Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo,
2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la
crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as
part of: José Carlos Mariátegui,
History of the World Crisis and Other
Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN
978-0-692-88676-2.
Tonight, we again take up our conversations on the history of the world crisis, which were interrupted by three weeks of vacation. We arrive today, at an intensely dramatic chapter in the history of the world crisis. The program for this course of lectures gives us the topic: The Hungarian Revolution. Count Karolyi. Bela Kun. Horthy.
These three names – Karoly, Bela Kun, Horthy – summarize the phases of the Hungarian Revolution: the insurrectional and democratic phase; the communist and proletarian phase; the reactionary and terroristic phase. Karolyi was the man of the Hungarian insurrection; Bela Kun was the man of the proletarian revolution; Horthy is the man of the bourgeois reaction, of the white terror and brutal and truculent repression of the proletariat.
Here, where the Russian Revolution is poorly known, even less is known of the Hungarian Revolution, which is understandable. The story of the Russian revolution is the story of a victorious revolution, while the story of the Hungarian Revolution is, so far, the story of a defeated revolution. The cable has not stopped telling us chilling things about the Russian Revolution and its people, but it has told us almost nothing of the Hungarian reaction and its people. And, the good bourgeois, so concerned about the red terror, the Russian terror, are not concerned at all by the white terror, by Horthy’s dictatorship in Hungary; nonetheless, there is nothing bloodier, nothing more tragic, than this somber and medieval period in Hungarian life. None of the crimes imputed to the Russian revolution can compare to the crimes committed by the bourgeois reaction in Hungary.
Let’s look at the three phases of the Hungarian Revolution, in order.
I have already explained the processes of the German Revolution and of the Austrian Revolution. Well, the process of the Hungarian Revolution is, in broad strokes, the same. But it always has something characteristic, something particularly its own. Aside from the tiredness, the fatigue, the discontent with the war, the Hungarian Revolution was prepared by the longing for national independence, suddenly awakened, excited, and stimulated by the Wilsonian propaganda. Wilson roused peoples against autocracy and against absolutism, and, at the same time, roused them against the foreign yoke.
Hungary, as you know, endured domination by the Austrian dynasty of the Hapsburgs. The Hungarians, different in race, language, and history, from the Austrians, did not voluntarily coexist with the Austrians within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, the defeat brought not only revolution to Austro-Hungary, it also brought about dissolution. The nationalities which made up the Austro-Hungarian Empire became independent and they separated. Naturally, the victorious powers stimulated this break-up of Austro-Hungary into several small states.
As I have already stated on another occasion, the Austrian front was weakened before the German front precisely because of the separatist ideals of the nationalities which were part of Austro-Hungary and, therefore, the Austrian military front gave sooner than the German military front. Faced with the Italians’ victorious offensive in the Piave, the Czechoslovak soldiers and the Hungarian soldiers, tired of the war, spontaneously threw down their weapons and refused to keep on fighting. This happened in the latter part of October of 1918.
The front-line troops’ rebellion against the war spread quickly to the entire Hungarian army. Thus began the Hungarian Revolution, which was – like the German Revolution – at first, a general strike by a defeated army, to use Walther Rathenau’s words. Like the German Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution began with the military insurrection, but in Hungary this military insurrection was not immediately followed by a proletarian insurrection. The proletarian movement was still too immature, too incipient. The Hungarian proletariat still lacked a solid revolutionary class consciousness. Count Mihály Karolyi headed the first revolutionary government. That government, which emerged from the October 31st insurrection, was a government of the radical bourgeoisie in coalition with Social-Democracy.
Count Karolyi was, in a way, the Hungarian Revolution’s Kerensky. But he was a less sectarian, more revolutionary, more interesting, more suggestive, Kerensky. Count Karolyi was an old agitator for Hungarian nationalism; a radical agitator, coming from the Hungarian aristocracy but infected with the social-democratic mentality of his time; an agitator with a romantic temperament, easily inflamed, capable of any bizarre lunacy, and exempt from the mediocre Kerensky’s democratic and bourgeois superstitions.
