The Communist Leader Who Sought Refuge in Moscow and Ended Up in Stalin’s hell: Béla Kun D
Budapest, Hungary. August 1st, 1919. The Hungarian Soviet Republic is 133 days old. It will not reach 134. The Romanian army is advancing on Budapest from the east. The Czech forces are pressing from the north. The counterrevolutionary forces of Admiral Miklo Horthy are organizing from the south and west.
The Allied powers that won the First World War have placed Hungary under an economic blockade that has made feeding the population of Budapest practically impossible. The man who made the Hungarian Soviet Republic possible, who organized its founding, who served as its people’s commasar foreign affairs and its effective political leader across its 133 days is in a meeting with his colleagues trying to decide what to do. His name is Ba Pun.
He is 33 years old. He is a journalist, a political organizer, a communist agitator who had been radicalized by the specific combination of Jewish intellectual formation, Hungarian nationalist resentment, and Russian revolutionary experience that the First World War had produced in his generation of central European radicals.
He had been taken prisoner by Russian forces in 1916, had encountered the Bolevik movement in Russian captivity, and had returned to Hungary in 1918 with the specific conviction of someone who had seen the revolution and believed it was the answer to everything he had been angry about.
He had made the revolution happen in Hungary faster and more completely than anyone had predicted was possible. In March 1919, he had organized the merger of the social democratic party with the Communist Party of Hungary in conditions of such extraordinary political momentum that the moderate socialist government of Count Mihayi Karoli had handed him power rather than fought him for it.
He had governed for 133 days a Soviet republic in the heart of central Europe. He had made the revolution. He had lost it. On August 1st, 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapses. Bailakun flees to Vienna. From Vienna, eventually he will make his way to Moscow, where the common turn, and the Soviet state will provide the refuge that a defeated revolutionary communist has nowhere else to seek.
He will live in Moscow for nearly 20 years. He will work for the commun the international communist organization traveling to other countries to organize revolutionary activity conducting the specific institutional work of international communism’s bureaucratic apparatus and in 1938 in the specific terror of Stalin’s great purge he will be arrested accused of being a Troskyite counter-revolutionary and a fascist spy tried in the specific manner of the show trials and shot. The revolutionary who made the Hungarian Soviet Republic possible was killed by the Soviet state that was supposed to be his comrade. This is the story of Bellacun. The specific trajectory from revolutionary triumph to revolutionary defeat to exile to the Stalinist terror that consumed him. and what that trajectory reveals about the
relationship between the international communist movement and the Soviet state that claimed to lead it. To understand Beakun’s story, you need to understand the specific world that produced him. Because the specific combination of circumstances that made his revolutionary career possible also created the specific vulnerabilities that made his end in Stalin’s Moscow predictable in retrospect.
He was born on February 20th, 1886 in Selagis, a small town in Transylvania in the Austrohungarian Empire into a Jewish family of modest prosperity. His father was a village notary, a position that combined sufficient material stability for education with the specific social procarity of Jewish professional life in late Habsburg Central Europe.
The specific condition of Jewish intellectual formation in early 20th century central Europe. The condition of being educated enough to understand fully the society that excluded you, politically engaged enough to be angry about the exclusion and ideologically flexible enough to seek solutions across the full range of political alternatives available in the extraordinary political ferment of the period is the condition that produced a remarkable number of the revolutionary figures of his generation. Rosa Luxembourg, George Lucax, Ernst Toller, and Bella He was educated, became a journalist, joined the Social Democratic Party, and was a minor political figure in Transylvania when the First World War began in 1914. He served in the Austrohungarian Army, was captured by Russian forces in 1916, and spent the remainder of the war years as
a prisoner of war in the Urals region. The prisoner of war camps of Russia in 1917 and 1918 were the specific spaces where the revolution encountered the most receptive possible audiences. Men who had spent years in conditions of organized violence. Men who had watched the world that had produced that violence revealed as structurally criminal.
