On 7 April 1919 they proclaimed the Bavarian Council Republic. Factories and large commercial enterprises were expropriated. Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie were threatened. Patrols were instituted around the city’s central districts. Telegrams of victory were sent to Moscow. Lenin replied congratulating the insurrectionaries; yet again he thought he had the proof that communism would spread quickly and easily to the rest of Europe.
The fact that Levien and Levine were of Jewish parentage and were Russian passport-holders did not go unremarked in Munich. In the eyes of Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio who in 1939 would become Pope Pius XII, Levien was ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.’8 The nuncio described the female communists as filthy sluts and he associated Levien and Levine with dirt, slipperiness and even bestiality. Pacelli’s prejudices were shared by many Christians in those years, and the Council Republic was widely regarded as a foreign disease. But the leaders of the Council Republic, by mixing exclusively with people who shared their political extremism, failed to detect the revulsion that millions of Germans felt for their creed. Nor did they appreciate how the disruption of social and economic stability that had enabled their seizure of power was only a temporary phenomenon. Retaliation was inevitable. But Levien and his comrades underestimated their enemies’ capacity to do them damage — and at a time when Kolchak was threatening Moscow, there was no chance of armed support from the Red Army.
The Bavarian Council Republic lasted only as long as it took for the national government in Berlin to organize an attack. Levien and Levine? were breathtakingly naive. Believing that common criminals were simply victims of the old Imperial order, they released all convicts from prison. (Neither Lenin nor Trotsky was ever tempted into such silliness.) The subsequent wave of robberies and murders in Munich made it a terrible place to live. The economic emergency intensified as businesses closed down. Levien and Levine had no idea how to restore employment, and their period in power was characterized by a collapse of industry and commerce.
In May 1919 the Freikorps assembled in Bamberg 150 miles to the north and moved on Munich alongside regular army units. Known communists were shot in the streets. The official tally was six hundred deaths, but the reality could well have been twice that. The fighting was over within a few hours as workers’ militias quickly laid down their arms. Levien escaped to Vienna until he took refuge in Soviet Russia in June 1921. Levine, a less worldly person, saw it as his duty to remain with his comrades in Munich. Arrested with the writer Ernst Toller, he was tried for sedition. He was resigned to his fate: ‘We communists are all dead men on leave.’9 He was executed after being found guilty of complicity in the shooting of hostages. The lamps of communism had failed to illumine central Europe. Although Soviet leaders were disappointed, they observed that German politics remained volatile and that the national government could not deal with its enemies on the political far left without bringing in the army and paramilitary forces. The economy was in tatters. Even if the Munich experiment had proved unsuccessful, this did not mean that workers in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe would not eventually find the ingredients to produce a revolutionary order.
Hungarian communists gave grounds for optimism from 21 March 1919, when they swept to power in Budapest with a communist dominated coalition. The revolution was quickly spread to the entire country — or at least to those parts of Hungary left to the Hungarians by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky greeted it with the same warmth as they had shown to the Bavarian Council Republic. Bela Kun, the Hungarian revolutionary leader, was a zealot for the Soviet order. He had spent time in Russia after being captured with the armies of Austria-Hungary on the eastern front. As an ex-POW he formed a Hungarian communist group in Moscow in March 1918, returning to Budapest as soon as the Great War was over. Kun had worked as a journalist and wrote lively pamphlets against the Western Allies and the prospect of a humiliating peace. He now found he had a talent for oratory, too. The unstable government that was striving to moderate the Allied terms threw him into prison. But when the social- democrats entered the cabinet they liberated Kun as a comrade on the political left. He walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post. He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he had received and fully intended to avenge.10
Like his friend and fellow communist Tibor Szamuely, Kun was a fanatic. Solidarity with Soviet Russia was proclaimed and reports of Bolshevik achievements were carried in the Budapest newspapers. The Red flag was hoisted on public buildings. Trade unions received a generous quota of free tickets to the theatres. The banks, mines and big textile factories were nationalized. Kun established a security police that soon gained notoriety for its terror against ‘class enemies’. Szamuely assembled the ‘Lenin Boys’ whom he sent into the villages to seize the harvest and impose a system of collective farms. (The same thing was happening in the Ukrainian countryside; but whereas in Ukraine it was against the instructions of Moscow, in Hungary it was on Kun’s orders.) Churches were desecrated and priests and landlords were arrested or murdered. When peasants objected to the violence, the Lenin Boys turned on them too. The communization of Hungarian society was undertaken at a faster pace even than in Russia after the October Revolution. Blood flowed copiously.
