13: The Red and the White
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Destiny granted undeservedly to Francis Joseph I that the ruins of the Monarchy would
not bury him. In 1916 he moved down into the crypt of the Viennese Capuchins, next to his
wife and son. He did not outlive his third heir-apparent, another nephew of his, Charles
(I as Austrian emperor, IV as Hungarian king). But this was of hardly any significance by
now. Charles could have even been a genius -which he was not everyone everywhere was fed
up with the Habsburgs. And the need for a monarch was experienced only in those countries
in the region, like Rumania and Yugoslavia, which felt the need for this traditional
requisite to national legitimacy between their new state boundaries because they were
still not nations and awaited establishment.
A revolutionary wave naturally followed the loss of the war, which led to such
extensive loss of life and property that society, and not just the political system, was
affected. (One of the first victims was Count István Tisza; assassins gunned him down.)
Nevertheless, the Hungarian revolution maintained proper order, at least to the extent
that at the outset (in October 1918), Hungary was "merely" a bourgeois
democracy. Its leader, Count Mihály Károlyi -from the branch of the Károlyi family that
we already know from the events of 1711- was a radical left-wing aristocrat who himself
was soon to distribute his estate among the landless. But while the confidence in the
Károlyi government at home was not slight, it had to cope with gigantic tasks. The
ragged, bitter soldiers streaming home from the collapsed fronts encountered people sunk
in misery at home; nearly every family was mourning someone lost in the war or waiting for
a prisoner of war to return. The radical changes in Russia had won over many of the
prisoners, and thousands and thousands of them still remained in Russia, voluntarily
fighting alongside the Red Army of the young Soviet state on the battlefields of the civil
war.
Károlyi would have liked to see a democratic and constitutional evolution to take
place, and, meanwhile, he himself also gradually shifted to the left; but his temperament
was too weak for the post of "trusteeship in bankruptcy" that he inevitably had
to fill at the head of the nation. He carried out the act of dethronement and became
President of the Republic in January 1919. Though no peace treaty had been concluded, the
armies of the "successor states" pressed forward to the lines of demarcation
that Trianon largely sanctioned later. Then they marched on. The Entente's local
emissaries and the distant central bodies were firm, but only with the Hungarians, who in
their eyes unambiguously signified that defeated side which they did not believe capable,
after achieving independence, of true revival, of breaking out of the shadows of a past
tying it to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On the other hand, they did not act with
sufficient firmness in dealing with the states of the later Little Entente. (An exception
was the clash between Rumanians and Serbians in the south, in the Bácska region, over a
contested -and till then Hungarian- strip of land. On this occasion, a French force
separated them. The result of this incident was that Szeged and its environs also came
under the occupation of French colonial -Senegalese- troops...
The growing pressure from the left and the threatening and indeed the ensuing loss of
territory undermined the Károlyi regime. The communists led by Béla Kun, uniting their
party with that of the social democrats, forced Károlyi to resign. The Hungarian Soviet
Republic came into being on March 21, 1919, with a bloodless assumption of power. It
lasted for 134 days.
Today, it is possible to analyze calmly the kind of errors rooted in objective and
subjective causes that Kun -who was later one of the leaders of the Comintern in Moscow,
who wrestled arduously with the idea of the People's Front, and who, in the end, was a
victim of Stalin's despotism- committed on the way after the seizure of power and its
organization, which began with not inconsiderable success, when Soviet Hungary linked
itself so quickly and buoyantly to the trend of world revolution which the war created and
which, at the time, augured much wider expansion. Instead of distributing land, he
nationalized the large estates and thus, by giving priority to supplying the cities and by
issuing compulsory requisitions for food products, he alienated the peasant masses; the
measures taken against the actions of the opposition, the counterrevolution, were
inconsistent; the broad view impairing the revolution's trustworthiness alternated with
compulsory measures that appalled the middle classes, and so on. All this is true.
However, this is not the issue. The Hungarian Soviet Republic; then and there, did not
have a chance. Not a chance from the moment it became evident that the hoped-for,
swift-moving world revolution had come to an abrupt halt at its very inception (the third
revolutionary experiment of the Soviet type, the Bavarian, was even more fragile than the
Hungarian), and that the Soviet Red Army could not break through on the Ukrainian front
into the Carpathians to provide the assistance that Béla Kun and his supporters
requested.