The mental and spiritual distance that separates the two figures is clearer and more evident after their governments than during. While Kerensky has not stopped turning to the Russian capitalists and even toward the monarchists, Karolyi has, with each passing day, evolved further to the left; so much so that about two years ago he was expelled from Italy, accused of being a Bolshevik agent. I had the opportunity to meet him in Florence in 1921. Two and a half years ago. It was on the eve of the famous Socialist Congress of Livorno, at which the Italian Socialist Party would break apart.
César Falcón and I awaited the opening date of the Congress in Florence, which is no more than four hours from Livorno. We filled our time visiting Florence’s museums, palaces, and churches. I already knew Florence perfectly. I served, therefore, as guide to Falcón who was visiting it for the first time.
One day a journalist friend let us know that Count Karolyi was living incognito at a Florence boarding house. Naturally, we immediately resolved to seek him out; but the moment was not a good one for establishing relations with the Hungarian ex-President. The newsmen had just discovered his undercover presence in Florence and besieged him in order to report on him. Consequently, Count Karolyi avoided interviews from strangers. Nonetheless, Falcón and I managed to speak with him. We chatted extensively about the European situation in general and about the Hungarian situation in particular. In those days, five Hungarian communists – Agosto, Nyisz, Sgabado, Bolsamgi, and Kalmar – people’s commissars in Bela Kun’s government had been sentenced to death by Horthy’s government. Karolyi was deeply concerned by this news and, since his anonymity had been violated by several journalists, he decided to definitively renounce it in order to start an international public opinion campaign in favor of the former Hungarian people’s commissars who were condemned to death.
He took advantage of all reports on him to ask for intervention by the honest spirits of Europe in defense of those noble and heroic lives. He asked Falcón and I to act in this regard upon Spanish journalists.
In short, at that time, Karolyi made common cause with the Hungarian communists, in the same way that Kerensky made common cause with the Russian capitalists and even monarchists.
That anecdote helps to define, to establish, Karolyi’s personality and that is why I have included it in my dissertation. But let us now return to the story of the Revolution, in order. Let’s examine Karolyi’s precarious government.
The dissimilarity, the moral difference, between each leader notwithstanding, more or less the same thing happened to Karolyi’s government in Hungary as happened to Kerenky’s government in Russia. It did not represent the ideals and interests of capitalism, nor did it represent the ideals and interests of the proletariat.
The soldiers, back from the front and the war, wanted a bit of land. The widows and orphans of the fallen and the crippled demanded financial relief from the state. Karolyi’s government could not satisfy either demand because it would be possible to meet them only at the expense of the bourgeoisie, at the expense of capitalism. However, these unfulfilled demands grew more desperate by the day.
The Hungarian proletariat was gaining a revolutionary consciousness. Here and there, factory councils sprang up. The proletariat’s left wing broke with the collaborationist social democrats and formed a Communist Party led by Bela Kun. Like the German Spartacists, this Communist Party advocated carrying out the maximum program.
Some factories were taken over by workers. Of course, this mounting revolutionary wave alarmed the reactionary elements to an extreme degree. Capitalism sensed that private ownership of lands and factories was threatened, and quickly and actively organized the reaction. The nobles, the landlords, the military chiefs – the extreme right, in other words – prepared to overthrow Karolyi’s weak government, which neither pleased the proletarian masses nor adequately guaranteed capitalism’s safety.
At the same time, the international situation also conspired against Karolyi’s government. Those were the days of the armistice and the birth of peace. The Allied powers were opposed to the creation of a strong Hungary, or rather, were interested in Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and Czechoslovakia, on the other, growing in territory at Hungary’s expense.
The nationalist elements demanded from Karolyi a policy of energetically pressing claims. Each loss of ground by Karolyi in the international arena, also meant a loss of ground in the terrain of internal politics.
