PARIS 1919 (47 page)

The peacemakers asked the Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs to draw the new border between Hungary and Rumania. The French and the Italians wanted to give Rumania a generous swath of Hungary as well, while the British and the Americans followed ethnic lines, which would have kept the border further east. As one of the British experts said, “The balance must naturally be inclined towards our ally Rumania rather than towards our enemy Hungary.” The commission came up with a compromise report in March, which went a long way toward satisfying Rumania's demands. When rumors of its contents reached Hungary, they caused consternation. Posters with maps of a Hungary divided into four asked “Voulez-vous faire quatre Alsace-Lorraines?” (“Do you want to create four Alsace-Lorraines?”) Before the Supreme Council could decide what to do, the revolution in Hungary broke out, adding the stigma of Bolshevism to the beleaguered country.
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Károlyi's government had been under attack from the right, which bitterly resented attempts at land reform, and the left, which felt it was not going far enough. The peacemakers did little to help. Where Austria received 288,000 tons of food and clothing for relief in the first six months of 1919, Hungary got only 635 tons. “Our difficulties,” Károlyi recalled bitterly in exile, “were multiplied a thousand times by the ill-will and inefficiency of the different foreign missions in Budapest.” On March 20, Colonel Vix delivered the final blow when he presented Károlyi with a decision from the Supreme Council establishing a neutral zone between Hungary and Rumania. Hungary had ten days to withdraw all its troops to the west of this area, while Rumania could advance to its eastern edge. This, according to the peacemakers, was to prevent clashes between the two nations. The Hungarians did not see it in that light.
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As Károlyi pointed out to Vix, the Hungarians were being asked to withdraw from almost exactly the territory claimed by Rumania, while Rumanian troops were being allowed to move westward by a hundred kilometers. What was to stop them from going still farther into Hungary? If he agreed to the neutral zone, he added, there would be a revolution and his government would fall. Under his breath, he muttered: “As far as I am concerned, I should be glad to be rid of it.” Vix was unmoved; it was not, he kept repeating, a matter of politics. The Hungarians must calm down and accept the ultimatum from Paris. He was sure that the Allies would keep Rumania in check. They might as well occupy the whole country now, said Károlyi: “Make it a French colony, or a Rumanian colony, or a Czechoslovak colony.” Vix shrugged. The following day Károlyi's government fell and he went into exile.
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He died on the French Riviera in 1955.

Károlyi's successor was, as he predicted, a revolutionary. Béla Kun came from a tiny village in Transylvania and was the son of a drunken, shiftless notary. (His father was a nonpracticing Jew, a fact later seized upon by anti-Semites as proof of a widespread Jewish-Marxist conspiracy.) A dandy and a poseur, Kun was vain, hot-tempered and self-centered. He was also, it was generally agreed, ugly, with a huge head supported on a wiry small body, a flat nose and enormous ears. Before the war he had made something of a name as a radical journalist. In 1914, he joined up and fought against the Russians on the Eastern Front, where he was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought a rapid change in both his politics and his fortunes. By 1918 he was free and in Moscow, meeting with Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, and the leader of a new Hungarian communist movement. At the end of the war, provided with gold and fake documents by his new friends, Kun traveled back to Hungary to spread the revolution. His timing was perfect.
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Kun moved through Hungary's chaotic politics like a whirlwind, issuing manifestos and demands, calling strikes and demonstrations. When the police in Budapest beat him up, he achieved martyrdom. On March 21, the day after the Allied ultimatum, Károlyi's socialist allies in the government came to see Kun in prison; they were prepared to hand over power to the communists. Béla Kun got his freedom, his revolution and his power that day, all without a shot being fired. The next day he declared Hungary a Soviet republic.
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In the opinion of a young American officer in Budapest, the revolution was more nationalist than communist: “The Hungarians who are united in their conviction that Hungary must not be dismembered, have made use of Bolshevism as a last desperate resort to preserve the integrity of their country.” In Paris the Council of Four hesitated. Clemenceau and his military advisers were for reinforcing the Rumanians and letting them loose on both the Russian and Hungarian Bolsheviks. Foch appeared with a large map to demonstrate how Rumania was the key to preventing a solid Bolshevik front in the center of Europe. Forget the White Russians in southern Russia, he said brutally; they were already lost. “This is why I tell you: build upon Rumania, because there you have not only an army, but also a government and a people.” Wilson admitted that he was uncertain about the right course of action. “What exactly is our position with regards to the Bolsheviks?” Perhaps it had been unwise to establish the neutral zone between Rumania and Hungary: “It doesn't seem this method has produced the desired result.” Should the Peace Conference be choosing sides? “Nominally we are friends of the Hungarians and even better friends of the Rumanians.” Clemenceau responded sharply, “The Hungarians are not our friends but our enemies.” Of all the peoples in Austria-Hungary, they had been the most reluctant to surrender.
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Lloyd George, who was now modifying his earlier hostility to Hungary, sided with Wilson. After all, the Croats and the Slovenes had also fought until the bitter end for Austria-Hungary, and the Allies were now friendly with them. “Why not enter into conversation with the Magyars as well?” The German peace terms should be a warning to them all; he had spent the previous weekend at Fontainebleau considering their flaws—the way, for example, they were leaving Germans under Polish rule. It was just as dangerous to the future peace of Europe to leave millions of Hungarians outside their country. He was also doubtful, as a result of their experience with Russia, about the prospects for a military solution to Bolshevism. “Let's not deal with Hungary as with Russia,” he urged the others. “One Russia is enough for us.” He suggested that they send some reliable person, Smuts perhaps, to report on Kun and his regime. Wilson agreed with enthusiasm, Clemenceau with reluctance. Under French pressure, the Council of Four also agreed to ship military supplies to Rumania.
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On the evening of April Fool's Day, Smuts and his aides, including Harold Nicolson, left Paris on a special train for Budapest. Ostensibly, Smuts's job was to persuade the Hungarians to accept the neutral zone between Hungary and Rumania; his real purpose was to assess Kun and decide whether he might be used as an informal conduit to Lenin. (The Allies still had not come up with a workable policy on Russia.) The British also hoped that the mission might counteract French influence in central Europe. The news caused tremendous excitement in Budapest, where it was seen as a sign that the Paris Peace Conference was prepared to recognize the new government. Kun hastily sold off Hungary's remaining assets—its stocks of fats—to Italy and ordered a huge amount of red velvet to drape the buildings leading from the railway station to Budapest's leading hotel, which itself was decorated with a giant Union Jack and a tricolor.
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When he arrived in Budapest, Smuts refused to play along. He remained firmly in his special train and Kun was obliged to come to him. (The miles of red velvet had to wait until May Day to make their appearance.) Nicolson, no friend to Hungary at the best of times, viewed the communist with all the hauteur of his class. “A little man of about 30: puffy white face and loose wet lips: shaven head: impression of red hair: shifty suspicious eyes: he has the face of a sulky and uncertain criminal.” And the new Hungarian foreign minister, who accompanied Kun, was just as distasteful: “A little oily Jew—fur-coat rather moth-eaten—string green tie—dirty collar.”
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The discussions, in the cramped quarters of the dining car, did not go well. Kun wanted recognition; Smuts was determined to withhold it. Kun wanted the Rumanians to withdraw to the east of the neutral zone; Smuts was only prepared to make minor concessions that would have left Rumania occupying Transylvania. Smuts decided that there was no point in further bargaining. “Well, gentlemen,” he said at the end of the second day, “I must bid you good-bye.” He politely shook hands and stepped back on his train, which, to the amazement of the Hungarians, slowly pulled out of the station.
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Smuts concluded from his brief foray that Kun was a stupid man whose government was unlikely to last long.

