Hungarian Soviet Republic
The Hungarian Soviet Republic was the political regime in Hungary from March 21, 1919 until the beginning of August of the same year, and it is the second Communist (or soviet) government in world history, after the one in Russia (1917). The Soviet experiment in Central Europe had major influences for Hungary and its neighbors' history.
The immediate cause of the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was the failure of Count Mihály Károlyi's government of the re-born state of Hungary to reorganize the country's social and economic life on the shambles left over after the lost war and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After less than six months in power, Károlyi admitted the failure of his policies, resigning in favor of the young Hungarian Communist Party. The party was very small at this time, but its members were very active and it grew rapidly. Károlyi intended to leave the communists in power in order to pass onto them the responsibility of dealing with the difficult matter of the Entente's territorial requests.
The Hungarian Communist Party thus had a meteoric, if precocious, rise to political power. An initial nucleus of the party had been organized just a few months earlier, in a Moscow hotel on November 4 1918, when a group of Hungarian prisoners of war and some other communist sympathizers formed a Central Committee. Led by Béla Kun, they soon left for Hungary and started to recruit new members and propagate the party's ideas, radicalizing many of the Social Democrats. By February 1919, the party numbered 30,000 to 40,000 members, including many unemployed ex-soldiers, young intellectuals and Jews.
Kun founded a communist newspaper, and concentrated on attacking Károlyi's government. He was arrested and sent to prison, but the newspaper continued to be printed. After receiving the Vyx Ultimatum (that required more Hungarian territorial cessions), on March 20 Károlyi released Kun from prison and basically gave him control over the government, so that he would be the one forced to deal with the ultimatum. Following the model learned his spiritual father Lenin, Kun created a government of People's Commissars, which proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic on March 21. Initially, the Sándor Garbai government consisted of a Socialist-Communist coalition, but Kun's Bolsheviks leaped into action and managed within days to dismiss their socialist comrades - considered to be bourgeois. The new government decreed the abolition of aristocratic titles and privileges, the separation of church and state, and guaranteed the freedom of speech and assembly, free education, language and cultural rights to minorities.
In a radio dispatch to Soviet Russia, Kun reported to Lenin that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" had been established in Hungary and asked for a treaty of alliance with Soviet Russia, to defend against the inevitable hostile reaction from the Entente. Soviet Russia was willing, but unable to lend a helping hand to the fledgling Hungarian republic, because it was itself tied down in the Russian Civil War. The Hungarian government was thus left on its own, and a Red Guard was established under the command of Mátyás Rákosi.
The Communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, and socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and all landholdings of more than 40 hectares. Kun undertook these measures even though the Hungarian communists were relatively few, and the support they enjoyed was based far more on their program to restore Hungary's borders rather than on their revolutionary agenda.
Kun attempted to spread communist revolution to neighboring regions that had previously belonged to Hungary. After his military victory over the Czechs, on June 8 American President Wilson demanded a halt to the Hungarian Red Army's advances and invited the Hungarian government to Paris to discuss Hungary's frontiers. Kun believed that the Soviet Russian government would intervene on Hungary's behalf and that the worldwide workers' revolution is spreading from East toward West. A spurious Soviet Republic of Slovakia was proclaimed on June 16, in the southern and eastern Slovak lands, centred on Kosice (Kassa).
The situation of the Hungarian Communists began to deteriorate when, after a failed coup by the National Social-Democrats on June 24, the new Communist government of Antal Dovcsák resorted to arbitrary violence. Revolutionary tribunals ordered 590 executions of people who were suspected of having been involved in the attempted coup. The government also used "revolutionary red terror" to expropriate grain from peasants. The new society was intended to be lustrated of the clergy and "former exploiters". This violence and the regime's moves against the clergy shocked many Hungarians.
Problems along the other frontiers prevented the Soviet Hungary from securing any more territory for Soviet Slovakia. At the end of June, Kun ordered the withdrawal of the Red Guards from Slovakia and the government there collapsed immediately without the support of the terror apparatus. The Romanians advanced across Hungary all the way to the gates of the capital, and the Red Guards engaged in a pitched battle before Budapest. But the terribly demoralised force was severely defeated, and Kun fled toward Austria on August 1 toghether with other high-ranking Bolsheviks, leaving Hungary to its fate. Once Kun had vanished from the scene, the Workers' Soviet elected a new government headed by Gyula Peidl, which in days rescinded nearly all of Kun's decrets. The Romanian occupation of Budapest on August 6 put an end to the first Communist regime in Hungary.