And a fatal day arrived for Karolyi’s government. The Allied governments notified him, by way of Lieutenant Colonel Vyx, that Hungary’s borders at that moment ought to be considered permanent. For Hungary those borders meant the loss of enormous tracts. Karolyi could not submit to these conditions. If he had, a chauvinist revolt would have brought him down within a few days. Therefore, he had no other option than to resign, to step down from power, which was immediately seized by the proletariat.
Karolyi has been often accused of handing the government over to the working class. In truth, however, events were greater than Karolyi’s will and any other individual will. The reactionary wave, from one side, and the revolutionary wave, from the other, both threatened Karolyi’s government, which was consequently, doomed to disappear swallowed by one side or the other. The reaction and the revolution both prepared for the assault at the same time, and, well, it was the revolution’s hour. Having been opened by Karolyi, the revolutionary period had to reach its maximum height, to reach fullness, before starting to decline, and when Karolyi resigned the proletariat hurried to take power into its own hands in order to prevent its being seized by the most backward noble and bourgeois reaction.
Thus, Bela Kun’s government came about. On March 21st, 1919, or more or less five months after the constitution of Karolyi’s government, the Revolutionary Government Council was formed, which declared Hungary a Soviet Republic.
Communists and social-democrats took part in creating this revolutionary government, and this is the sign which sets the Hungarian communist revolution apart from the Russian communist revolution. In Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat was taken up exclusively by the maximalist party, with the benevolent neutrality of the Left Social-Revolutionaries, but with the Right Social-Revolutionaries’ and the Mensheviks’ opposition. In Hungary, by contrast, the dictatorship of the proletariat was exercised by communists and social-democrats jointly. Apparently, this gave the Hungarian workers’ government strength as, by virtue of the agreement between communists and social-democrats, that workers’ government represented the whole of the proletariat. The whole, plus one: all the great proletarian tendencies in power. However, this was also the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s weakness.
The Social Democratic Party lacked sufficient revolutionary consciousness. Its leading body was made up of reformist elements, mentally and spiritually averse to maximalism. These elements came from the union bureaucracy. They were old union organizers, grown old in the minimalist and contingent action of union life, superstitiously respectful of the bourgeoisie’s strength, and deprived of the capacity and will to work in solidarity with the maximalists, whom they dismissed as young, inexperienced, and extremist. Why then, did the Hungarian Social-Democrats cooperate with, and decisively participate in the revolution? The explanation lies in Hungary’s political situation under Karolyi’s government, which I have described earlier.
Karolyi’s government, in which the Social-Democrats participated, was doomed to fall under the wheels of the revolution or the reaction. The Social-Democrats found themselves, then, having to choose between the communist revolution and the feudal and aristocratic reaction. Of course, they had to opt for the communist revolution. Also, they had to hasten it in order to eliminate the danger of the reaction gaining time.
When Karolyi resigned, the leadership of the Communist Party was in jail. The Social-Democrats and the communist leaders negotiated and agreed amongst themselves, but the former from the seat of power and the latter from prison. Around the communist leaders were the majority of the masses, committed to revolution. The Social-Democrats did not, therefore, give in in the face of the communist leaders; they gave in in the face of the majority of the proletariat. Their capitulation was, on the face of it, complete. The Social-Democrats agreed to the carrying out of the communist program in its entirety. But they agreed without conviction, without faith, without true moral or mental adherence to it. They accepted it constrained, pushed, pressed upon, by the circumstances. In exchange for their adherence to the communists’ program they demanded only the right to participate in carrying it out.
They told the communists, “We accept your program, but we want to take part in the government destined to execute it.” It was a logical demand. It was a natural demand, and it was a legitimate demand. The communists agreed to it. That was their first mistake, because, by virtue of the character of the social democratic-communist alliance, Hungary’s soviet government turned out to be a hybrid government, a mixed government, a compounded government. This workers’ government’s program was of a single hue, but the men charged with carrying it out were of two different hues. One part of the government truly wanted to carry out the program and sensed its historical necessity. Another part of the government did not intimately believe in the possibility of bringing about that program; it had accepted it with clenched teeth, without optimism, and without confidence. The Social-Democrats, in their majority, saw in the wider European revolution the only hope of salvation for the Hungarian proletarian revolution. They lacked the intellectual and spiritual preparation to defend the Hungarian proletarian revolution, even in the event that the proletariat of the great European powers not respond to the call, to urging from the Russian Revolution. This is the spiritual cause, the moral cause, for the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary.