Yet Smuts was willing, as he told the peacemakers in Paris, to follow up on the one useful suggestion Kun had made: that the nations of the former Austria-Hungary be called together to work out their common borders and common economic policies. Smuts even worked briefly with Keynes on a plan for an international loan to get the economies in the Danube basin going again. These were sensible ideas, but nothing came of them in Paris. The Italians were firmly against anything that smacked of a reborn Austria-Hungary, and none of the other Allies had a particular interest in implementing Kun's suggestions. Even if they had tried, the mutual hostilities among the successors to Austria-Hungary might have made the job impossible. There was to be precious little cooperation, economic or otherwise, along the Danube in the interwar years. The dream has never quite died, though. The son of the last emperor, Dr. Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen, as he is known in the European parliament, works indefatigably for cooperation among the nations that once belonged to his ancestors.
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In Hungary the communist-controlled newspapers claimed that Smuts's mission meant the Allies had recognized their regime. They did not report his sudden departure, but versions of what had taken place leaked out, adding to public unease. It was rumored that the Allies were sending an army to occupy Budapest, or that Trotsky and a Red Army were approaching in the northeast to support the Hungarian revolution and the one which had just occurred in Bavaria. The Austrian Reds were about to seize Vienna. The communists were arresting thousands of the middle and upper classes. There were right-wing plots to seize power, left-wing plans to unleash mass terror. Not all the rumors were false.
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Trotsky was not on his way, but the Bolsheviks were hoping to link up with their fellow communists. In Belgrade, Franchet d'Esperey was trying to persuade the Yugoslavs to send part of their army north to Budapest against Kun. In a palace in Vienna, exiled noblemen, including Károlyi's relatives, were meeting secretly to plan a counterrevolution. (In a daring raid on the Hungarian embassy, the conspirators seized a small fortune in cash which Kun had sent out of the country; unfortunately, they immediately became immobilized with quarrels over how to spend it.) In the Hungarian countryside, safely out of Budapest's reach, army officers led by another one of Károlyi's cousins planned a military coup. They persuaded one of Austria-Hungary's few naval war heroes, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to join them.
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Kun's regime made things easy for its opponents. In its 133 days in power it announced dramatic and largely unenforceable reforms: prohibition of alcohol, socialization of the factories, distribution of the big estates, the abolition of all titles, proletarian culture for all, compulsory baths and sex education for schoolchildren, compulsory reallocation of housing and furniture, the standardization of graves. They alienated almost every section of the population, from Catholics horrified by plans to turn churches into cinemas, to liberals appalled by the censorship, the arbitrary arrests and the secret police. Public opinion condemned the regime above all for its failure to cope with inflation and shortages, and its own corruption.
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What finally finished off Kun's government, though, were its external enemies. In April, a week after Smuts left Budapest, the Rumanian army, with a nod and a wink from the French military, attacked through the neutral zone toward Budapest. The Czechs made their move in the north a few days later. In Paris, the Rumanians, like the Czechoslovaks, claimed that they were blameless. “I fear,” Br
tianu told the Council of Four, “that you are not perfectly informed about the role of the Rumanian army and the Hungarian provocations.” Their moves were entirely defensive. “They are all little brigand peoples,” complained Lloyd George, “who only want to steal territories.” As the Rumanians moved well west of what they were claiming, even Clemenceau found their demands excessive. And he was worried about the political implications: his own left feared that he was planning to intervene against the Hungarian communists. He was also getting alarming reports about the state of morale among French forces supervising the armistice in Eastern Europe.
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