Chronicles of the Commune

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Cecile Tormay
An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune, An Account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Hungary
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2020

“Pole and Hungarian brothers be.” Poland and Hungary have enjoyed a long and special relationship ^[2] since the Middle Ages. It was the ethnic Magyar Stephen Báthory (yes, of the same family as the infamous “Blood Countess ^[3]”) whom Polish noblemen voted into power as the king in 1576. As king, Báthory created the famous hussar corps of the Polish-Lithuanian army and imported skilled saber makers from Transylvania to create fearsome blades that earned a reputation for both high quality and deadly efficiency. Another shared monarch, the Pole Władysław III, died leading Christian forces against the Turks at Varna ^[4]. Over the course of centuries, Poles and Hungarians fought side by side against shared enemies like the Teutonic Knights and Turks, plus they deserve credit for turning the tide against the Mongols. ^[5] Their friendship is a brotherhood defined by a shared Christian faith and a willingness to use arms in order to defend Christendom. 

Poles and Hungarians today also share the distinction of being the primary enemies of the European Union and the American Leviathan. The national conservative governments in Warsaw and Budapest have managed so far to thwart the machinations of Berlin, Paris, and Washington in regards to Muslim invasions and the globohomo agenda that in effect is the cultural arm of neoliberal imperialism. NGOs filthy with Soros lucre constantly harp ^[6] about Hungary’s “turn away from democracy,” and Western think-tanks rotten with Russophobia write screeds denouncing the genuine populism of Poland and Hungary as a roundabout Russian plot. ^[7] The attacks on Poland and Hungary reveal the naked truth that “our democracy,” which Western elites worship, is nothing but pseudo-imperialism designed to corrode all racial, national, religious, and communal bonds in the service of global capital. 

As for the Poles and Hungarians, their resistance is borne of experience and history and as victims of various totalitarian ideologies (liberalism is a totalitarian ideology, after all). Hungary’s first encounter with Bolshevism came in March 1919. The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic ^[8], which was the first Bolshevik state outside of Russia, drenched Hungary in a sea of blood. Fueled by ethnic resentment as well as Marxist fervor, the Hungarian Communists made it their mission to oppress and wipe out all traces of Christianity, familial loyalty, and national pride in the Hungarian people. Published in 2020 by the fine folks at Antelope Hill Publishing ^[9], An Outlaw’s Diary by Hungarian novelist Cecile Tormay is an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Hungary. Despite its age, the book is painfully relevant today in our age of increasing anarcho-tyranny. 

Reviled ^[10] by the same forces who disdain Orban and his government, Tormay was once a popular novelist and Right-wing activist in Hungary during the age of the Dual Monarchy. When the Bolshevik revolution hit Hungary in March 1919, she, like millions, was caught in the black heart of the movement in Budapest. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was born out of the ashes of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in November 1918. The so-called “Aster Revolution” ^[11] installed the First Hungarian Republic and Mihály Károlyi as its leader. Like the German Revolution that occurred in the same month, the First Hungarian Republic was a bourgeois coup led by professors, wealthy urban merchants, and members of the Social Democratic Party (MSZDP). The First Republic was thoroughly unprepared to deal with both the vengeful Entente (who wanted to punish Hungary for fighting alongside the hated Germans) and its voracious neighbors. A weakened Hungary was attacked on all sides by the new states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as old enemies in Romania. The Slavs and Romanians invoked nationalism to carve out lands formerly belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary. The First Republic seemed unwilling or incapable of invoking an appropriate response. 

Waiting in the shadows of these events was the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP). Founded in Moscow by radicalized prisoners of war, the MKP enjoyed Soviet financial backing as well as a reputation for ruthlessness (some members of the group fought ^[12] in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution, while others executed White Russian and Austro-Hungarian prisoners in Russia). The Communists were also savvy enough to latch onto the nationalism issue, and during the debate over the Treaty of Versailles, the Communists promised the Hungarian proletariat both revolution and revanchism. 

