Memory Politics Issues in Relation to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919)

Csunderlik, Péter (2022) Memory Politics Issues in Relation to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). RussianStudies.HU, 2022 (2). pp. 105-114.

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Abstract

Although the Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted only 133 days, it continues to have an enormous effect on Hungarian history. During the counterrevolutionary Horthy Era the whole episode was depicted as a horror story, for example by Cécile Tormay. In the socialist period, by contrast, during the Rákosi and Kádár dictatorships, the Hungarian Soviet Republic became the most glorious chapter of Hungarian history. Both representations were distorted, as right-wing storytellers emphasized the terror perpetrated by the dictatorship of the proletariat and excluded the other aspects of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, while after 1945 the red terrorists became heroes, and Communist Party historians focused on the commune’s social and culture policies, like the opening of baths and theaters for the proletarians and tried to forget the fact that farmers who resisted the changes were executed. Unlike these storytellers, we must put the Hungarian commune back into its historical context. The proclamation of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a coup d’état carried out by alien, communist agents, as it is represented in the current memory policy of the Orbán government; the Hungarian Soviet Republic was in fact a product of the chaotic and desperate situation in Hungary following the country’s defeat in the First World War, when the disappearance of Greater Hungary became a reality. This was also, however, a period when intellectuals agreed that world revolution was on the horizon, and believed that the 20th century would be socialist, just as the 19th century had been capitalist

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