Such popularity as Kun retained lay in his unequivocal rejection of the Allies’ schemes for Hungary. The Western Allies planned to reward Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia with territory that until then had been part of Hungary. Hungary would become a third of its previous size. As a result even Hungarians who were wary of Kun’s communist internationalist doctrines lent him their support. The communist leadership were willing to act rather than merely grumble.
Recruiting left-of-centre commanders from the Imperial armed forces, Kun mobilized the troops to fight for every patch of ‘Hungarian’ soil. He vowed to repel the growing incursions by Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. He paraded foreign POWs through the streets of Budapest. Hungary’s interests, he implied, were safe in his hands. Although he disliked the Hungarian national flag, he yielded when Ferenc Julier, Chief of the General Staff, told him that without it there might be trouble in getting an army into the field against the Romanians.11 Kun was cunning in his interviews for the foreign press, pretending to be much more moderate than he really was and claiming that it would be years before any truly communist policies would be applied. For a while he was successful and the communist regime threw back the Romanian and Czech invaders in April 1919.12 Its Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia, taking several towns before meeting effective resistance. It closed the Danube to shipping, and Austrian attempts to break the river blockade were disrupted ‘by the Hungarian Bolshevists who would fire on boats’.13 The Orient Express continued to run across Hungary from Romania, but Red Guards with their fixed bayonets and grenade belts made crossing the border an unpleasant experience.14
The Allies reacted with an economic blockade designed to bring Kun and Szamuely to their knees.15 Food supplies were depleted. The only solution according to Kun was to expropriate more grain, vegetables and meat from the villages. Clashes with the peasantry intensified as civil war broke out.
Kun and Szamuely had always seen their ultimate salvation in international revolution. They begged Lenin and Trotsky to send a contingent of the Red Army from newly conquered Ukraine.16 Little did the communist leaders in Moscow and Budapest know that American forces were intercepting Hungarian wireless traffic.17 So nothing that Kun wrote in his telegrams was truly confidential.18 It was no secret, of course, that the Soviet leaders, if the opportunity arose, were intent on helping to spread communist revolution west-wards. The Bolshevik party’s entire foreign policy had been built on this foundation. Just occasionally there were surprises for the Allied powers, such as when the Austrian security agency claimed to have discovered a secret plan of Kun’s for a communist seizure of power in Vienna. This may have been a case of counter-intelligence officers trying to prove their usefulness to Austria’s new social-democratic government.19 It would seem that the Americans later used their intercepted information to prevent Kun from heading to Switzerland as an envoy of Lenin and Trotsky.20 Old ‘Austria-Hungary’ was boiling up with political conflicts that could spill over the new national borders. It appeared that anything might happen, and it frequently did.
Lenin and Trotsky did not dismiss Kun’s requests out of hand, and their Red Army high command began to examine how it might lend assistance to Hungary. It quickly became obvious that a campaign across the Ukrainian frontier would put the Red Army in danger from Kolchak and Denikin. If Russians marched westwards, they might find there was no Soviet homeland to return to. With regret they turned down Kun’s request.21
By late summer, the Hungarian Red Army faced rebellion throughout Hungary and threats on the northern borders. Desertions grew in number. The last slim hope of the Kun government vanished on 4 August when Romanian forces, after weeks of fighting in the north of the country, stormed into Budapest. Although they were delighted that a power in the region had overthrown communism, the Western Allies did not approve of what happened next. The Romanian military force was a law unto itself and the Bucharest authorities exercised no