In spite of the Social-Democrats’ quiet sabotage, in its brief months of existence Bela Kun’s government developed the proletariat’s economic and social program to a great extent. It proceeded to the expropriation of the latifundia and country estates, of the means of production and industrial establishments. The latifundia and the landed estates, the old property of the Hungarian aristocracy, were given to the peasants, organized into production co-operatives. At the same time, the war’s victims – whose demands could not be met by a Karolyi government hindered by its views and respect for the capitalist order – were solicitously tended to. The invalid, the mutilated, the widows, orphans, and the unemployed were succored. The luxury sanatoriums were turned into hospitals for the people. The aristocrats’ palaces, castles, and chalets were turned to the lodging of the invalid, of the aged, or of sick proletarian children. Simultaneously, public education and general culture were reorganized revolutionarily, on a class basis, in order turn them into instruments of socialist education, and so that culture, technical ability – once the exclusive patrimony of the bourgeoisie – would be socialized for the proletariat’s benefit.
But, against Bela Kun’s government there conspired, on the one hand, the Social-Democrats’ skepticism and resistance, and on the other, the ploys of the victorious powers. The capitalist powers saw in Soviet Hungary a dangerous focus for the spread of the communist idea, and they took pains to eliminate it, pushing the neighboring nations – placed under tutelage of the victorious Entente – against the Hungarian Republic.
Meanwhile, the Social-Democrats limited and blocked the government’s measures against the reactionary preparations and plots. Ensconced in their democratic and liberal prejudices, in their superstition of freedom, they did not allow the government to suspend individual liberties for the aristocrats, bourgeois, and conspiratorial military men. Bela Kun’s Minister of Justice was a Social Democrat; a Social Democrat who seemed more worried about protecting the freedom of counterrevolutionary elements than about defending the revolution’s existence.
The Hungarian Revolution was, thus, attacked on two fronts: the external front and the internal front. Externally, it was threatened by the counterrevolutionary intervention of the Allied powers, who economically blockaded Hungary in order to besiege it with hunger. Internally, it was threatened by Social Democracy’s unpreparedness for revolution, by the inconstancy of one of the bases, of one of the fundamental supports of the Revolution, of one of the two governing parties.
It was under these conditions that Bela Kun’s government, which was inaugurated on the 21st of March, reached the middle of April. It was toward mid-April that Romania – one of the Entente’s pawns in this great political match – invaded Hungary. The Romanian troops took hold of Hungary’s best agricultural zone, and they advanced as far as the Tisza River, threatening Budapest. Almost simultaneously, the Czechs also moved against the Hungarian Republic.
The Czech army penetrated Hungarian territory, reaching as far as a mere seventy or eighty kilometers from Budapest. It was a critical moment. On the 2nd of May, Bela Kun explained the situation in a dramatic session of the Budapest Workers’ Council. He posed the following question: Was it preferable to organize resistance or was it preferable to surrender to the Allied powers? Many Social-Democrats spoke in favor of the latter idea, but the Workers’ Council stuck by Bela Kun’s thesis. It was necessary to resist to the very end. There could be but the Revolution’s complete victory or its complete defeat. No middle ground was possible. To give in to the capitalist powers was to give up entirely on the Revolution and its conquests. The Workers’ Council voted for resistance at all costs, and the government got to work. The workers of Budapest’s factories, the vanguard of the Hungarian proletariat, constituted a great red army which stopped the Romanians’ offensive and inflicted a total defeat upon the Czechoslovakians. The Hungarian revolutionaries penetrated into Czechoslovakia, occupying a large portion of the Czech territory. The moment was turning critical for the Allied offensive against Soviet Hungary. Revolutionary seeds were spreading within the Czech army.
