Bela Kun

Bela Kun ran the Hungarian Soviet Republic for 133 days in 1919 and was shot by Stalin's police nineteen years later. He was a Transylvanian Jewish journalist and trade union official who was captured on the Russian front in 1916, converted to Bolshevism in a prisoner-of-war camp, met Lenin, and was sent home with money and instructions. Hungary in early 1919 was a country that had lost a war and expected to lose two thirds of its territory at the peace conference; when the Entente demanded a further withdrawal in March, the government resigned rather than accept, and the social democrats handed power to the communists in the belief that only Soviet Russia would help. Kun nationalised almost everything, including farms of more than a hundred acres, which lost him the peasantry immediately because the land was collectivised rather than distributed. His Red Army recovered Slovakia and then gave it up under Entente pressure, which lost him the army. Detachments known as the Lenin Boys carried out several hundred killings in what was called the Red Terror. Romanian troops occupied Budapest in August and he fled to Vienna. The White Terror that followed under Horthy killed several times more, much of it explicitly antisemitic and pointing at Kun. He worked for the Comintern in Russia, botched an insurrection in Germany in 1921, and was arrested in the purges in 1937. He was executed in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956. The republic's cultural commissar was Georg Lukacs, and the young Arthur Koestler and Michael Polanyi were among those whose lives it redirected. Its collapse is one reason the Hungarian right spent the interwar years treating communism and Jewishness as the same thing.

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