Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic [antikvár]

Preface The Communist Party of Hungary was founded in November, 1918, by a group of Russian-trained Hungarian former prisoners of war and indigenous left socialists for the purpose of overthrowing the democratic government of Mihály Károlyi and establishing a revolutionary beachhead in Hungary to spread the "bacilli of Bolshevism" in Europe. Internal disunity and the threat of foreign invasion, exploited by the communists, caused the downfall of the Károlyi government and the subsequent establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in March of 1919. The Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by Béla Kun, fell after 133 days of existence. It was followed by Admiral Nicholas Horthy's counterrevolutionary regime, which ruled until the end of World War II. In early 1945 the Communist Party re-emerged from the underground to become a decisive force in postwar politics, and within three years established its complete authority in Hungary. This study is concerned with the background and history of the communists' first, shorthved role in Hungary, and specifically with the intellectual prehistory and ideological and organizational achievements of the Communist Party of Hungary in the democratic and proletarian revolutions of 1918 and 1919. Since most of the founders and early leaders of the Communist Party of Hungary, including Béla Kun and more than nineteen People's Commissars of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, fell victim to the Soviet purges, and also because Stalinist party historians after 1928 viewed the Kun regime as a Luxemburgist deviation rather than a bona fide proletarian revolution, very Httle information concerning the party's early history, and particularly its Russian origins, was available until 1957. Since then, in an effort to restore the political credentials of these fallen communists, several previously suppressed documents, a score of memoirs, and many specialized monographs have been published in Hungary and in the Soviet Union. These new data and additional primary sources from the years 1917 to 1928 necessitate a careful vii