The astute capitalist diplomacy then changed tactics. The Allied powers invited Hungary to withdraw the red army from Czech territory, offering the withdrawal of the Romanian army from occupied territory beyond the Tisza River as compensation. The Social-Democrats spoke out in favor of accepting this proposal and took advantage of the unpopularity of the war’s prosecution in the hearts of the proletariat, worn down after five years of war-related travails. The communists were unable to energetically counteract this propaganda. The Communist Party’s most numerous and combative elements were absent from Budapest, having voluntarily enrolled in the red army. The vanguard of the Budapest proletariat was at the front, battling against the Revolution’s external enemies. Under the influence of Budapest’s social-democratic atmosphere, the government and the Council of Soviets thus ended up leaning toward the Allied proposal. The red army, unhappy and depressed in its will to fight, withdrew from Czechoslovakia, but, its sacrifice was for naught, as the Allied powers did not, for their part, keep their agreement. The Romanians did not withdraw from Hungarian territory.
This disappointment, this failure, greatly disheartened the Hungarian proletariat, whose revolutionary faith was sapped, on the other hand, by the defeatist propaganda of the Social-Democrats, who began to secretly work out a negotiated solution with diplomatic representatives from the Allied powers. The reaction, in the meantime, prepared to seize power. On the 24th of June, reactionary elements, joined by three hundred students from the former military academy, took control of the monitors on the Danube. This sedition was put down, but the revolutionary tribunals treated the rebels with excessive generosity. The three hundred rebel student officers were pardoned. Thirteen instigators and organizers of the insurrection were sentenced to death, but, yielding to pressure from the Allied diplomatic missions, they ended up pardoning them as well.
The communist regime, in the meantime, kept on struggling against enormous difficulties. Provisions were scarce due, on the one hand, to the blockade, and on the other, to the Romanian occupation of the Tisza’s fertile agricultural region. The available foodstuffs were not enough to supply the entire population. This scarcity contributed to an air of discontent and distrust toward the communist regime. Bela Kun’s government then decided to attempt an offensive against the Romanians in order to dislodge them from the lands beyond the Tisza, but this offensive, begun on July 20th, did not succeed. The red army, disheartened by so many disappointments, was repulsed and defeated by the Romanian army. This military setback condemned the communist regime to death.
The social-democratic and union leaders entered into formal peace talks with Allied diplomatic missions. These missions promised recognition for a social-democratic government. In sum, they put the elimination of the communists and the destruction of their work as the price of peace.
The Social-Democratic Party and the unions – with the illusion that a social-democratic government, protected by the Allied diplomatic missions, could hold on to power – accepted the Entente’s conditions. Thus, Bela Kun’s government fell.
On August 2nd, the Council of Peoples’ Commissars abdicated command. It was replaced by a social-democratic government. In order to please and satisfy the Allied powers, this social-democratic government repealed the communist government’s laws. It reestablished private property of factories, latifundia, and landed estates. It reestablished freedom of trade and returned the bourgeois administration’s functionaries and employees to their posts. In short, it reestablished the capitalist order. But, with all that, this social-democratic government lasted but three days. With the defeat of the Revolution, power inevitably had to fall into the reaction’s hands, and it did. The social-democratic government lasted but the time necessary for the abolition of communist legislation and for the aristocracy, militarism, and capitalism to organize the seizure of power.
The Social-Democrats were unable to resist the reactionary wave. From its first moment of life, since it undertook the destruction of the revolution’s work, they could not even count on the democratic government’s disabused masses. They had to fall at the reactionary’s first onslaught.
Thus, the communist regime in Hungary came to an end. Thus, the reactionary regime of Admiral Horthy was born. Thus began the Hungarian proletariat’s martyrdom. Never was a proletarian revolution punished so cruelly, so brutally repressed. Horthy’s government lent itself, body and soul, to the persecution of all those citizens who had participated in the communist administration. The white terror struck Hungary like a horrible scourge. It turned first against the communists, then on the Social-Democrats, and later on against the Hebrews, Masons, Protestants, and finally, even against those bourgeois suspected of excessive liberal and democratic devotion. But it lashed out, above all, against the proletariat. Cities and towns guilty of revolutionary enthusiasm under the communist government were horrifically punished.
