Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Like his friend and fellow communist Tibor Szamuely, Kun was a fanatic. Solidarity with Soviet Russia was proclaimed and reports of Bolshevik achievements were carried in the Budapest newspapers. The Red flag was hoisted on public buildings. Trade unions received a generous quota of free tickets to the theatres. The banks, mines and big textile factories were nationalized. Kun established a security police that soon gained notoriety for its terror against ‘class enemies’. Szamuely assembled the ‘Lenin Boys’ whom he sent into the villages to seize the harvest and impose a system of collective farms. (The same thing was happening in the Ukrainian countryside; but whereas in Ukraine it was against the instructions of Moscow, in Hungary it was on Kun’s orders.) Churches were desecrated and priests and landlords were arrested or murdered. When peasants objected to the violence, the Lenin Boys turned on them too. The communization of Hungarian society was undertaken at a faster pace even than in Russia after the October Revolution. Blood flowed copiously.

Such popularity as Kun retained lay in his unequivocal rejection of the Allies’ schemes for Hungary. The Western Allies planned to reward Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia with territory that until then had been part of Hungary. Hungary would become a third of its previous size. As a result even Hungarians who were wary of Kun’s communist internationalist doctrines lent him their support. The communist leadership were willing to act rather than merely grumble.

Recruiting left-of-centre commanders from the Imperial armed forces, Kun mobilized the troops to fight for every patch of ‘Hungarian’ soil. He vowed to repel the growing incursions by Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. He paraded foreign POWs through the streets of Budapest. Hungary’s interests, he implied, were safe in his hands. Although he disliked the Hungarian national flag, he yielded when Ferenc Julier, Chief of the General Staff, told him that without it there might be trouble in getting an army into the field against the Romanians. 11Kun was cunning in his interviews for the foreign press, pretending to be much more moderate than he really was and claiming that it would be years before any truly communist policies would be applied. For a while he was successful and the communist regime threw back the Romanian and Czech invaders in April 1919. 12Its Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia, taking several towns before meeting effective resistance. It closed the Danube to shipping, and Austrian attempts to break the river blockade were disrupted ‘by the Hungarian Bolshevists who would fire on boats’. 13The Orient Express continued to run across Hungary from Romania, but Red Guards with their fixed bayonets and grenade belts made crossing the border an unpleasant experience. 14

The Allies reacted with an economic blockade designed to bring Kun and Szamuely to their knees. 15Food supplies were depleted. The only solution according to Kun was to expropriate more grain, vegetables and meat from the villages. Clashes with the peasantry intensified as civil war broke out.

Kun and Szamuely had always seen their ultimate salvation in international revolution. They begged Lenin and Trotsky to send a contingent of the Red Army from newly conquered Ukraine. 16Little did the communist leaders in Moscow and Budapest know that American forces were intercepting Hungarian wireless traffic. 17So nothing that Kun wrote in his telegrams was truly confidential. 18It was no secret, of course, that the Soviet leaders, if the opportunity arose, were intent on helping to spread communist revolution west-wards. The Bolshevik party’s entire foreign policy had been built on this foundation. Just occasionally there were surprises for the Allied powers, such as when the Austrian security agency claimed to have discovered a secret plan of Kun’s for a communist seizure of power in Vienna. This may have been a case of counter-intelligence officers trying to prove their usefulness to Austria’s new social-democratic government. 19It would seem that the Americans later used their intercepted information to prevent Kun from heading to Switzerland as an envoy of Lenin and Trotsky. 20Old ‘Austria-Hungary’ was boiling up with political conflicts that could spill over the new national borders. It appeared that anything might happen, and it frequently did.

Lenin and Trotsky did not dismiss Kun’s requests out of hand, and their Red Army high command began to examine how it might lend assistance to Hungary. It quickly became obvious that a campaign across the Ukrainian frontier would put the Red Army in danger from Kolchak and Denikin. If Russians marched westwards, they might find there was no Soviet homeland to return to. With regret they turned down Kun’s request. 21

By late summer, the Hungarian Red Army faced rebellion throughout Hungary and threats on the northern borders. Desertions grew in number. The last slim hope of the Kun government vanished on 4 August when Romanian forces, after weeks of fighting in the north of the country, stormed into Budapest. Although they were delighted that a power in the region had overthrown communism, the Western Allies did not approve of what happened next. The Romanian military force was a law unto itself and the Bucharest authorities exercised no restraint over it. Red Hungarian terror was replaced with a White Romanian one, and Hungarian groups emerged seeking revenge on the communists who had tormented them for months. Chaos ensued when the Romanians reduced the police service to six hundred policemen. Attacks on Jews in the streets and in their houses became frequent. The economy fell apart entirely and food became scarce in the capital even for those who had possessions to barter. 22The Romanians stripped the occupied territories of their flour, sugar, medicine and even its railway locomotives. 23Famine spread across the country. 24

US officials were aware that communism remained a threat in central Europe — and not only in Hungary. Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, wrote to Woodrow Wilson on 28 March 1919:

Politically the Bolsheviki most certainly represent a minority in every country where they are in control. The Bolsheviki… [have] resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even among reactionary tyrannies… [They have] embraced a large degree of emotionalism and… thereby given an impulse to [their] propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements. 25

Hoover’s remedy was to counteract Marxism’s appeal by shipping American food relief to central Europe. Europe had depended on grain exports from Russia before the Great War. Hoover argued that American farmers would benefit from filling the gap. 26America had an over-abundance of agricultural produce. Credits should be advanced so that European countries could buy stocks. 27

Hoover argued that no better way existed to demonstrate capitalist superiority over communism than to bring the bread of life from the world’s healthiest market economy and help industry and agriculture to recover. He saw that wherever food was short there was a danger of cities toppling into communist hands. American philanthropy, however, came with strings. Hoover stipulated that the recipient governments should maintain order and keep the political far left out of power. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna were enough for him to suspend aid to Austria temporarily; and he held back supplies from Hungary underr Kun. 28Meanwhile his American Relief Administration transported cereals, medicines, sugar, tinned meat and fish to Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. His efforts in central Europe after the Great War were extraordinary in the face of much obstruction from the French and British, who continued to blockade Germany at the risk of outright mass starvation in 1919. When he learned that American grain cargoes were held up at European ports, Hoover angrily intervened by stressing that he had President Wilson’s full support. Undoubtedly the strain took a toll on him — J. M. Keynes described him admiringly as ‘a weary Titan’ and ‘an exhausted prize-fighter’. 29But Hoover got his way and the French and British stopped being obstructive — and the blockade of Germany was lifted.