Leader
Béla Kun
Béla Kun (Kohn) · 1886–1938 or 1939
Photograph. Wikimedia Commons / Nationaal Archief.
Kun imported the method of the Russian terror into a Hungarian republic that lasted 133 days, then helped run the Crimean killings, then was eaten by the same police.
Origin and religion
Hungarian, of Jewish family origin, secular communist. He led the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, fled to Russia after it fell, and was used by Moscow as a trusted foreign enforcer. He is not an “Old Bolshevik” of 1903. He is part of the Bolshevik record in Crimea.
Jewish family in Transylvania. Atheist. Hungarian communist, not a Russian Bolshevik by origin.
Responsibilities
- Leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919)
- Chairman of the Crimean revolutionary committee (1920)
- Comintern functionary
In Crimea he shared political direction of the 1920–21 massacres with Zemlyachka. In the Comintern he was one of many foreign communists who discovered that Moscow’s hospitality had an NKVD basement.
The record
He was arrested in 1937 during the purge of foreign communists. Most accounts put his execution in 1938 or 1939; the date in different archival notices is not identical, which is itself a fact about how the NKVD kept books. The Crimean crime does not depend on the exact day he died.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
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