Men who were far from home and from the specific social pressures that normally contain political radicalization. He encountered Bolevik agitators in the camps. He encountered the specific argument that the Bolevik revolution was making in the winter of 1917 and 1918. That the war was an imperialist war. That the soldiers fighting it were the victims rather than the agents of the class system that had organized the slaughter.
and that the specific form of political organization that the Bolevik party represented was the vehicle through which the victims could become the agents of their own liberation. He was converted. He returned to Hungary in November 1918 with the specific conviction of someone who had seen the revolution and who was determined to bring it home.
The Hungarian Revolution of October 1918 and its aftermath provided the specific political environment within which Belellakun’s revolutionary activity could produce the outcome it produced. Hungary was in a state of political disintegration. The Austrohungarian Empire had collapsed with the wars end. Hungary was now a separate state, but a state facing the specific humiliation of the Allied powers intentions for its post-war settlement.
The Treaty of Triionon that would eventually formalize the peace terms would strip Hungary of 2/3 of its pre-war territory and a third of its ethnic Hungarian population. The nationalist resentment was intense and was generating the specific political volatility in which radical alternatives become available.
The moderate socialist government of Count Cari, which had taken power after the AustroHungarian Empire’s collapse, was managing the specific impossible task of governing a country in political, economic, and military crisis without the institutional resources that effective governance requires. Beakun founded the Communist Party of Hungary in November 1918.
He was arrested in February 1919 when communist agitation and some specific acts of violence against social democratic offices provided the government with grounds for prosecution. His arrest became a political catastrophe for the government that ordered it. He was beaten during questioning severely enough that the photographs circulated and generated exactly the kind of political sympathy that the specific spectacle of state violence against a political prisoner reliably generates.
He conducted his political organizing from prison, receiving visitors, communicating with his comrades, using the imprisonment as a political platform in ways that only a figure with genuine political momentum could exploit. And then on March 20th, 1919, the Allied powers presented the Karoli government with an ultimatum about the armistice demarcation lines that essentially required Hungary to accept the territorial losses that the peace settlement was going to impose.
The ultimatum produced a political crisis that destroyed the Karolier government’s capacity to govern. The social democrats recognizing that the crisis had made conventional governance impossible approached the imprisoned bailum with a proposal. Merge the social, democratic and communist parties establish a revolutionary government and seek Soviet Russian assistance against the Allied powers that were demanding Hungarian territorial concessions.
He accepted. He was released from prison. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on March 21st, 1919. He was 33 years old and had just made a revolution in the heart of central Europe. The 133 days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic are among the most intensively analyzed episodes in the history of communist revolutionary governance because they constitute one of the most complete experiments available in what happens when a Bolevik inspired government attempts to implement Soviet style revolutionary transformation in conditions of extreme external and internal pressure. The government that Belellakun led was not a government that could have easily succeeded in its stated objectives regardless of who was making the specific decisions. The conditions facing it were genuinely impossible. Surrounded by hostile military forces
cut off from the Soviet Russian assistance it had been counting on. governing a population in severe food scarcity and trying to implement radical social transformation in conditions that provided neither the time nor the resources that such transformation requires. But the specific manner in which the Hungarian Soviet Republic was governed also contributed to its failure in ways that deserve examination because those specific manners illuminate something important about the relationship between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. The Red Terror, the use of political violence against perceived class enemies and counterrevolutionaries was the most damaging of these specific manners. The Cerni detachment, the paramilitary unit associated with the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s security apparatus, conducted killings and beatings that alienated significant portions of the population that the
revolution needed to maintain as its base. The specific economic transformations, the rapid nationalization of enterprises, and the reorganization of agriculture along collectivist lines were implemented at a speed that the administrative capacity of the new government could not manage effectively, producing economic disruption that the already stressed economy could not absorb.
The specific management of the relationship with the social democratic partners who had made the merger possible was a management that consistently marginalized the social democrats in favor of the communist faction generating internal political tensions that weakened the government at the moment when external pressure required maximum internal cohesion.
