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