Fraternity-Testvériség, 1956 (34. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1956-06-01 / 6. szám
8 FRATERNITY some veterans of our diplomatic and military services who had worked together with Bandholtz remember the days of thirty-five years ago when that self-styled diplomat made irregular but successful diplomatic history on the shore of the not-at-all blue Danube. Victors to the Aid of the Vanquished In the summer of 1919, in conjunction with the downfall of the short-lived but sanguinary Hungarian Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun, troops of Rumania •— Johnny-come-lately ally of the Entente — entered the capital of war-loser Hungary. The Communists collapsed under the combined pressure of passive resistance at home, invasion from abroad, and proscription by the Allied Powers. Lost was their first foreign crucible for world revolution, the testing ground on the crossroads of East and West through which the U. S. S. R. had hoped to extend its frontage as far as the Rhine. Soviet Russia, separated from Hungary by hostile forces, hard pressed by the armies of Kolchak and Denikin from South and East, was in no position to lend direct aid to its Gauleiter in the Danube valley who had received his original instructions directly from the horse’s mouth — from Lenin himself. In vain had Lenin declared that the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet “perhaps plays a larger role in history than the Russion Revolution”; 1 the roof caved in over Kun and his lieutenants — among them Rákosi, currently Number One Communist in Hungary — and the Kremlin could do nothing but watch the dramatic spectacle. A make-shift Social Democratic cabinet took over. It was booted out five days later by a group of nationalists through a ludicrous coup d’etat fit more for an operetta than for history. But there was nothing farcical or unreal about the utter exhaustion, hunger and despair of the people which, in a war it had neither caused or desired, had one way or another lost nearly 60 percent of its military forces and was about to be deprived of some 72 percent of its pre-war territory with 64 percent of the total population. Clemenceau. the old “Tiger”, acting on behalf of the Supreme Allied Council, sent a message to the new Government: “Hungary shall carry out the terms of the Armistice and respect the frontiers traced by the Supreme Council, and we will protect you from the Rumanians who have no authority from us. We are sending forthwith an Inter-Allied Military Mission to superintend the disarmament and to see that the Rumanian troops withdraw.” Four general officers were immediately appointed as principal members of the Mission — Bandholtz of the United States, Gorton of Great Britain, Graziani of France and Mombelli of Italy. Their task was to attempt the impossible — to create order out of political, economic and i Lenin’s Address to the Factory Committees and Union Officials in Moscow; “Sochineniia”, 3rd ed., XXIV, 261.