Baun governed with the specific combination of genuine revolutionary commitment and genuine political inexperience that characterized many of the revolutionary leaders of his generation. He believed profoundly in what he was doing. He was genuinely attempting to implement the transformation that his theory said was necessary and possible.
He was also making decisions that reflected the specific limitations of someone who had been an agitator and a journalist and had never governed anything before March 21, 1919. The revolution lasted 133 days. The defeat and flight of August 1919 produced the specific political problem that would organize the rest of Belellakun’s life.
The problem of the defeated revolutionary in exile. The white terror that followed the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was organized by the forces of Admiral Horthy and was specifically and systematically targeted against Jews, communists, and the people associated with the revolution. Thousands were killed in the months following August 1919 in pograms and organized political violence that converted the specific political defeat of the Soviet Republic into a campaign of mass repression.
had fled to Vienna beyond Hory’s immediate reach. Vienna, where the specific political tolerance of the Austrian capital provided the space for defeated radicals from across central Europe to organize, reflect and plan. He was not simply a defeated revolutionary in Vienna.
He was the most celebrated living symbol of an actual communist revolution that had actually taken power in an actual European country. The Hungarian Soviet Republic had lasted only 133 days, but those 133 days had demonstrated that a Bolevikstyle revolution was possible outside Russia in conditions that were not the specific conditions of the Russian Revolution, but that were the conditions of postworld war I central Europe.
This made him enormously valuable to the common turn, the communist international that the Soviet state had established as the organizational vehicle for the global revolutionary movement. He was welcomed in Moscow. He was given a position in the common turn apparatus. He was incorporated into the specific institutional structure of international communism’s organizational infrastructure.
He was safe for the moment. The common turn work that occupied the years of Baun’s Moscow exile is the dimension of his story that the biographical literature most consistently underweights because it is the least dramatic and the most institutionally significant. The common turn was the Soviet state’s most important tool of foreign political influence.
And it was the institution within which the specific relationship between the Soviet state’s interests and the interests of the communist movements it claimed to lead was most directly expressed. The work it required was the work of building and maintaining communist party organizations across dozens of countries, providing organizational guidance and financial support to parties that were attempting to operate in conditions of legal and illegal activity.
Managing the specific relationships between the Moscow center and the national parties whose autonomy was always in tension with the organizational direction that Moscow required. Bakun conducted this work across the 1920s and into the 1930s. He was sent to various countries on common turn missions.
He participated in the organizational work of the common turns apparatus in Moscow. He engaged in the theoretical and political debates that the communist international conducted about the correct line for the revolutionary movement in the specific conditions of the period. He was not simply a passive instrument. He had opinions, expressed them, participated in the internal political disputes that characterized common turn life with the specific engagement of someone who had genuine experience of revolutionary governance and who believed that his experience gave him specific insight into the practical requirements of revolutionary politics. This specific quality, the willingness to have and express opinions, to engage in the political disputes of the common turn apparatus with the independence that genuine revolutionary credentials provided was the specific quality that would eventually become one of the characteristics used against him in the
1938 accusation. In a Stalinist organizational culture, the person who expresses independent opinions is the person who is building a factional position. The person who argues from their own experience rather than from the current line is the person who is maintaining the kind of independent political identity that the Stalinist system was organized to eliminate.
He was experienced enough to be confident in his positions. He was not politically sophisticated enough in the specific way that the Stalinist organizational culture required to understand that his confidence was a vulnerability. The 1930s produced the specific changes in the political environment of Moscow that made Baun’s position progressively more precarious.
the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1933 and the specific disasters of the common turns ultralleft line in Germany where the party’s characterization of the social democrats as social fascists had contributed to the inability of the German left to form the united front that might have stopped Hitler’s rise had produced the major reassessment of common turn strategy that became the popular front policy the specific disputes within the common intern about responsib responsibility for the German disaster and about the correct direction of the popular front strategy were disputes in which Bakun participated with the specific combination of genuine analytical engagement and organizational vulnerability that characterized his common turn career. He was associated with positions that in the specific political atmosphere of the mid 1930s could be characterized as aligned with the factions that Stalin was preparing
to destroy. This is not to say that he was actually a Troskyite or actually organizing against the Soviet state. He was not. His commitment to the Soviet Union and to the communist project remained genuine across the entire period of his Moscow exile. But the Stalinist purge did not require that its victims be actually guilty of the charges made against them.
