Kun, Bela

(1886–1939)

   Bela Kun was a Hungarian communist leader who was active in the Bolshevik Party before becoming a victim of Josef Stalin’s purges. Born in Transylvania in 1886 Kun’s career in radical politics began as a journalist for a radical newspaper in 1906. He joined the Workers Insurance Bureau in Kolozsvar in 1910, becoming its managing director, and in 1913 was a delegate to the Hungarian Social Democratic Party Congress. In World War I he served in the Hungarian army on the Russian front where he was captured in 1916. As a Russian prisoner he converted to Bolshevism, becoming first leader of the Hungarian section of the Bolshevik Party, and then in 1918 head of the new Bolshevik-supported Hungarian Communist Party.

   In 1918 Kun launched a coup against the Hungarian government that failed and led to his imprisonment. However, the government rapidly collapsed and Kun was invited to join a coalition government. He soon took over leadership of the coalition and set about ousting anyone who was not a socialist or communist. He then attempted to create a Soviet Republic in Hungary, nationalizing land and industry, but after a mere 133 days the Republic collapsed. Kun went into exile in Austria before traveling to Russia to fight for the Bolsheviks in the civil war. As chairman of the Crimean Soviet he ordered the execution of nearly 20,000 White Russian officers. In 1921 he became an official of the Communist International and supported the disastrous attempted coup in Germany that year.

   Kun was a dogmatic Marxist–Leninist and a loyal Stalinist until his failures, foreignness and Jewishness made him a target of Stalin’s purges. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1937, and suffered torture before being executed in 1939. His prominence stems from his activism rather than any theoretical contribution, but he did influence Soviet policy toward acceptance of a nationalist element in Central European proletarian revolutions and inclusion of nationalist petty bourgeois revolutionaries in the initial stages of such revolutions.