The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Béla Kun

534 Pages·1993·14.923 MB·English

by  Gyorgy Borsanyi

ATLANTIC STUDIES ON SOCIETY IN CHANGE
NO. 75
Editor-in-chief, Béla K Király
Associate Editor-in-Chief, Peter Pastor
Assistant Editor, Edit Völgyesi

György Borsányi
THE LIFE
OF A
COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARY,
BÉLA KUN
Translated from the Hungarian Original by
Mario D. Fenyő
Social Science Monographs, Boulder, Colorado
Atlantic Research and Publications,
Highland Lakes, New Jersey
Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York
1993
EAST EUROPEAN MONOGRAPHS, NOCCCLXm
Copyright*1993 by Atlantic Research and Publications
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, without
the written permission of the publisher
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-83147
ISBN 0-88033-260-3
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Preface to the Series vii
Foreword ix
Chapter I Childhood 1
Chapter II The Journalist 9
Chapter m Combat and Captivity 37
Chapter IV The Founder of the Communist
Party of Hungary 79
Chapter V Consolidating the Revolution 139
Chapter VI In Exile 207
Chapter VII The Reorganization of the
Hungarian Communist Party 267
Chapter Vin Member of the Presidium 343
Bibliography 437
Biographical Notes 451
Name Index 493
Place Index 507
Volumes Published in “Atlantic Studies on Society in Change” 513

Preface to the Series
The present volume is a component of a series that, when complet­
ed will constitute a comprehensive survey of the many aspects of
East European society.
The books in the series deal with the peoples whose homelands lie
between the Germans to the west, the Russians to the east and the
Mediterranean and Adriatic seas to the south. They constitute a par­
ticular civilization, one that is at once an integral part of Europe, yet
substantially different from the West The area is characterized by a
rich variety in language, religion, and government The study of this
complex area demands a multidisciplinary approach and, according­
ly, our contributors to the series represent several academic disci­
plines. They have been drawn from the universities and other schol­
arly institutions in the United States and Western Europe, as well
as East and Central Europe. The author of the present volume is a
distinguished scholar and Professor of History at the Budapest
University of Economic Sciences, Budapest
The editors, of course, take full responsibility for ensuring the
comprehensiveness, cohesion, internal balance, and scholarly quality
of the series. We cheerfully accept this responsibility and intend this
work to be neither a justification nor condemnation of the policies,
attitudes, and activities of any persons involved. At the same time,
because the contributors represent so many different disciplines,
interpretations, and schools of thought, our policy in this, as in the
past and future volumes, is to present their contributions without
mqjor modifications.
vii

Foreword
At the beginning of 1970 I was a researcher with the Institute of
Party History, a component of the Central Committee of the
Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. I had a doctoral degree, ten
years of scholarly activity, and a fair number of publications behind
me. One day the Director of the Institute called me in.
“We are entrusting you with a delicate task,* he told me. “We
know very little about Béla Kun, the founder of the Hungarian
Communist Party, and what little we know is not based on reliable
evidence. Find out about Kun’s life, collect and double-check all
accessible data, records, documents, information. Write up every­
thing you have been able to gather. Do not let yourself be swayed by
any bias, and especially do not worry about censorship. After all, it is
not likely that what you write will ever be published in Hungary. The
only thing that matters is that you write the truth. A few years from
now we will decide what to do with the manuscript....”
Presumably, the director chose me because, of all the staff at his
disposal, I was the one with the language tools necessary for this par­
ticular project - German and Russian.
The assignment was exciting, and exciting years followed. As the
bloodhound follows the trail of some scent into the depth of the for­
est, so I pursued the hitherto unfamiliar documents. Hie librarians
at the Széchenyi library in Budapest brought out, from the very
depth of their stacks, musty copies of newspapers published in
Hungarian towns at the turn of the century - papers that no one had
touched over the past sixty years. Hundreds of notebooks containing
diaries kept in the front lines by officers in World War I written in
pencil, the writing almost washed away, were lying around, in the
Institute of Military History; some entries in these were relevant to
my project. The volume of correspondence the underground
Communist Party conducted with the Comintern in the twenties and
thirties was enormous. Since the bureaucracy of the Comintern was
so painstaking, this correspondence was preserved in Moscow; micro­
film copies of it were received in Budapest at the beginning of the
ix
Foreword
fifties. Yet there remained in Moscow extensive materials pertaining
to Kun which no Hungarian researcher had seen. I showed up, there­
fore, at the “fraternal institute” in Moscow, with a letter of reference
from my own institute.
“You are a lucky man,” my colleagues in Moscow told me on
arrival. ‘The boss is in a generous mood, we have prepared plenty of
material for your project”
I sat in the reading room full of anticipation. A thick dossier was
placed in firont of me. My disappointment however, was like that of
Jacob in the Bible upon finding in his bed Lea instead of Rachel. The
dossier contained nothing but the typescripts of the articles Kun had
published in the Soviet press, with which I had been long familiar;
these had absolutely nothing new to offer me.
I told my hosts in no uncertain terms that if this was the extent of
their generosity, I would feel compelled to return home the next day
and report that I had received nothing. My outburst was not without
effect: after a long wait I did receive some documents pertaining to
Kun’s activities within the Comintern, albeit not the most important
ones by a long shot; as for what became of Kun after his arrest in
1937, the archivists at the Comintern could tell me nothing. It
seemed them documents remained sealed even to them.
My investigations in East Berlin and Sofia bore similar results. In
Vienna, however, I was granted access to everything relevant to Kun.
After about five years of research, I could honestly say: there was
hardly a pertinent book, article, or recollection in the world with
which I am not familiar. Furthermore, I have exhausted the accessi­
ble archival materials. I even knew which archives contained further
pertinent, but closed materials. It was time to stop remarch and
begin to write.
When the approximately 800 pages of typescript was ready, it was
read by a committee consisting of the general staff of the Institute.
They concluded their discussion, to my considerable surprise, by
agreeing that the manuscript be turned over — after some abridge­
ment — to a publishing house interested in historical works.
This was in 1977. The Kádár regime had achieved considerable
prestige by convincing world public opinion that, of all the countries
of the Eastern bloc, Hungary ei\joyed most freedom. This was partic­
ularly true in the area of culture: indeed, many works published in
x