András B. Göllner, ed. <i>The Forgotten Revolution: The 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils</i>

The centenary of the Soviet Republic revived interest—if not necessarily public, at least scholarly—in the history of Hungary’s first experiment with communism. The book under review is the product of this revived scholarly interest, as well as a polemic against the demonization of the political Left and an attempt to rehabilitate the Soviet Republic, its leaders, and policies. The volume is part of the larger polemic, which seeks to locate the place of the Hungarian Republic of Councils in world history and rehabilitate its leaders and policies. The authors make no secret of their political preferences and ideological convictions. Guided by progressive and universal values that they believe transcend time and space, such as compassion toward the downtrodden, solidarity with the powerless, equal rights for all, and economically sustainable communal well-being, they subscribe to the creed that the task of history-writing and intellectuals is not simply to describe but to change the world. The contributors were looking for antecedents, lost and forgotten revolutions and defeated emancipation movements, not only to set the historical records straight but also to inspire and provide guidance for today’s activists. They have found such as an antecedent and model in the Hungarian Soviet Republic.The first chapter, Péter Csunderlik’s “The Roots and Antecedents of the Hungarian Republic of Councils,” traces the origins of the left-wing experiment in the pre-World War I socialist subculture and the chaos and confusion produced by the war. His thesis is that the Soviet Republic was not an accident; neither can it be described and dismissed, as many contemporary political commentators did, as a conspiracy and criminal enterprise founded by a handful of antisocial and ethnically alien (i.e., Jewish) adventurers. The Soviet Republic was a logical result of the lost war and the economic collapse and social disintegration in its aftermath, as well as of the rise of radical and leftist ideologies and political movements since the late nineteenth century. Csunderlik seeks to dispel several myths about the revolutionary period. He argues that the greatest omission or mistake of the democratic leaders was not their pacifism and naiveté about the intention of Entente leaders (in fact, the two democratic governments made a heroic effort to defend the country) but their failure to organize a national election and carry out substantial social, particularly land, reforms. Csunderlik rejects the demonization of Bolshevik leaders such as Béla Kun as historically incorrect and politically counterproductive. The Soviet leaders did not simply grab power: the new regime, at least in its first months of existence, received significant support from the lower orders, particularly from skilled workers and the intelligentsia in Budapest, while the rest of society, particularly the middle class and the elite, temporarily tolerated the first dictatorship of the proletariat. The collapse of the Soviet Republic could not be attributed only to the mistaken policies and needless radicalism of its leaders; Hungary’s first experiment with communism was defeated not from within but from without: by the Romanian Army, financed and politically supported by the victorious Entente powers.The second field of contention, or controversy, that the book seeks to address is the role of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in the revolutionary period. The next two chapters in this volume examine the historical origins, political, and social functions and the fate of these grassroots institutions in Germany and Hungary. In the chapter entitled “Workers’ Councils and Revolution: The German Example,” Marie-Josée Lavallée argues that a small group of revolutionaries, particularly the members of the Spartacus Groups and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, envisioned and sought to turn the workers’ councils into the cells of a new and more democratic and egalitarian social and political order. By infiltrating the local councils and changing their agenda, the majority social democrats were able to reduce their revolutionary potential. The revolution failed in Germany not only because the councils could not live up to the high expectations of the radicals. The country, as Lavallée’s chapter shows, was simply not ready for a true social revolution: the German working class had too much to lose; and the middle-class remained opposed to violent upheavals. Finally, the German political elite was aware that the Bolshevization of the country would provoke a Western reaction in the form of a military intervention, which could then result in the loss of even more territories.In contrast to Germany and to German historians, the historical debate on the origins and the role of the council movement in Hungary during the revolutionary period has been low-key. Lajos Csoma’s chapter, “Workers’ Councils and the 1919 Hungarian Commune,” addresses this lacuna in historical research by comparing the council movements in Germany and Russia, on the one hand, and Hungary, on the other, highlighting local and national peculiarities. Lavallée’s chapter and Csoma’s essay make for good comparative history. On the negative side, Lavelée’s chapter could have profited from a more detailed discussion on the highly politicized debate on the council movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, Csoma could have based his article on more archival sources to flesh out the social compositions of the local councils and shed light on the language, ideology, and mental universe of the participants.The book also makes a significant contribution to women’s history by highlighting women’s roles in the democratic revolution and the communist experiment. Susan Zimmermann has written a concise yet informative introduction to Magda Aranyossi’s essay, “The Impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1919 Republic of Councils on the Working Women’s Movement in Hungary.” Aranyossi was not only a witness to the Republic of Councils: she also played a major role in the feminist movement in Hungary and occupied important positions in both the Rákosi and Kádár regimes. Moreover, Aranyossi was the aunt of the famous writer Péter Nádas. Aranyossi had a high opinion of the Soviet Republic’s policy toward women and families: the socialist state enfranchised all working women over the age of eighteen; it built playgrounds for poor children; opened the