Background
Bela Kun was born on February 20, 1886 in Transylvania (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Son of a minor official.
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Revolutionary secret police official
Bela Kun was born on February 20, 1886 in Transylvania (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Son of a minor official.
Educated at a secondary school in Cluj (now Rumania).
He joined the Hungarian Social Democratic party in 1902, working first as a journalist and then as a clerk, and later manager, with the Kolozsvar Workers’ Insurance Fund. He was discharged from this job for misconduct.
Kun joined the army in 1914 and was captured by the Russians in 1916. In Russia, he encountered Bolsheviks and helped them organize the revolutionary movement among prisoners of war in the Tomsk camp. Having joined the Bolshevik party before the October revolution, he met Lenin at Saint Petersburg (Petrograd) in 1917. From March 1918 Kun was leader of the Hungarian group in the Russian Communist party and edited its newspaper.
From May he was chairman of the International Federation of Socialist POWs, participated in the victory over the Moscow counter-revolutionaries, fought on the Perm front, and organized the international units of the Red Army. In November 1918 Kun returned to Hungary, founded the Hungarian Communist party and its organ Voeroes Ujsag (“Red Newspaper”), and wrote pamphlets. His fiery speeches led to his arrest and he was badly beaten by the police in February 1919. However, he continued to direct the preparations for the proletarian revolution from jail, and elaborated a scheme to unite the Social Democratic and Communist parties. He was liberated from prison on 21 March 1919, the day the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed and was immediately appointed Commissar for foreign and military affairs, that is, virtual leader of the government.
Calling his regime the dictatorship of the proletariat, Kun nationalized banks, large businesses, and estates. Ruthlessly suppressing opposition, he eliminated moderate elements in the government and exploited the wave of popular nationalism that had swept the country. He promised to obtain Soviet help in fighting the Romanians and created a Red Army that reconquered territory that had been lost to the Czechs and Romanians, and overran Slovakia. However, the reaction to his regime came quickly. The Soviet help failed to arrive. The peasants were alienated by the decision that private estates should be nationalized rather than distributed among them. Food distribution broke down. And after initial successes, the army refused to fight leading to its defeat at the hands of the Romanians.
Within a few months the proletarian dictatorship fell and Kun emigrated to Austria, where he was taken into custody and held for a short time in an insane asylum. He then went to the Soviet Union, where he was elected an executive member at the Third Congress of the Communist International, serving from 1921 to 1936. In connection with this work, he returned to Vienna illegally in 1928, was discovered, jailed, and then sent back to Russia. He was also active in strengthening several other Communist parties. One of Klin’s greatest errors was that he failed to recognize the menace of rising fascism for the Communist parties and the changes this circumstance brought about. He was arrested in 1937. during the Stalinist purges, accused of Trotskyism and was executed.
Kun played a leading role in the reorganization of the Hungarian Communist party.
Religion divides people, and is a cause of numerous wars and conflicts throughout the human history.
The emphasis on peaceful coexistence doesn’t mean that the Soviet Union accepted a static world with clear lines. Socialism is inevitable and the "correlations of forces" were moving towards socialism.
Communist Party member from 1916.
