{"id":80500,"date":"2022-05-23T08:08:27","date_gmt":"2022-05-23T13:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80500"},"modified":"2022-05-23T08:46:42","modified_gmt":"2022-05-23T13:46:42","slug":"ravenous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80500","title":{"rendered":"Ravenous"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The first President of Hungary, Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi, had been forced to swallow many bitter pills in his short time in office.\u00a0 The last appointed Hungarian Prime Minister by Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles I, K\u00e1rolyi had ushered the relative bloodless Astar Revolution (with a couple of notable exceptions) and Hungary’s full independence.\u00a0 In short order, K\u00e1rolyi watched the Allied powers disintegrated the lands of the ancient Habsburg regime by decree and by force.\u00a0 The latest blow had arrived the day before with the arrival of the “Vix Note” – a communique from the French that Hungarian troops were expected to retreat even further than originally agreed upon in order for those lands to be seized by Hungary’s neighbors.<\/p>\n

The note had caused K\u00e1rolyi’s prime minister to resign on March 21st, 1919 as the Hungarians didn’t wish to agree to France’s demands but were in little military position to resist.\u00a0 With his authority evaporating as quickly as Hungary’s borders, K\u00e1rolyi proclaimed that the National Council, the legislative body through which he ruled, would attempt to form another government.\u00a0 But as K\u00e1rolyi was a determined anti-communist, only the center-left Social Democrats would be allowed as the organizing party.\u00a0 The Social Democrats agreed on the same day and made a surprising announcement – K\u00e1rolyi was resigning as President.<\/p>\n

Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi had most certainly not told the Social Democrats he intended to resign.\u00a0 And the Social Democrats had most certainly not told K\u00e1rolyi that they had secretly entered into an alliance with the Hungarian Communist Party and had released their imprisoned leadership the night before.\u00a0 B\u00e9la Kun, the Moscow-dispatched leader of the Hungarian Communists, immediately declared a Hungarian Soviet Republic, deposing and arresting K\u00e1rolyi by fiat.\u00a0 Kun then radioed Vladimir Lenin in Russia, telling him that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” had seized control in Budapest.<\/p>\n

The fear of most nations around the world since the Russian Revolution of 1917 had arrived – a Communist dictatorship had taken hold in the heart of Europe.<\/p>\n

The Astar Revolution – Hungary’s hopes for an Allied-supported government died a quick death, even with a pro-Allied leader like Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi at the helm<\/p><\/div>\n

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“I was certainly no adherent of the ancient regime, but it seems doubtful to me whether it is a sign of political shrewdness to beat to death the smartest of the many counts [Count Istv\u00e1n Tisza] and to make the stupidest one [Count Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi] president.”\u00a0 – Sigmund Freud<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hungary’s fate was far from sealed as the Great War ended on November 11th, 1918<\/a>.\u00a0 It took a series of terrible moves from leadership to ensure the rise of a Soviet Republic.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

As the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed into the dustbin of history<\/a>, Hungarian legislators had already begun the process of separation from the Dual Monarchy.\u00a0 Count Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi had been one of those legislators – indeed, he had been pushing for separation from Austria since the turn of the century when the one-time adventurer and wealthy playboy finally settled down into a life of politics (some say K\u00e1rolyi partied to make up for his youngest years when he had a cleft lip and palate).\u00a0 Legislative affairs didn’t dull his reckless reputation; he would become deep political enemies with Prime Minister Istv\u00e1n Tisza over K\u00e1rolyi’s refusal to shake hands following a heated debate.\u00a0 The disagreement would escalate to the two dueling with sabres until Tisza wounded K\u00e1rolyi after an hour of fighting and each man’s second intervened to stop the fight.\u00a0 K\u00e1rolyi’s reputation for passion and poor judgement wouldn’t improve over the years.<\/p>\n

Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi – despite his initial views and actions, K\u00e1rolyi was rejected by the West as a Communist.\u00a0 Partially as a result, he would embrace socialism after WWII and return to Hungary to briefly be in government before resigning in protest to the Soviet puppet state<\/p><\/div>\n

For a regime hoping to avoid a punitive peace, K\u00e1rolyi’s pro-Allied\/anti-war stances during the war made him an attractive legislative figurehead for Charles I as various factors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire split away<\/a>.\u00a0 The degree to which either Charles I or K\u00e1rolyi believed Hungary would completely separate from the monarchy is debatable, but with federal troops opening fire on Hungarian protestors, the appointment of a pro-independence politician might prevent violence from engulfing the country.\u00a0 Regardless of what Charles I thought may happen by such a promotion, K\u00e1rolyi immediately formalized the end of the Compromise of 1867 that had created the Dual Monarchy and shortly thereafter announced a Hungarian People’s Republic, run by the Hungarian National Council of which K\u00e1rolyi was a leading member.\u00a0 The moves, later called the “Astar Revolution” for the flower that rebels wore on their lapels or hats, had minimized further violence, but not before the murder of Istv\u00e1n Tisza.\u00a0 The former prime minister had his home broken into by Astar rebels (or disgruntled soldiers, depending upon the definition) and was shot to death in front of his family.\u00a0 The men who did it claimed it was retribution for initially supporting the war.<\/p>\n

