(b. Szilagyczeh, Transylvania, 20 Feb. 1886; d. Soviet Union, Aug. 1938) Hungarian; Communist dictator 1919 Kun was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Austria-Hungary. Before the First World War he worked as a journalist and joined the Social Democrats. He fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1916, when he was captured by the Russians. He joined the Bolshevik Party after the October Revolution of 1917, came to Lenin's notice, and was specially trained in revolutionary technique. He returned to Hungary after the war and founded the Hungary Communist Party (HCP) on 20 December 1918. In March 1919 Kun brought about the fall of the liberal provisional government of Count Mihály Károlyi and came to power with the help of the Social Democrats, who joined the Communists in a coalition. The new government was dominated by the Communists, even though the HCP had only 7,000 members at the beginning of 1919. They set up a Bolshevik-style dictatorship based on their secret police. Kun formed a Red Army which regained from Romania and Czechoslovakia most of the territory which Hungary lost in the First World War. However, the Kun regime was generally loathed in Hungary because of its brutality and its policies of collectivization of agriculture and nationalization of industry. After only four and a half months in power, Kun's regime was swept away by the Romanians and the counter-revolutionary forces of Horthy. In August 1919 Kun fled to Vienna then Moscow.

In 1921 Kun was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In 1938 he was arrested by the NKVD, charged with "Trotskyism", and shot in August. He was formally rehabilitated in 1958.

For more information on Béla Kun, visit Britannica.com.

(bā'lŏ kūn) , 1886–1937, Hungarian Communist. A prisoner of war in Russia after 1915, he embraced Bolshevism. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917 he was sent to Hungary as a propagandist. In 1919, Count Michael Károlyi and his government resigned and the Communists and Social Democrats formed a coalition government under Kun. Kun set up a dictatorship of the proletariat; nationalized banks, large businesses and estates, and all private property above a certain minimum; and ruthlessly put down all opposition. He raised a Red Army and overran Slovakia. The allies forced Kun to evacuate Slovakia, and a counterrevolution broke out. Kun was at first victorious over the counterrevolutionists, but he was defeated by a Romanian army of intervention and was forced to flee to Vienna. Kun's Red Terror was followed by a White Terror. Nicholas Horthy de Nagybanya became regent of Hungary. Kun, after being held at an insane asylum in Vienna, went (1920) to Soviet Russia. He reappeared (1928) in Vienna and was briefly imprisoned but was allowed to return to the USSR. There he took an active part in the Comintern until he was accused of anti-Stalinism and perished in the Communist party purges of the 1930s. In the late 1950s and 1960s his reputation was restored in the USSR.

Bibliography

See study by R. L. Tökés (1967).