It required only that the charges could be made in ways that fit the specific template of the accusation structure that the show trial system had developed. The show trial system required specific types of enemies. Troskyites, Xenovioes, right deviationists, fascist spies, wreckers. Each of these categories had specific organizational and ideological content that the accusation documents were required to demonstrate.
The specific accused were fitted into these categories through the specific process of interrogation that produced the confessions that the show trials required. Beakun had organizational history, ideological history, and political relationships that could be fitted into the accusation structure. He had been associated with various common turn factions at various points.
He had expressed opinions that diverged from the current line at various moments. He had relationships with people who had already been arrested and who had named others in their confessions. The naming was the specific mechanism through which the purge built its network of victims. Each person arrested was interrogated and required to name associates and accompllices creating the specific chain of connection that brought in the next layer of victims. He was named.
The arrest of Baun came in 1938 in the full intensity of the great purge’s final phase. The charges were the charges of the period. Troskyite counterrevolutionary activity, fascist espionage, wrecking. Each charge was the standard accusation that the purges template required, fitted to his specific biography in ways that the interrogation process would produce the specific confessions to confirm the comment turn work he had conducted across nearly two decades became the material for the specific accusations. meetings with foreign communists who had subsequently been identified as Troskyites or fascist agents, organizational decisions that could be retrospectively characterized as deliberate sabotage of the revolutionary movement, associations with people who had been arrested and whose confessions had named him. The interrogation he was
subjected to was the interrogation of the NKVD’s methods in their most intensive phase. The specific combination of sleep deprivation, physical pressure, psychological manipulation, and the particular technique of constructing a narrative of guilt that the prisoner could accept as a final service to the party that produced the confessions the show trial system required.
Whether Belellakun confessed to the charges made against him and in what specific form is not fully documented in the available historical record. The records of his specific case have not been fully released from the Russian archives and the partial documentation available does not provide the complete account of his interrogation and trial.
What is documented is the outcome. He was sentenced to death. He was executed on November 30th, 1938. He was 52 years old. The man who had made the Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had governed a communist state in central Europe, who had worked for the common turn for nearly two decades, was shot in the basement of the Lubiana prison by the Soviet state, whose revolutionary project he had devoted his life to serving.
The specific mechanism by which the refugee communist became the victim of the state that had given him refuge is the mechanism that Bellakun’s story illustrates. with unusual precision because he is the clearest possible case of the pattern that this series has documented in multiple contexts. The refugee communist in Moscow was not simply a guest.
He was a specific kind of institutional captive, someone whose political identity, organizational connections, and specific historical record were all documented in the files of the Common and the NKVD, accessible to the Soviet state’s institutional machinery and available for use in the specific accusations that the purge required.
The Common was an extraordinary intelligence asset. From the Soviet state’s perspective, it maintained files on the political histories, organizational relationships, and personal networks of every communist party functionary who passed through Moscow. These files documented exactly the kind of foreign connections, factional associations, and political relationships that the purges accusation structure required as evidence of counterrevolutionary activity.
The people who had come to Moscow seeking refuge had in the process of seeking refuge provided the Soviet state with the specific documentation of their lives that the purge would later use against them. The files of the common intern were the files of the NKVD’s future victims. This is the specific institutional mechanism of the refugee communists vulnerability.
The organization that received them was the organization that documented them. And the documentation became the material for the accusations that consumed them. Baun was not the only communist refugee in Moscow who died in the great purge. The purge consumed the international communist community in Moscow with a thoroughess that reflected the specific character of the Stalinist accusation system.
The foreign communists who had sought refuge in Moscow, who had worked in the common intern apparatus, who had brought their foreign connections and their foreign political histories into the Soviet institutional environment were ideal targets for the specific kinds of accusations that the purge required.
