HUNGARY: Up With Bela Kun!

Plots to restore 17-year-old Archduke Otto to the Throne of Hungary and rumored meetings of Royalist conspirators in Hungarian castles have kept Hungarians in a romantic haze of Graustarkian intrigue for many months. Last week the crack of rifles in Budapest snapped citizens back to reality, and the problems of unemployment.

From 11 o’clock in the morning a trickle of unemployed began sifting in from Budapest’s industrial suburbs toward the Inner City and the Municipal Park. With the noon whistle, when thousands of factory hands threw down their tools, the trickle swelled to a river. Socialist and Communist agitators appeared magically, shouting for government dole, free bread lines, work on government projects. Squads of mounted gendarmes moved nervously up and down the avenues.

Just as tempers were rising, one Dr. Soltan Klars, municipal physician, tooted past a group of angry workmen in a new and shiny automobile. That was all that was needed. With howls of rage they sprang on the running board, beat the frightened doctor, set the car afire.

“Loot the shops,” shouted the agitators, “burn the fat bourgeois restaurants!”

Karl Payer, Socialist Deputy who had helped organize the park mass meeting, suddenly grew frightened at the turn of events, tried to calm the rioters. He had to flee for his life. Like locusts the workmen swept down Andrássy Street, looting shops, smashing windows. The three most expensive restaurants in Budapest, the Edison, the Western, Weingruber’s (beloved of plump monocle-eyed Ferenc Molnar) were gutted. Piling chairs, crates, table tops to make street barricades the mob raised the old polysyllabic clarion of Communism, “Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”

Cutting, thrusting with their sabres, police charged down the street, were turned at the barricades with a hail of bottles, pistol bullets.

“Up with Bela Kun!” screamed the Communists.

No cry could chill the blood of Budapest’s bourgeoisie as quickly. Eleven years have passed since the pale violet-scented clerk Albert Cohen, Bela Kun in Hungarian, ruled Budapest for 133 bloody days, but nursemaids still frighten children with lurid tales of gutters red with blood, nuns and countesses falling before his firing squads, rich landowners tortured to death. Since his downfall in 1919 Bela Kun has held a minor office in Moscow’s Foreign Propaganda bureau. He has appeared, plump, ugly flashily dressed, smelling of wood violet, in Portugal and Vienna only to be hustled out of the country by frightened police. “Up with Bela Kun” was therefore a cry only to be answered by armored cars and spitting machine guns. An official bulletin appeared that evening:

“The casualties of today’s disorders are two killed, 57 seriously wounded, some of whom are dying, and 150 less seriously.”

Prime Minister Count Bethlen, absent at Geneva, escaped the ructions. Scape goat was Dr. Joseph Vass, 53, Minister for Social Welfare & Labor, and acting Prime Minister. He was a Roman Catholic Monsignor, formerly professor of theology at the University of Budapest before he entered politics ten years ago as a leader of the Christian National Party. He was unaccustomed to riotous conduct. Last week’s disturbances caused his death, from heart failure.