Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки, Vol 19, Iss 3(166), Pp 120-127 (2017)

Венгрия, русская революция, Октябрьский переворот, Екатеринбург, венгерские военнопленные, Венгерская Советская Республика., History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature

This article discusses the impact of the Russian revolution of 1917 on Hungary, and the Hungarian people. During World War I, many Hungarians found themselves in Russia as prisoners of war. Many of them supported the Reds in the Russian civil war (among others, their traces can be found in the events of the last weeks of life of the Imperial family), and in the subsequent decades, some of them (for example Imre Nagy, Matyas Rakosi) played a crucial role in the history of Hungary. In the spring of 1917, many Hungarians were worried and impressed by the news about the Russian revolution which shook the Hungarian public. After the October revolution, the Hungarian left-wing Radicals began to support the Leninist-Bolshevik principles and call for civil war. The author analyses the press, memoirs, and archival documents of the time, and concludes that the collapse of the “old Hungary” in 1918 was due to a major role played by former prisoners of war who, as a result of the Brest peace in 1918, came home from Russia, “infected” by the ideas of the revolution. They ruined the army, and the country exhausted by war from the inside. In 1919, the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic tried to adopt the “Moscow models” of governance. Because of the desperate situation in the country, many Hungarian intellectuals welcomed the attempt at first, but the policy of terror carried out by the Hungarian Bolsheviks naturally led to disappointment, and the fact that the government itself destroyed its moral and political foundations.