History of the World Crisis

Lecture 7:
The Hungarian Revolution

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 interestingly dramatic chapter in the history of the world crisis. The program for this course of lectures tells 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, the Hungarian Revolution is even less well known, and this 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 men, but it has told us almost nothing of the Hungarian reaction and its men. 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; nevertheless, there is nothing more bloody, more tragic, than this somber and medieval period of Hungarian life. None of the crimes imputd to the Russian revolution can compare to the crimes committed by the bourgeois reaction in Hungary.

We see, in order, the three phases of the Hungarian Revolution. I have already explained the processes of the German Revolution and of the Austrian Revolution. Good. The process of the Hungarian Revolution is, in broad strokes, the same. But it has always something phyisiognomical, something particular to itself. Aside from the tiredness, the fatigue, the discontent with the war, the Hungarian Revolution was prepared by the longings for national independence, suddenly awakened, excited, and stimulated by the Wilsonian propaganda.

Wilson encouraged peoples against autocracy and against absolutism, and, at the same time, he encouraged 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 Hungarians within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, the defeat did not bring only revolution to Austro-Hungary, it also brought about dissolution. The nationalities which made up the Austr-Hungarian Empire became independent and 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 before the German front precisely because of the separatist ideals of the nationalities which were part of Austro-Hungary and, consequently, the Austrian military front gave way before 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 coninued fighting. This ocurred in the latter part of October, 1918. The front-line troops' rebellion against the war spread quickly to the entire Hungarian army. Thus began the Hungarian Revolution, which, like the German Revolution, was, in Walther Rathenau's words, at first a general strike by a defeated army. Like the German Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution began with the military insurrection, but in Hungary this military insurrection was not followed immediately by a proletarian insurrection. The proletarian movement was still too immature, too incipient. The Hungarian proletariat still lacked a solid revolutionary class consciousness. Count Michael Karolyi headed the first revolutionary government. This government, which emerged from the October 31 insurrection, was a government of the radical bourgeoisie coaligned with Social-Democracy.

Count Karolyi was, in a way, the Hungarian Revolution's Kerenski. 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 emerged 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 which separates the two figures is rendered more clear and ostensible after their governments than during them. While Kerensky has not stopped orienting toward 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. In other words, 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 meeting date for 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, thus, as chaperone to Falcón, which visited 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 entering into relations with the Hungarian ex-President. The newspapermen had just discovered his presence incognito 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 condemned to death by Horthy's government. Karolyi was deeply concerned by this news and, since his incognito 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 condemned to death.

He took advantage of all the reports made on him to ask for the intervention of Europe's honest spirits in defense of those noble and heroic lives. He asked Falcón and I to act in this regard on 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.

This anecdotal note helps to delineate, to define, Karolyi's personality and that is why I have included it in my dissertation. But let us return now to the ordered story of the Revolution. Let us 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 only at the expense of the bourgeoisie, at the expense of capitalism, could it be possible to meet them. However, these unfulfilled demands grew more acute day by 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. This Communist Party, like the German Spartacists, preached the carrying out of 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 --in other words, the extreme right-- prepared to overthrow Karolyi's weak government, which could not count on the proletarian masses, but also did not adequately guarantee capitalism's safety.

Simultaneously, 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 Hugary, or rather, were interested in that Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and Czechoslovakia, on the other, grow strong at Hungary's expense.

The nationalist elements demanded from Karolyi a policy of energetically pressing claims. Each loss of territory by Karolyi in the international arena, meant a loss of territory in the terrain of internal politics.

And, there came a fatal day for Karolyi's government. The Allied governments notified him, by way of Lieutenant Colonel Vyx, that the then borders of Hungary should be considered permanent. These borders meant the loss of enormous tracts for Hungary. Karolyi could not submit to these conditions. If he had, a chauvinist revolt would have brought him down in a few days. Thus, he had no option left but resignation, stepping down from power, which was immediately seized by the proletariat. Frequently, Karolyi has been accused of handing the government over to the working class. In reality, however, events were greater than Karolyi's will and to any individual will. From one side, the reactionary wave, and from the other, the revolutionary wave, both threatened Karolyi's government, which was, consequently, doomed to disappear, swallowed by one 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 ahd 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 mastered by the most retrograde nobility's and bourgeoisie's reaction.

