Page 263 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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purposes magyar leadership tried to interact with Italian and Austrian authorities, hoping that
these authorities, potentially helped by Great Britain, could expel Czechoslovakians, Roma-
nians and Yugoslavians from Hungary. But those political measures tried to salvage a desper-
ate situation. Internal political instability and the unsolved international situation led to end
forever the democratic-bourgeois government. Especially the 16 February’s law about the
land reform, far from having solved peasants’ problems, had just obtained the strengthening
of Communist party, fighting for lands’ squatting and conflict against landowners. Not even
Béla Kun’s and lot of communist leadership’s arrests stopped the complaints, that revolution-
ary leaders went on organizing even from the jail. Then, on March the 20th, French Colonel
Fernand Vyx rejected Hungarian government’s appeals, by the famous “Note”, causing the
degeneration of the existing situation: the “Vyx’s Note” signed Hungary’s fate (advantaging
Romania as anti-sovietic buffer State), seeming an ultimatum and creating the base for the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Afterwards the government quit, as a sign of complaint against
winners’ decisions, and social-democrats and communists, united in the Hungarian Socialist
Party, took control of the Country. This was the creation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
6
(Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság), run by a “Revolutionary Governmental Council”
and inspired to the Soviet example (instead of ministers there were “People’s Commissars”).
Béla Kun, appointed People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs, became the real leader of the
new government and immediately made an alliance with Lenin’s Russia: he decided the
separation between State and Church, he began the organization of a Red Army and he na-
tionalized banks, finance companies, mines, industries and lands. The revolutionary govern-
ment was very smart, advising it wanted to defend national borders and recover stolen areas,
as to endear itself to the nationalists and to the not-communists. Bolshevik regime’s deci-
sions had caused a strong discontent that in the future would have gradually damaged Hun-
garian people’s consensus to the communist leadership, while entente, in alarm due to Hun-
garian events and the possibility it would spread in the rest of Europe, didn’t end at all the
relationships with Hungarian Soviet Government and on April the 4th sent one of its repre-
sentatives, General Jan Smuts, to discuss peace agreement, not succeeding. Probably the
failure of Smuts’ mission convinced France to give up the diplomacy and support counter-
revolutionary groups in the Country and military offensive that Romania and Czechoslova-
kia made on the north-east front during the second half of April. The Entente, using its Ro-
manian, Czechoslovak and Serbian allies (afterwards the latter went for on the south-west
front with French divisions), had the clear intention to stop the Hungarian communist experi-
ence using weapons. But, despite the large deployment of the Allies and the inferiority of the
Red Army, the Soviet Republic managed to resist to the attack, above all thanks to the great
popular mobilization made by the revolutionary government, in which took part also some
officers of Hungarian ex-army and lots of enlightened intellectuals, moved due to that patri-
otic spirit on which Bela Kun relied on from the beginning. In this way the situation of the
Hungarian Soviet Government seemed to be very critical since the beginning of May: so

6 about Hungarian Soviet Republic: R. l. tokéS, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic, New York,
Praeger, 1967; M. Imre, L. SzüCS, A Forradalmi Kormányzótánács jegyzkönyvei 1919, Akadémiai Kiadó,
Budapest, 1986; P. FoRnaRo, Crisi postbellica e rivoluzione. L’Ungheria dei Consigli e l’Europa danubiana
nel primo dopoguerra, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1987