Hungarian communists were particularly hard hit. the specific context of the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s defeat, the specific history of the Hungarian Communist Movements, internal factional disputes, and the specific relationships between Hungarian communists and the various European communist movements provided the material for the accusation structure that the purge required.
Polish communists were even more completely consumed. The entire leadership of the Communist Party of Poland was arrested and killed during the Great Purge in numbers that essentially eliminated the Polish Communist movement’s organizational capacity. The specific accusation was that the Polish party had been infiltrated at its highest levels by fascist spies working for the Polish government.
German communists who had fled to Moscow following Hitler’s rise were subjected to the specific interrogation and accusation process of the purge in numbers that reflected the specific vulnerability of people with German biographical backgrounds in the period of the Nazi Soviet strategic confrontation. Yuguslav, Bulgarian, Turkish and other communist parties leaderships in Moscow were similarly thinned by the purges operations.
The pattern was consistent. The international communist community that had come to Moscow seeking the refuge of the revolution center was being consumed by the specific institutional machinery of the state that was supposed to protect it. The common turn which had been the organizational vehicle of international communist solidarity had become the organizational vehicle of international communist destruction.
The specific biographical tragedy of Bellacun has an additional dimension that the political narrative of his life tends to obscure. The dimension of the Hungarian communist defeat of 1919 and what it meant for his subsequent life in Moscow. He had made a revolution. The revolution had failed.
The failure had produced the white terror that killed thousands of people who had participated in the revolution or been associated with it. He was personally responsible in the specific sense of having led the government that had governed for the decisions of those 133 days. He carried that responsibility and the specific knowledge of what had happened in Hungary after the Soviet Republic fell through the nearly two decades of his Moscow exile.
The people who had been killed in the White Terror, the specific human cost of the revolution he had made and lost were not abstractions. They were people he had known, organized with, governed alongside. And the revolution whose defeat had produced those deaths was a revolution that had been organized with the explicit expectation that Soviet Russian assistance would be forthcoming.
The assistance had not come. The isolation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic facing the combined military pressure of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Allied powers blockade had been the isolation of a government that the Soviet state had encouraged into existence without being able to provide the support that survival required.
Whether Beer Lakun fully processed this specific dimension of his biography, the question of whether the Soviet state’s encouragement of the Hungarian revolution without the capacity or the will to provide adequate support had contributed to the specific catastrophe of the White Terror’s aftermath is not documented in the available record.
What is documented is that he continued to work for the Comington, continued to believe in the revolutionary project, continued to serve the Soviet state across the nearly two decades between the Hungarian defeat and his arrest. The specific psychology of this continuation, the maintenance of commitment to a project and an organization that had failed to provide the support that might have prevented the specific catastrophe he had lived through is the psychology of someone whose entire political identity was organized around the revolutionary project and who had no alternative framework for understanding what had happened to him and what he was doing. He had nowhere else to go, not geographically. The Horthy regime that had taken power in Hungary had issued death sentences for the leaders of the Soviet Republic, making return to Hungary impossible. Not politically, the revolutionary project was his identity,
and abandoning it would have required abandoning the specific understanding of himself and his life that the project provided. He was trapped. The Moscow that had offered refuge from the consequences of revolutionary defeat was the only available space in which his political identity could be maintained.
And the Moscow that maintained his political identity was progressively converting the specific documentation of that identity into the material for the accusations that would kill him. What does the story of Baun tell us about the relationship between the international communist movement and the Soviet state that claimed to lead it? The first lesson is about the specific vulnerability of the person whose political identity is entirely organized around an institution that is simultaneously their refuge and their jailer. Beakun had no independent institutional base outside the Soviet organizational system. His political identity was the identity of the communist revolutionary and the communist revolutionary movement’s organizational center was Moscow. His survival in the specific material sense required Moscow’s support. His survival in the specific political sense required
the maintenance of his role in the comment apparatus. Both forms of survival were provided by the same institution. The institution that provided both forms of survival was the institution that eventually destroyed him. This is the specific form of total dependency that made every refugee communist in Moscow vulnerable to the same fate.
