Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [167]
20
Hungary
ON MARCH 23, 1919, as the first signs of spring were appearing, two American experts walked glumly in the Bois de Boulogne. “We had just learned,” one wrote in his diary, “of the outbreak of troubles in Hungary, which, if they spread, may make waste paper of our conventions for a while to come.” 1 If Austria had been causing mild concern in Paris, Hungary had been setting off alarm bells, especially when Béla Kun, an unknown communist, seized power in Budapest. Suddenly Bolshevism appeared to have taken a giant step into the rich Hungarian plain, with its key strategic position. With a short hop, it could be in Austria, already under a socialist government, or the Balkans, and with another step still, into Bavaria, where the communists were edging toward their brief moment in power. Kun himself sent out contradictory signals, with reassuring messages to the Allied leaders but fraternal greetings to their working classes. More worrying, he sent an offer eastward to Lenin, asking for a treaty. Perhaps the two communist states could establish a link through the disputed territory on the eastern edges of Poland and Czechoslovakia, where there were said to be local Bolshevik forces on the march.
Even before Kun arrived on the scene, the peacemakers were suspicious of Hungary. With its great landed magnates, its cowed peasantry and its history (the Magyars had stormed out of central Asia in the ninth century), there was something not quite European about Hungary. Liberals tended to blame the worst faults of the old empire on the Hungarian oligarchy. “There has been much talk of suppressing the revolution in Hungary,” Lloyd George told his colleagues on the Council of Four when they first heard the news. “I don’t see why we should do that: there are few countries so much in need of a revolution. This very day, I had a conversation with someone who has visited Hungary and who knows it well; he tells me that this country has the worst system of landholding in Europe. The peasants there are as oppressed as they were in the Middle Ages, and manorial law still exists there.”2
This time Lloyd George was not far wrong. Budapest was an elegant, modern capital, but the countryside, which produced much of Hungary’s wealth, was a different world. Serfdom had been finally abolished in 1848, but much of the land was still held in large estates, by aristocrats, the gentry or the church. In 1914 Prince Esterházy owned 230,000 hectares; one of his ancestors had had a uniform on which all the buttons were diamonds and the seams were marked out in pearls. The grand families were worldly and international, with houses in Vienna and Paris, English nannies and grooms, French cooks and German music masters. They spoke easily in French or Latin, less so in Hungarian. They produced the political leaders, the generals, occasionally even liberal reformers, but most were deeply conservative and uninterested in anything outside their own world. They distrusted Jews, although rich Jewish industrialists and bankers were starting to marry their children; they believed in keeping the non-Magyars, the Croats, Slovaks or Rumanians who probably made up more than half the population of prewar Hungary, firmly under control.3
The man Béla Kun overthrew in March 1919 was one of the greatest landowners of them all. Michael Károlyi, who took over in the last chaotic days of the war, owned 60,000 acres, a glass factory, a coal mine, a superb country house, a mansion in Budapest and several shooting lodges. When he tipped a Gypsy band in a restaurant the usual amount, his tutor, he recalled, reprimanded