The leader of the Hungarian Communists, Béla Kun, became the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the First Republic on March 21, 1919. This is where Tormay’s diary begins, on the night when the Bolsheviks seized control and formed a new Communist-Social Democrat coalition government: 

“Death to the bourgeois!” A bullet strikes a lamp and there is a shower of glass on the pavement. A carriage drives past furiously, then stops away in the distance. Other cars follow its track into the maddened, lightless town. What is happening here, beyond it, everywhere, in the barracks, in the boulevards? Sailors are looting the inner city: a handful of Bolsheviks have taken possession of the town. There is no escape! [1] ^[13]

Much like the American racial jacquerie of 2020, the Bolshevik revolution in Hungary was inaugurated with state-sponsored anarcho-tyranny: drunken sailors and soldiers looted shops and homes in Budapest, Communist thugs harassed women on the streets, and all semblance of law and order collapsed as police officers either went over to the revolution or went home to protect their families. As for Tormay, her well-known name meant that she had to flee into the countryside. There, between March and July 1919, she avoided the revolution by moving from house to house and living among the hardy, Christian, and patriotic peasants of Hungary. 

What makes An Outlaw’s Diary a must-read text is its brutal honesty and its bravery in telling the truth about the racial makeup of the revolutionaries. “The demoniacal organizers,” Tormay writes, “the raving wire-pullers and prompters have taken their place, and for the first time in the long history of Hungary, Hungarians are excluded from every inch of ground, whether the hills and the vales of the Carpathians; or the boundless plains.” [2] ^[16] Hungarians were replaced by ethnic minorities, most notably Jews. Outside of Budapest, where the Communists did enjoy some support with the proletariat, the Hungarian Bolsheviks found it impossible to convert Slavs, Romanians, or provincial Hungarians, all of whom saw Kun’s government as a Jewish cabal. [3] ^[17] This was no mere anti-Semitic trope: the leaders of the revolution were almost all Jewish. The hunchbacked Tibor Szamuely ^[18] was the Deputy People’s Commissar of War and People’s Commissar of Public Education; Kun’s righthand men were Matyas Rakosi (Roth/Rosenfeld) and Otto Korvin (Klein); György Lukács ^[19], the son of a millionaire banker who remains a hero to Western Marxists in English departments everywhere, served as a political commissar for the Hungarian Red Army, as well as one of the leaders of Communist education. These men, along with other agitators, made it their mission to disrupt nominal life in the country. For over one hundred days, they succeeded. 

Tormay notes that the Hungarian Soviet consolidated power through pure violence and social control. On the one hand, armed thugs used the trains to travel the countryside and carry out swift executions of “counter-revolutionaries.” The masters of this violence were the Lenin Boys. Known for their distinct leather jackets and flat caps, the Lenin Boys, who were led by Szamuely and a Communist former sailor named Jozsef Cserny, specialized in abductions, torture, and summary executions. This became known as the “Red Terror ^[20],” which singled out the clergy, intellectuals, and wealthy peasants for liquidation. Thousands died in this manner. 

As for social control, by March 1919, all newspapers in Budapest were either aligned with the Social Democrats or completely controlled by the Communists. All other dissent, even including the one liberal capitalist newspaper in Budapest that had supported the revolution, was squashed. [4] ^[21] The Communists did not need to capture Hungary’s public schools, for crypto-Communists had long controlled portions of the Hungarian education system. But, with the coming of the Soviet, Communist instructors were given full control of the classroom. With this power, the schools and the Commissary of Education seized private libraries, banned the teaching of Christianity, and instituted sex education for the youngest pupils, including grade school children who were informed about the benefits of free love and the mechanics of sexual reproduction. 

Throughout all this turmoil, Tormay never loses sight of the fact that the Hungarian Soviet is nothing more than the secularized synagogue — a state based on the principles of Jewish group identity. 