In the regions beyond the Danube some locales, marked by their communist sentiment, were truly depopulated. Innumerable workers were shot or massacred; others were jailed, and others forced to emigrate to escape similar punishments o constant mistreatment. Every day, there arrived in Austria, and in Italy, numerous contingents of escapees, armies of workers leaving Hungary in flight from the white terror. Vienna was full of Hungarian refugees. And in almost all the main Italian cities through which I traveled at that time, the Hungarian refugees were also legion.
Any description of the white terror in Hungary will always pale in comparison with reality.
Since August 1919, shooting, dismemberment, jailing, arson, mutilation, rape, and looting, have taken place in Hungary as means of repression and punishment of the proletariat. It has taken the quenching of the reactionaries’ bloodlust, and that a cry of horror from civilized men of Europe inhibit it, for the crimes and persecutions to diminish and become less frequent.
I have on hand a book which contains some tales of the white terror in Hungary.
[Here, Mariátegui read passages from the aforementioned, but unnamed, book.]
However, these tales could seem exaggerated to the bourgeois’ hearts. It will be said that this is an Italian version and that, as good Latins, the Italians are always excessive and passionate in their impressions.
But it happens that more or less the same things have been told by a commission of the Trade Unions and the English Labour Party, which visited Hungary in May 1920, in order to learn directly what was happening there. The British commission’s finding is one of unimpeachable circumspection, and, even more, it is the finding of a commission of very measured, very grave, and very conscientious people from the Trade Unions and the Labour Party.
The English delegation was made up of Colonel Wedgwood, member of the House of Commons, and four distinguished members of the Trade Unions and Labour Party bureaucracies. Naturally, the delegation could not visit all of Hungary. It visited only Budapest and one or another important township.
During its visit, moreover, there was a prudent truce in the white terror. Horthy’s reactionary government tried to cover things up as much as possible. The delegation’s means of information were, in a word, limited and insufficient for learning the true magnitude, the true reality of the terrorism of Horthy’s bands.
Consequently, the English Commission’s finding is but a pale, benevolent narration of Hungarian events. It is guilty of moderation, guilty of optimism, but it nonetheless corroborates the assertions of the book from which I have just read a page. According to the commission’s calculations, at the time at which it was in Hungary, the number of political prisoners and detainees was at least twelve thousand. According to official information there were six thousand. Horthy’s government was admitting that it had six thousand people imprisoned for political reasons. In its report, the Commission mentions that it had been assured that the total number of people arrested or detained was above 25,000.
The British Commission’s report[1] contains several atrocious anecdotes of the white terror in Hungary. I will read one of them so that you will be able to form an idea of the ferocity with which the members and functionaries of the communist government, and even their relatives, were persecuted.
Such is the case of Mrs. Hamburger. The Commission’s report says this:
[Reads from report.]
Why continue? You know already how the red “terror” behaved in Hungary. You already know many things which have been told to us by the newspapers’ cablegrams, so prodigal in horrific details when it comes to narrating a death by firing squad in Soviet Russia.
Horthy’s government resembles a frightening mission from the Middle Ages. It is not in vain that its characteristics are, precisely, those of attempting to re-establish medievalism and feudalism in Hungary. The reaction in Hungary is not only the enemy of socialism and the revolutionary proletariat. It is also the enemy of industrial capitalism. Because industrial capitalism, the factories, and large industry give rise to the industrial proletariat, the organized proletariat in the city – that is, the instrument of social revolution – the Hungarian reaction instinctively detests industrial capitalism, the large factories, and large industry. Horthy’s government is the despotic and bloodthirsty rule of agricultural feudalism, of the landlords and latifundists. Horthy governs Hungary with the title of Regent because for the reaction Hungary continues to be a kingdom. A kingdom without a king, but a kingdom nonetheless.
