.

The long shadow of 133 days

The Soviet Republic was short-lived, but Hungary felt its consequences for a quarter of a century. After its fall the counter-revolution took power, and in March 1920 parliament elected Admiral Miklós Horthy regent. In the White Terror the new regime’s officer detachments murdered many people – from a thousand to several thousand, according to various estimates – among them many Communists, Social Democrats and Jews. Because most of the people’s commissars, with Kun, Szamuely and Korvin at their head, were of Jewish origin, the new regime’s propaganda identified communism with the Jews. As early as 1920 the Hungarian parliament passed a law restricting the number of Jews at universities, the first anti-Jewish law in post-war Europe. Throughout the interwar years the memory of “Kun’s rule” was used to fight any form of leftism and liberalism, and fear of Bolshevism was one of the arguments used in June 1941 to justify Hungary’s entry into Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Republic also worsened Hungary’s position at the peace conference. The powers, which were in any case awarding most of the former Kingdom of Hungary to its neighbours, had no wish to listen to the arguments of a country ruled by Bolsheviks, while Romania and Czechoslovakia presented their expansion as the defence of Europe against communism. The Treaty of Trianon, signed on 4 June 1920, took about two-thirds of its territory from Hungary. Revision of the treaty became the goal of Horthy’s policy, and the only power that proved able to carry it out was Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

The Hungarian revolution also reverberated in Germany. The Bavarian Soviet Republic, inspired in part by the example of Budapest, fell at the beginning of May 1919 to the blows of the army and the Freikorps, and Munich became for years a centre of the extreme right, where Hitler began his career. For the far right, as for Horthy, the Soviet Republic was the crowning proof of a supposed “Jewish Bolshevism”. To the Communists, for their part, it left cadres and a legend. Kun worked in the Comintern until his death in Joseph Stalin’s purges, and Rákosi, one of the deputy commissars in 1919, returned to Hungary with the Red Army in 1945 and built a Stalinist dictatorship – this time under the protection of Soviet troops.