The Jew comes uninvited and declines to go when dismissed. He spreads and yet holds together. He penetrates the bodies of nations. He invisibly organizes his own nation among alien peoples. He creates laws beyond the law. He denies the conception of “patrie” but has a “patrie” of his own which wanders and settles him. He scoffs at other people’s conception of God and yet builds churches of his own everywhere. . . . What the Jew finds ridiculous in other people, he keeps fanatically alive in himself. [5] ^[22]

The Jewish-dominated Hungarian Soviet could not hide its ethnic character, nor did it really bother to try. Tormay recounts one time during a public execution of “counter-revolutionaries” when Szamuely let a Jewish prisoner go with a pithy phrase about how Jews were only hung by accident. Elsewhere, despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Hungarian Soviet, the government found willing accomplices among Jewish bankers and financiers in Budapest (a similar situation unfolded in Bolshevik Russia, too). ^[23] Jews were spared from the rampant looting of the Bolsheviks, as Red Army soldiers with bayonets guarded Jewish homes and shops. [6] ^[24] Jewish officials were also protected from angry Hungarian crowds following incidents like the one during the Feast of Corpus Christi, where Jewish Communists in cars tried to run worshippers over or spit on the consecrated host. [7] ^[25]

For Tormay and other Hungarian patriots, the conundrum of 1919 was that they suffered under Communist rule, and yet did not want salvation in the form of foreign occupation. The Hungarian Soviet never knew a moment of peace, as the Czechoslovakian and Romanian armies continued to press in on the shrunken Hungarian state. At times, the Red Army showed some promise, especially against the equally hapless Czechoslovaks. However, against the Romanians, who enjoyed French military support, the Red Army fell apart. Much of this was due to internal divisions, as most of the soldiers were Hungarian nationalists who grew to resent the mostly Jewish political commissars who refused to do any fighting. Then, in the summer of 1919, several cities in western Hungary rose in revolt, initiating a counter-revolution led by the Hungarian National Army, which was officered by and composed of World War I veterans. These Hungarian Whites, after a few missteps and failed risings that were put down with extreme violence, found a leader in Admiral Miklós Horthy. Horthy and the National Army would enter Budapest with the Romanians in August 1919, effectively ending the Hungarian Soviet. Kun and company fled to Vienna rather than face justice. Kun would be accused of Trotskyism by Stalin. He died sometime after being arrested by the NKVD in 1937. Other former Communists tried to offer their services to the Whites, while thousands were executed in revenge killings known as the White Terror. Tormay notes with disgust that the Jewish women of Budapest saved their skins by sleeping with Romanian soldiers. [8] ^[26]

As for Horthy, he ruled as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 until 1944. His national-conservative government expanded Hungary’s borders after successful wars against Slovakia and Yugoslavia, plus it sent Hungarian divisions to the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union. Horthy’s government, which did not have much enthusiasm for Germany’s war, quietly saved an untold number of Central European Jews ^[27]. For this, Horthy is today painted as a “Nazi” by the international Left. 

Tormay, who was already a middle-aged woman when she composed An Outlaw’s Diary, lived long enough to see Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, which she supported with gusto as the opening salvo of a European-wide counter-revolution against Soviet Communism and Anglo-American liberalism. Tormay was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, but she died in 1937 without having won the award. Today, in a renewed and prosperous Hungary, many celebrate Tormay as a Hungarian patriot. An Outlaw’s Diary is a reminder of just how patriotic Tormay was, plus it might serve as a blueprint for a future American dissident. After all, the current regime in Washington, DC is clear on its abhorrence of the Historic American Nation and the utility of anti-white vitriol. The neoliberal Leviathan sees rooted, rural, and Christian whites as the last impediment to complete atomization. Therefore, ethnic resentments are but one tool for oppression prior to dispossession. This scenario played out in Hungary in 1919, but unlike Hungary, no foreign governments are coming to save the United States. 

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Notes

[1] ^[31] Cecile Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune, An Account of the Revolution in Hungary (Antelope Hill, 2020), p. 1. 

[2] ^[32] Ibid., 7.

[3] ^[33] Keith Hitchens, “The Rumanian Socialists and the Hungarian Soviet Republic,” Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 109

[4] ^[34] Tormay, 29.

[5] ^[35] Ibid., 51.

[6] ^[36] Ibid., 187.

[7] ^[37] Ibid., 149-50.

[8] ^[38] Ibid., 200.