Yet the beginning was encouraging. Within days a Hungarian Red Army came into existence
that included young workers rallying to the call-to-arms and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder
against the Rumanians in the east and the Czech interventionists in the north, as well as
professional and reserve veteran soldiers who were ready to enter battle under flags of
any color to preserve the integrity of the country. The two most outstanding leaders of
these armed forces were Jenö Landler, a Socialist and then a Communist lawyer, a former
anti-militarist and antiwar strike leader, and Aurél Stromfeld, an elite member of the
Monarchy's army staff. But the Entente, which if it did not trust Károlyi and his
entourage, trusted Kun and his associates even less, rendered ineffective successively
everything that had been achieved by military means.
And that ever-growing group of politicians and soldiers who saw the white and not the
red as Hungary's future color organized in Vienna and assembled in Szeged. The Entente
looked upon them with suspicion, too, but considered them by far the lesser evil. A
conservative, maybe a slightly liberal restoration but strictly without the Habsburgs
-this sounded much more acceptable to influential French, English, and Italian political
circles than an "experimental" workers' state.
The legacy that forced Károlyi to capitulate to the Communists also swept Kun and
company away. There was no power that could reconcile Hungarian public opinion to the loss
of territory which the nation had already suffered and which still threatened it. In
August 1919, a Social Democratic government took shape for a few days. A large band of
leaders of the Soviet Republic fled to Vienna by train.
Wearing the feather of the white crane on their field caps, detachments of commissioned
and non-commissioned officers quickly headed from Szeged in two prongs toward Budapest,
which, meanwhile, had been occupied by Rumanian troops -under the Entente's authority. A
brutal sequel followed the reprisals upon which the military forces of the by-then royal
Rumania had already embarked. Executions, torture, corporal punishment, and anti-Jewish
pogroms marked the detachment's passage to the "sinful" capital, the main seat
of the Hungarian Bolsheviks.
The gray eminence of the white turn-about was Count István Bethlen, the owner of a
vast estate in Transylvania. However, a soldier was needed as a leader. Why was it that
among the countless commissioned officers it was a sailor, Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy of
Nagybánya -the long-time aide-de-camp of Francis Joseph I and the commander-in-chief of
the Austro-Hungarian battle fleet at the end of the war -who came to the forefront? He was
senior in rank among the officers assembled in Szeged. In 1918, he displayed determination
following the sailors' revolt at Cattaro (Kotor). He was the descendant of a pure-blooded
Hungarian medium landowning family; he could not, it is true, really boast about
possessing any outstanding abilities, and he spoke Hungarian poorly, and was a
Calvinist... If only he would have arrived aboard a gunboat on the Danube! But, attired in
a dark-blue sailor's dress cape, he entered Budapest on a white horse at the head of his
detachments in November 1919. And thus began that period when Hungary was a kingdom
without a king, and its ruler a sailor, even though the country had no outlet to the sea.
However, the Entente accepted this strange situation, in fact supported it. It withdrew
the Little Entente's and its own forces, naturally only from between the borders drawn in
Trianon. Thus further dismemberment of the country was averted, and if it did remain
somewhat restricted, its national sovereignty was restored.
However, when we examine the new borders, two of their characteristic features emerge:
-1. Several million Hungarians remained outside the nation's borders. Some of them were
inseparably melded with other nationalities, but immediately on the other side of its
borders were found regions made up entirely or almost entirely of Hungarians with which
large numbers of non- Hungarian inhabitants would not have been turned over to Hungary.
-2. The new boundary lines practically crippled several areas. Many Hungarian cities
close to the border but more of them beyond it in the successor states were stripped of a
substantial part of their gravitational centers and economic and population bases;
consequently, they were either sentenced to slow decline or condemned to a forced and
therefore costly development. For example, several railway lines ended up a stone's throw
from the Hungarian border; thus, they were lost to us, but, on the other hand, they could
not really be utilized on the other side along the edge of the successor state either.
Though Karl Marx employed this phrase in relation to Czarist Russia, the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was once also called the "peoples' prison". Sometimes
it really deserved this name. However, what replaced it became some kind of "peoples'
co-tenancy", a compulsory temporary accommodation which, with requisite goodwill and
compromises, could have been equipped with every modern convenience. Instead, the former
"prison inmates", nursing grudges against each other, ruined the jointly used
furnishings so that nothing would remain for the other party. A real catastrophe resulted.
