Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [172]
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.22
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.23
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.24
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. 25
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,” Brătianu told the Council of Four, “that you are not perfectly informed about the