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The nation Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi inherited was in dire straits but not powerless.\u00a0 1.4 million Hungarian soldiers were still under arms as Serbian troops entered the south of Hungary and the newly formed Czechoslovak Army<\/a> crossed the northern frontier.\u00a0 Plus, French commander Louis Franchet d’Esp\u00e8rey at Salonika was encouraging the Romanians to expand their claims on Transylvania.\u00a0 K\u00e1rolyi saw the situation, and the tenuous hold the National Council had on a shrinking Hungary, and decided to unilaterally disarm.\u00a0 Not stand-down or partially demobilize, but to completely disband the Hungarian army.\u00a0 The Hungarian Republic had literally no one to defend themselves.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

K\u00e1rolyi’s motivation was likely to try and gain more generous terms from the Allies by embracing Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points<\/a>, but like the Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians<\/a> and Germans<\/a> had already learned, the United States was not going to interfere in armistice talks as a third party.\u00a0 The French would lead the armistice negotiations with the new Hungarian government and Paris was merciless in their demands.\u00a0 The Hungarian army would permanently be reduced to eight divisions – six infantry, two cavalry – and the entire country had to grant access to Allied forces at all times; essentially a floating, ceaseless occupation.\u00a0 The Hungarians had to turn over their entire rail and transportation systems as war indemnity and pay for the cost of repairing Serbian infrastructure.\u00a0 These weren’t even the final terms of any peace treaty, just the preconditions to ending the war.\u00a0 K\u00e1rolyi’s prior decisions had left him no choice – Hungary signed the punitive armistice.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hungarian Soviets – K\u00e1rolyi’s epic mismanagement initially attracted a wide and varied political coalition to the Soviet, even otherwise conservative elements and royalists<\/p><\/div>\n

The months that followed unfolded much as they had in Russia after the February Revolution<\/a> and in the winter of 1918 in Germany<\/a> – a system of dual power between revolutionary councils and relatively more moderate executive leaders.\u00a0 K\u00e1rolyi and the Social Democrats would endlessly thrust and pare legislative measures, turning K\u00e1rolyi’s cabinet into what critics called more of a debating society than a government.\u00a0 And as both sides debated, Hungary fell further into disarray.\u00a0 The Allies had continued to blockade Hungary until a final peace treaty would be signed, cutting them off from needed coal to heat homes in the winter.\u00a0 The loss of most of the country’s transportation in the armistice terms triggered massive unemployment as workers were unable to get to their jobs while the supply chain froze with goods unable to move.\u00a0 And the nation’s neighbors continued to occupy more and more territory en route to Hungary losing 75% of it’s pre-war territory.<\/p>\n

K\u00e1rolyi had presided over a spectacular political, military and societal collapse in less than four months of governance.\u00a0 The fact that he never saw a coup coming only adds to his list of profound failures.<\/p>\n

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The seizure of power by Hungary’s Communists was made all the more terrifying to the European powers by the virtue of it’s organization and control from Russia.\u00a0 B\u00e9la Kun, the de facto leader of the party, was Hungarian born and raised, but gone from being a Social Democrat-supported journalist to a Bolshevik firebrand after his imprisonment in Russia as an Austro-Hungarian POW.\u00a0 While Kun would develop a reputation as the Hungarian Lenin, and would constantly inform and seek advice from the father of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had little direct use for Kun himself.\u00a0 Although the Bolsheviks gave Kun vast sums of money to help finance the revolution, Lenin viewed Kun as a part of the movement he mockingly called “kunerists” who wanted to immediately spread Communism to the rest of Europe by force.\u00a0 Such revolutionaries could only embolden Communism’s international enemies, thus threatening the core revolution that was still far from resolved<\/a> in Russia.\u00a0 Thus, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic needed help the most over the coming months, Lenin and Russia refused to do much more than provide occasional advice and rhetorical support.<\/p>\n

B\u00e9la Kun – the Russians would transplant him around eastern Europe, both supporting and undermining his revolutionary efforts at the same time.\u00a0 His final reward would be execution by Stalin as part of the dictator’s “Great Purge”<\/p><\/div>\n