Thus emerged the government of Bela Kun. On 21 March, 1919, or more or less five months after the constitution of Karolyi's goverment, the Revolutionary Government Council of the Soviet Hungarian Republic was formed.

Communists and social-democrats joined in the creation of 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. Aparently, this gave the Hungarian workers' government strength because, by virtue of the agreement between communists and social-democrats, that workers' government represented the unanimity of the proletariat. Unanimity, plus one. All the great proletarian tendencies in power; but 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, deprived of the capacity and will to solidariously collaborate 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 Democrars participated, was unremittably condemned to fall crushed by the revolution or by the reaction. The Social Democrats found themselves, then, in need of choosing between the communist revolution and the feudal and aristocratic reaction. Of course, they had to opt for the communist revolution. Moreover, they had to hurry it along in order to eliminate the danger of the reaction's gaining time.

When Karolyi resigned, the directorate 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 was the majority of the masses, committed to revolution. The Social Democrats did not give in, then, 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 accepted, in its entirety, the carrying out of the communist program. But they accepted 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 thei adherence to the communists' program they demanded only the right to participate in its realization.

They told the communists, "We accept your program, but we want to take part in the government destined to carry it out." 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 compound government. This workers' government's program of a uniform hue, but the men charged with carrying it out were of two different hues. One part of the government truly wanted the carrying out of 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 general 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 answer the call, the incitement, of 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' deaf sabotage, in its rief months of existence Bela Kun's government developed, to a great extent, the proletariat's economic and social program. It proceeded to the expropriation of the latifundia and landed 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 were not able to be met by the government of Karolyi, impeded by its views and respect for the capitalist order-- were solicitously tended to. The invalid, the mutilated, 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 on a class basis, revolutionarily, 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 to the benefit the proletariat.

But, against Bela Kun's government there conspired, on the one hand, the Social Democrats' skepticism and resistance, and on the other, the predations of the victorious powers. The capitalist powers saw in Soviet Hungary a dangerous focus for the propagandization of the communiust idea. And, they took pains to eliminate it, pushing the neighboring nations --under the victorious entente's tutelage-- against the Hungarian Republic.

In the meantime, the Social Democrats limited and blocked the government's measures against the reactionary preparations and plots. Esconced within their democratic and liberal prejudices, in their superstition of freedom, the Social Democrats did not allow 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 with 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 revolutionary unpreparedness, the revolutionary inconstance of one of the bases, one of the fundamental supports of the Revolutions: one of the two governing parties.

It was under these conditions that Bela Kun's government, inaugurated on the 21 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 toward the Tibisco River, threatening Budapest. The moment was critical. On the 2 of May, Bela Kun explained the situation in a dramatic session of the Budapest Workers' Concil. He posed the following question: Was it preferrable to organize resistance or was it preferrable to surrender to the Allied powers? Many Social Democrats spoke in favor of the latter thesis, but the Workers' Council stuck by Bela Kun's thesis. It was necessary to resist to the very end. There was alternative but the Revolution's complete victory or complete defeat. No middle position was possible. To give in to the capitalist powers would to totally renounce 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 great portion of the Czech territory. The moment was turning critical for the Allied offensive against Societ Hungary. Revolutionary seeds were spreading within the Czech army.

The astute capitalsit 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 Tibisco Roiver as compensation. The Social Democrats spoke out for the acceptance of this proposal and took advantage of the unpopularity of the carrying out the war within the spirits of the proletariat, worn down after five years of war-related travails. The communists could not 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 combative will, 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 deception, 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 the Allied powers' diplomatic representatives.

The reaction, in the meantime, readied itself to seize power. On the 24 of June, reactionary elements, joined by three hundred students from the former military academy, took control of the Danube's lookouts. 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, giving in to pressure from the Allied diplomatic missions, they too ended up being released.

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 Tibisco's fertile agricultural region. The available foodstuffs did not suffice to supply the entire populace. This scarcity contributed to creating 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 Tibisco. But this offensive, begun on July 20, 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 fell the government of Bela Kun.

On August 2, the Council of Peoples Commissars abdicated command. It was replaced by a social democratic government. This social democratic government, in order to contain and satisfy the Allied powers, 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 so it was. 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 attempt to seize of power.