A year and a half ago, as you will recall, Charles of Austria, ex-Emperor of Austro-Hungary, son of Franz Joseph, was called on by the Hungarian monarchists to reestablish the monarchy in Hungary. The plan failed because the restoration of the Hapsburg dynasty, of the old ruling house of Austro-Hungary, was opposed by all the nations made independent as a result of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who feared that, once installed in Hungary, the monarchy would end up establishing the old Empire.
It failed, also, because Italy, alarmed at the possibility of the rebirth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, opposed the reestablishment of the monarchy in Hungary for the same reasons.
All these nations used their veto to oppose placing Charles back on the Hungarian throne. Lastly, the non-aristocratic peasants, hostile toward socialism but equally hostile to the old order, were opposed to this repositioning.
That is why, today, we do not have Hungary transformed into an absolute, medieval, and feudal, monarchy with a king at its head. But the regime of Regent Horthy is, in fact, an absolute, medieval, and feudal regime. It is the domination of the great landed estates over industry, the domination of the countryside over the city. As a result of this regime, Hungary is impoverished. Its depreciated money lacks hope of convalescence and stabilization. The poverty of the intellectual and manual proletariat is apocalyptic. A journalist told me in Budapest, in June of last year, that in this city there were people who could eat only every other day, one day yes, one day no. This poor journalist, who no doubt was a privileged being, next to other intellectual workers, seemed afflicted by hunger and misery.
I later met an intellectual, the author of several studies on musical aesthetics, who served as doorman in a neighborhood house. Poverty had forced him to accept the role of doorman. Such is the economic order, the consequences of the reaction and the white terror.
But a period of reaction, a period of absolutism, cannot be but a transitory, temporary period.
A contemporary nation, and much less a European nation, cannot return to a primitive and barbarian way of life. A resurrection of feudalism and medievalism cannot be long-lasting. The necessities of modern life, the tendency of the productive forces, the relation with other nations, do not allow a people’s regression to an anti-industrial nor anti-proletarian order.
Gradually, the proletarian movement is reviving in Hungary. The Social Democratic Party and the unions again win their right to a legal existence.
Some socialist, albeit timidly socialist, deputies have entered the Hungarian parliament.
The Communist Party, condemned to an illegal and clandestine life, silently prepares the hour of its re-emergence. Some democratic or liberal elements of the bourgeoisie also begin to move and polarize. Fearful of this rebirth of proletarian forces and of democratic forces, a fascist band has been organized in Hungary. Its headman is Friedrich, the famous reactionary. It is all symptomatic.
As I have already said, regarding the German Revolution, a revolution is not a coup d’état, it is not an insurrection, it is not one of those things which we here call a revolution from arbitrary use of the word. A revolution does not take place but over many years, and frequently it has alternating periods of predominance by revolutionary forces and of predominance by counterrevolutionary forces.
Just as a war is a process of offensives and counteroffensives, of victories and defeats, while one of the combatant groups does not definitively capitulate, while it does not give up its struggle, it is not defeated. Its defeat is transitory, but not total. In accordance with this interpretation of history, the reaction, the white terror, Horthy’s government, are but an unpleasant chapter of the Hungarian Revolution.
This chapter will someday come to its final page. Then, there will begin another chapter, a chapter which may be the chapter of the Hungarian proletariat’s victory.
For the Hungarian proletariat, Horthy’s government is a dark night, a
painful nightmare. But this dark night, this painful nightmare, will
pass. Then will come the dawn.
Next Friday, in accordance with the program of this course of lectures, I will talk about the Conference and the treaty of the Versailles Peace. I will give the history, explanation, and critique of that peace treaty which, as you know, has not turned out to be a peace treaty, but a war treaty.
I will lay out the moral character, the ideological profile, of that
document, still fresh and already totally discredited; grave and
tombstone for President Wilson’s candid democratic illusions.
_______________
[1] Likely a reference to The white terror in Hungary. Report of the British Joint Labour Delegation to Hungary, May 1920. London, 1920. - Trans.