Such a laissez faire attitude from Moscow didn’t appear to be the case just days into the Hungarian Revolution.\u00a0 Lenin gave Kun one of his few direct orders during the life of the Hungarian Soviet Republic – purge the Social Democrats from the government.\u00a0 Like the Bolsheviks casting out the Mensheviks<\/a>, there was no room in the revolution for a competing political party, even an allied one.\u00a0 The order was easier to give than follow; while rank-and-file Social Democrats were excluded from the government, a true purge would have left the Republic without any experienced leadership.\u00a0 Most of the Republic’s first commissars were former Social Democrats, including the president, S\u00e1ndor Garbai.\u00a0 Ultimately, it could be argued the former Social Democrats were a fig leaf covering the fact that control of the government was in the hands of Kun (who technically only held the post of Foreign Minister) and other communists who had travelled with him from Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What few could have foreseen was that the new Communist government initially had decent support among the nation’s former royalists and nationalists.\u00a0 While the government’s domestic policies of nationalization alienated anyone not already politically allied with them, Kun’s declaration that Hungary would reclaim her original borders, coupled with the nation’s rearmament, were welcome changes from K\u00e1rolyi’s seemingly effete governance.\u00a0 Former Hungarian officers and soldiers flooded the ranks of the new Red Guard and when Kun’s Soviet Republic reached a stalemate in negotiations with the Allies in late May after another round of demands for the nation to cede territory, Hungary attacked.<\/p>\n

In June of 1919, the Hungarian army crushed the Czechoslovak units in Upper Hungary, successfully cutting off the Czechs from their Romanian and French allies.\u00a0 Large tracts of modern Slovakia would be liberated by this new Red Army and it appeared that Kun had kept his promise to restore Hungary to it’s prominence.\u00a0 The goodwill was short-lived.\u00a0 Kun and his allies proclaimed a Slovak Soviet Republic in the new territory.\u00a0 The government had already begun dropping the use of “Hungarian” in it’s title of Hungarian Soviet Republic, and had unleashed a wave of violence in the rural countryside that would be known as the “Red Terror” as the communists tortured or executed anyone who opposed them.\u00a0 Kun and the Moscow-backed revolutionaries had no allegiance to Hungary; this was revolution for revolution’s sake and the exodus of officers and trained soldiers quickly left the Red Guards as little more than a disorganized paramilitary group with heavy weapons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kun speaks to a group of supporters – Kun tried to balance telling the Hungarian masses that he supported reuniting the empire while downplaying such rhetoric to Moscow who worried he was more of a nationalist than Communist<\/p><\/div>\n

What remained of the Hungarian Red Army was quickly defeated by the Romanians.\u00a0 Like the rest of Europe, Romania was the in process of settling her new borders and had fought a small-scale war with the Russian Soviets over Bessarabia.\u00a0 The Romanians weren’t interested in being boxed in by aggressive communist governments to their east and west and went on the offensive against Kun’s regime.\u00a0 By late July, the writing was on the wall as the Romanians approached Budapest.\u00a0 Kun and his supporters fled the country, looting the National Bank and numerous works of art as they fled to Austria.\u00a0 The “White Hungarian” resistance government of Admiral Mikl\u00f3s Horthy, backed by the French, would claim authority shortly thereafter, bringing a much more conservative government to the Allies’ liking to power.\u00a0 It would also usher in an era of “White Terror” that executed most of the leadership and sympathizers of the Soviet Republic.<\/p>\n

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The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted for barely a blip in time, and despite the fears and potential it brought about on both sides of the communist\/democratic divide, it also revealed how little either side was truly willing to risk to either advance or contain communism in the aftermath of the Great War.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1919, it would have appeared that communism was about to run rampant across eastern and central Europe, between the military victories of the Russians, the abortive German revolution and successful Hungarian one.\u00a0 Yet Lenin and the Russians were seemingly of two-minds on whether to encourage or discourage their revolutionary brethren.\u00a0 They gave Kun the tools necessary to foment a revolution but then backed away once he gained power.\u00a0 They’d repeat this cycle in the future with Kun again, dispatching him to Germany to advise the Communist Party there only to recall him when he actually encouraged another attempted violent revolution in 1921.\u00a0 The Western Allies weren’t really any better – despite the rise of another communist government in central Europe, and one that was actively marching (and winning) to advance the cause of Bolshevism, the Allies couldn’t be bothered to muster forces to stop the Hungarians.\u00a0 Even after the defeat of the Czechoslovaks, the large French and Serbian armies to Hungary’s south did nothing, outsourcing the campaign to the Romanians.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mikl\u00f3s Horthy – the regent of Hungary; Horthy would draw Hungary closer to Nazi Germany in the inter-war period as American journalists claimed the nation was “the jackal of Europe.”\u00a0 In 1944, Horthy would first halt deportations of Hungarian Jews and then switch sides, joining the Allies<\/p><\/div>\n

For all the talk of revolution, Europe was simply exhausted.\u00a0 Not enough leaders or even ordinary citizens were that interested in spilling more blood, whether it was to overthrow or preserve the current system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first President of Hungary, Mih\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi, had been forced to swallow many bitter pills in his short time in office.\u00a0 The last appointed Hungarian Prime Minister by Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles I, K\u00e1rolyi had ushered the relative bloodless Astar Revolution (with a couple of notable exceptions) and Hungary’s full independence.\u00a0 In short order, K\u00e1rolyi watched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,281],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-ringer","category-ww1-fact-and-myth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80500"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82234,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80500\/revisions\/82234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}