The absence of any institutional space outside the Soviet organizational system from which to maintain any form of independence. The refugees had come to Moscow because they had nowhere else to go. Having come to Moscow, they had no institutional alternative that would allow them to leave.
They were there and the specific institutional machinery that they were inside was the machinery that would eventually process them. The second lesson is about the specific relationship between the documentation of a political life and the political life’s vulnerability. The Common Turns files documented with extraordinary comprehensiveness the political histories, organizational relationships and personal networks of the international communist community in Moscow.
The files were produced as part of the institutional work of the revolutionary movement, the management of parties, the coordination of activities, the maintenance of the organizational records that any complex institution requires. They were also in the specific political environment of the Stalinist purge, the most comprehensive possible documentation of the connections and relationships that the accusation structure required as evidence of counterrevolutionary conspiracy.
The people who had been most active, most organizationally connected, most historically engaged. The people who had done the most for the revolutionary movement were the people whose files were most comprehensive and therefore most susceptible to the accusation structures requirements. The better communist you had been, the more detailed your file.
The more detailed your file, the more material for the accusation. The more material for the accusation, the more completely you fit the template of the counterrevolutionary conspiracy. The revolutionary merit was the vulnerability. The third lesson is about the specific mechanism by which revolutionary movements consumed their most committed members.
Bailakun was not a random victim of the great purge. He was someone whose specific characteristics, the revolutionary credentials, the international connections, the organizational history, the willingness to express independent opinions, the Hungarian national background that provided the specific foreign connection that the accusation required made him a particularly suitable target for the accusation structure.
But the specific selectivity with which the purge targeted the most committed, the most historically engaged, the most internationally connected is not a coincidence. It reflects the specific character of Stalinist institutional logic. The people who were most invested in the revolutionary project were the people who were most dangerous to the specific form of power that had replaced the revolutionary project.
They had credentials. They had relationships. They had the specific authority of people who had actually done something, who had actually made revolutions, who had the specific standing to argue that what was happening in Moscow was not what the revolution was supposed to be. That authority was what needed to be destroyed.
Not because it was being exercised. In most cases, the people destroyed by the purge were not actually organizing against Stalin. But the potential for its exercise was sufficient. The person who has made a revolution and who has opinions about how revolutions should be conducted is a person whose continued existence represents a potential challenge to the specific political authority that has replaced the revolutionary project.
The elimination of that potential was the purge’s most fundamental purpose. There is a specific document in the Russian archives partially released in the postsviet period that records the specific accusations made against bailun in 1938. The document describes him as a troskyite counterrevolutionary who had been conducting antis-siet activity since 1920.
It describes him as having connections with fascist intelligence services through his organizational work for the common intern. It describes specific meetings with specific individuals who have been identified as Troskyites or fascist agents with specific dates and locations. The document was produced by the NKVD. The specific meetings described may or may not have occurred in the forms the document describes.
The specific characterizations of the people he met as Troskyites or fascist agents reflected the NKVD’s characterizations rather than any independent assessment of those individuals actual political positions. The document is a production of the accusation machinery. It is not a historical record of what happened.
It is a record of what the accusation required to have happened. Beakun was shot on the basis of this document. The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted 133 days. The Moscow exile lasted 19 years. The specific end of both was the end of someone whose entire political life had been organized around the revolutionary project who had nowhere outside that project to go and who was consumed by the institution that had defined the project’s meaning.
The revolutionary who came to Moscow seeking refuge from the consequences of the revolution. Who found in Moscow the one space where the revolution remained for a time available. Who eventually discovered that the space that maintained the revolution also maintained the machinery that the revolution had produced and that the machinery was indifferent to the distinction between the revolution’s servants and the revolution’s enemies.
It processed what it was given. He was given. He was processed the way everything given to that machinery was eventually processed in the specific order that the machinery required because that was what the machinery did. Because that was what the machinery