The Social Democrats were unable to resist the reactionary wave. They could not even count on the no-longer fooled masses of the democratic government from its first moment of life, since it undertook the destruction of the revolution's work. They had to fall at the reactionary's first onslaught.

Thus ended the communist regime in Hungary. Thus was born the reactionary regime of Admiral Horthy. 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 terrible whip. It turned first against the communists, then on the Social Democrats, and later on against the Hebrews, Masons, Protestants, and finally against even the bourgeois suspected of excessive liberal and democratic devotion. But it threw itself, above all, against the proletariat. The 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 emmigrate to escape the analogous punishments o constant mistreatments. Every day, there arrived in Austria, in Italy, numerous contingents of escapees, armies of workers who left Hungary fleeing 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.

All description of the white terror in Hungary will always pale in comparison with reality.

From August 1919, in Hungary there have followed shootings, drawing-and-quartering, jailings, arson, mutilations, looting, as means of repression and punishment of the proletariat. It has been necessary that the reactionaries' thirst for blood ease and that a cry of horror from civilized men of Europe still it, for the crimes and persecutions diminish and become rare.

I have on hand a book which contains some tales of the white terror in Hungary. [Reads from book.]

But these tales could seem exagerated to the bourgeois' hearts. It will be said that this is an Italian version and that the Italians are always, as good Italians, excessive and passionate in their impressions.

But it happens that the same things, more or less, have been told by a commission of the Trade Unions* and the English Labour Party, which visited Hungary in May 1920, to directly find out what was happening there. The British commission's finding is one of executed 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 delagtion was made up of Colonel Wedgwood, member of the House of Commons, and four distinguished members of the Trade Unions' and Labour Party's bureacracy. Naturally, the delegation could not visit all of Hungary. It visited but Budapest and one or another important township.

During its visit, moreover, there was a prudent truce of the white terror. Horthy's reactionary government tried to cover things up as much as possible. The delagtions means of information were, in short, 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, a benevolent, narration of Hungarian events. It sins in moderation, in optimism, but it nonetheless corroborates the affirmations 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 Comission tells that it had been assured that the total number of people arrested or detained was above 25,000.

The British Commission's report contains severl 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 goverment, and even their relatives, were persecuted.

Such is the case of Mrs. Hamburger. The Commission's report says thusly:

[Reads from report.]

Why continue? You already know 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, 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 still.

A year and a half ago, as you will remember, Charles of Autria, 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 reestablishment 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 Asutro-Hungarian Empire, opposed the reestablishment of the monarchy in Hungary for the same reasons.

All these nations opposed their veto to placing Charles back on the throne in Hungary. Lastly, against this ressumption were the non-aristocratic peasants, opposed to socialism but equally opposed to the old order.

That is why today we do not have a Hungary transformed into an absolute, medieval, and feudal, monarchy with a king at the head. But, in fact, the regime of Regent Horthy is an absolute, medieval, and feudal regime. It is the domination of the great estates over indsutry, the domination of the countryside over the city. As a result of this regime, Hungary is impoverished. Its depreciatd money lacks hope of convalescence and stabilization. The poverty of the intelectual 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 intelectual 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 house in the neighborhood. Poverty had forced him to accept the role of doorman. Such is the economic order, the consequences of the reaction and white terror.

But a period of reaction, a period of absolutism, cannot be but a transitory, temporary period.

A contemporary nation, and much less an European nation, cannot return to primitive and barbarian way of life. A resurrection of feudalism and medievalism cannot be longlasting. The necessities of modern life, the tendency of the productive forces, the relation with other nations, do not allow the regression by a people to an anti-industrial nor antiproletarian order.

Gradually, the proletarian movement is reviving in Hungary. The Social Democratic Party and the unions again win their right to a legal existence.

Into the Hungarian parliament have gone some socialist deputies, but timidly socialist in the end.

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 the famous reactionary Friedrich. It is all symptomatic.

As I have already said about the German Revolution, a revolution is not a coup d'etat, 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 voctories 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 some day come to its final page. Then, there will begin another chapter, a chapter which may be the chapter of the Hungarian proletariat's victory.

Horthy's government is, for the Hungarian proletariat, 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 resulted in a treaty for peace but a treaty for war.

I will lay out the moral physiognomy, the ideological profile, of that document, still fresh, and already totally discredited, grave and headstone for President Wilson's candid democratic illusions.

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