Rivalry over the ruins of the Monarchy and mutual suspicion and hatred muddled human
contact and severed the most rational regional economic relations (exchange of
commodities, transport, public health, etc.). Every small state in East Central Europe
aspired to national self-sufficiency, though their production structure supplemented each
other's very closely -it was precisely this that supplied the economic setting that made
it possible to hold together somehow an otherwise most heterogeneous Monarchy!
-furthermore, these states were forced into and shipped to distant and costlier markets.
(It was at this time, for example, that the Hungarian flour-milling industry collapsed.)
The following is not an evasion but an explanation of the fact that the chief and, at
times, the only rallying cry heard during the quarter century of the Horthy period
concerned the enlargement of the country, rectification of its borders: "Dismembered
Hungary is not a country, undivided Hungary is heaven." But if national borders had
followed the true ethnic borders more closely, then who would have actually listened to
Hungarians with large estates who employed only non-Hungarian field hands on lands that
had ended up in a foreign state? Thus again, the harsh illogic of the borders rendered the
grievance nationwide. Those who resettled so that they could remain within Hungary's
borders only enhanced the prevailing mood -they were predominantly state officials and
people in the middle levels- and they were obliged to live for years in rail cars pushed
onto the side rails of shunting depots.
From the very first moment, Horthy and his White Army made efforts to revise the
borders. The sole, small success, as it happened, was achieved in the west. The city of
Sopron and its environs had been awarded to Burgenland, Austria. But a guerilla-like
assault forced the weak Austrian troops to flee, and later it became possible to put the
question of the region's future to a local referendum. Sopron remained Hungarian, and thus
gained the name of City of Loyalty. But this action attracted attention not so much
because it succeeded but because it typified how much the peace treaty failed to establish
future political security and, instead, meted out punishment for the past. In what way?
Even if we consider ridiculous the fact that the former national territory of Hungary had
also been mutilated for Austria's benefit, that does not wash away the enormous
responsibility of Hungarians for World War I. Though a significant segment of the
inhabitants of Sopron and its vicinity was German-speaking, the majority of them were not,
however. And at the time of the plebiscite, even a part of these favored belonging to
Hungary.
Horthy had to tack about. The detachments that had raised him to the peak of power with
such strong, bloody hands became too much for him. Their brutality and independence
compromised him in the eyes of the Entente and the European bankers and even the citizens
and capitalists indispensable to the consolidation of Hungary. Horthy was a military man,
but he did not want to establish a junta. He would not share power. Not even with a king.
Seemingly, or according to his statements -he never stopped emphasizing this- he was
faithful to the oath that bound him to the Habsburg throne. He proved this by legally
reestablishing the institution of royalty. But why did he not go further? A significant
proportion of his military and political base wanted him to do so. So much so, that
Charles, who, driven from the country, had fled to Switzerland, twice entered the country
at summons from the monarchists and with their complicity, claiming the throne lawfully
for himself. His second attempt was noteworthy on account of the fact that it was,
perhaps, the first hijacking of an airplane in the world: loyal supporters, former pilots,
stole a plane and conveyed him to Hungarian soil from Switzerland: a daring air feat at
the time.
At the head of an army joining him in Transdanubia, Charles IV reached the city limits
of Budapest, where Horthy stopped him with a small army consisting, in part, of hastily
armed university students. The Entente unanimously supported Horthy, and an English war
vessel coming up the Danube took the captured Charles IV aboard and carried him into exile
on the Island of Madeira. (He soon died. His son, Otto, is today a well-known political
personality, as a citizen in Western Europe.)
Foreign countries had to be pacified once and for all-and also runaway inflation at
home. Count István Bethlen was the unruffled father of the consolidation. Count Pál
Teleki was the first prime minister -he, too, was an owner of a large estate in
Transylvania, and otherwise an important geographer who was chiefly an authority on ethnic
groups and economic geography; as such he participated, by invitation, in the first
demarcation of the state borders of modern Iraq in 1924-25. Then Bethlen himself became
the head of the government.
In the mid-1920s, Hungary was a bourgeois state living in relative peace, with a
functioning parliament. The Communist Party was illegal. The Social Democratic Party, in
order to be able to function in the cities and among the workers, renounced, in a pact,
agitation among the majority agrarian population. The nation's social structure contained
numerous obsolete accessories and irritating features; these were distributing factors,
but they did not obstruct some modernization in the spirit of conservatism and liberalism.
Public education and public health improved and there were many technical courses offered
in the villages; an extensive network of marketing cooperatives developed under the name
of Hangya (Ant).
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