doors of the high schools and universities to the talented daughters of the proletariat; and, last but not least, the new state also declared the principle of equal pay for equal work, and more. While many of these reforms were put into practice late and/or piecemeal, or remained only on paper, according to Aranyossi, the Soviet Republic’s intentions were good, and its social policy was light-years ahead of that of the prewar liberal governments and the interwar conservative authoritarian regime.Another area to which the volume makes a contribution is the short- and long-term impact of the Republic of Councils on political events and cultural trends in foreign countries. Kari Polanyi Levitt’s short essay, entitled “Vienna and Budapest after WWI: A Tale of Two Cities,” sheds light on the life of Hungarian emigres in the capital of the defunct Dual Monarchy. The chapter’s author is the only child of sociologist Karl Polányi and revolutionary Ilona Duczynska. In her piece, Levitt paints a vivid picture of her parents’ tribulations as refugees in Vienna and their political and scholarly activities. As a recollection of Kari’s childhood memories and of her upbringing in a progressive family in the socialist-ruled Austrian capital in the 1920s and early 1930s, the article, similarly to Aranyossi’s piece, can be used and appreciated as a primary source.Christopher Adam’s piece looks at the impact of the Communist experiment on North America. Entitled “The Exiled Voice of the 1919 Commune: The Hungarian Communist Press in Canada,” his essay examines the origins, impact, and social and political function of a small, working-class weekly, Kanadai Magyar Munkás [Canadian Hungarian Worker], founded in 1929. Besides organizing strikes and providing social services, the weekly kept the memory of the failed communist experiment alive as an event worthy of the 1848 Revolution. The essay is at its best when analyzing the competition between the conservative and wealthy publications and the underfunded leftist printed media. However, the paper should have made reference to the even greater Hungarian contribution to the formation of the communist movement in the United States, particularly to the role of József Pogány, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in developing the American Communist Party.The book is framed by András Göllner and Raquel Varela’s introduction and Dimitrios Roussopoulos’s excellent conclusion. Göllner also contributed two separate essays to the volume. In the first, entitled “Exploring the Public Policy Universe of the 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils,” he warns not to equate the history of the Republic of Councils with the Red Terror, and he would like to see more public attention devoted to its positive achievements. It is a mistake to describe the Soviet Republic as a Communist dictatorship, Göllner argues: in fact, the Communists represented a small minority in the leadership of the Republic of Councils. The Soviet leaders did not receive their orders from Lenin; rather they followed the teachings of August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg, and tried to put home-grown ideas into practice. In his second essay, entitled “The Rhapsody of the Permanent Counterrevolution in Hungary,” Göllner examines the long-term impact of the two revolutions. He argues that revolutions and radical reform movements have always been defeated in Hungary, and the history of the last one hundred years can be described as a permanent counterrevolution. Under interwar Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungarian workers, he writes, “became the slaves of the military-industrial complex that sustained European Fascism to the bitter end” (207). The Communist takeover of power in 1947 in Hungary and the creation of the Stalinist regime represented only different forms of the counterrevolution. The popular uprising in 1956, which revived the council movement, suffered the same end: the defeat of the uprising and the dissolution of the workers’ councils marked a new phase in the history of the permanent counterrevolution. After 1990, the new political elite did their best to ingratiate themselves with their capitalist masters from the West. But the harshest phase of the counterrevolution arrived with the victory of the Fidesz Party in 2010. The last twelve years have witnessed a wholesale attack on workers, the poor, the elderly, women, refugees, and the members of the LGBTQ community.Göllner’s and Varela’s introduction and Dimitrios Roussopoulos’s conclusion places the radical leftist experiment in the context of other forgotten revolutions. Göllner’s argument that the Soviet experiment cannot be reduced to the Red Terror poses a challenge to recent Hungarian scholarship. Yet one must also wonder if some of Göllner’s conclusions might not be overdrawn. In spite of their democratic or moderate socialist past, many leaders of the Soviet Republic did end up as refugees in the Soviet Union or remained Stalinist in the West. Their career paths suggest that the Soviet Republic was not simply about emancipation but could also be regarded as the forerunner to Stalinist dictatorship and János Kádár’s authoritarian state. Equally problematic, while brilliant, is Göllner’s idea about the permanent counterrevolution. Both the Horthy and the Kádár regimes had counterrevolutionary roots. Yet neither were counterrevolutionary in the sense that they wanted to stop and reverse modernization, public participation in political life, and the expansion of the welfare state. That the current government portrays the liberal conservative regime of the pre-1918 period and the conservative authoritarian government of Count István Bethlen in the 1920s as its forerunner does not mean that such links actually exist. The current regime in many respects is more “counterrevolutionary” than its predecessors.The book represents an important contribution to the historical research on the origins, meaning, and long-term impact of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. It acquaints international audiences with a forgotten chapter in East European history; the essays provide a good basis for international comparisons, inviting transnational research in labor and women’s history. Written in an enjoyable and highly polemical style, The Forgotten Revolution promises to revive scholarly interest in social upheavals and revolutions and gives a new impetus to the public debate on the significance of the Hungarian Republic of Councils.

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