Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)
Room 16. From the Belle Epoch to the Collapse of the Monarchy (1900-1919). László Baják
the Allies recognised them and to all intents undertook the creation of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as a duty. With the capitulation in the autumn of 1918, first of Bulgaria and then of Turkey, the Balkan front disintegrated and the position of the Monarchy's army became hopeless. On October 17 István admitted, "We have lost this war." The hard part followed after this, but the balance was already extremely serious. Hungary had mobilised 3,800,000 men, of whom 661,000 (17%) died on the front, 743,000 (20%) were wounded and 734,000 (19%) were captured. Countless prisoners-of-war were languishing in concentration camps in Siberia and the Far East, of whom around 300,000 managed to find their way home by October 1918. 100,000, seeking a way out of their hopeless situation, participated in the Russian civil war, around one third of them perishing. The better part of the remaining 100,000 added to the list of those permanently lost. By October 1918 the disintegration of the Monarchy could no longer be delayed. In an edict of October 16 Emperor Charles I announced Austria's reformation into a confederation, which essentially legalised the national councils of the minorities and abolished the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. However, the minorities did not want a federation and in turn declared their secession; indeed, they made demands upon the territory of Hungary, which did not feature in Charles's edict. In Budapest, at midnight on October 23 rd , the parties of the radical opposition - Mihály Károlyi's Independence 1848 party, the National Bourgeois Radical Party and the Social Democratic Party of Hungary - formed a National Council as an opposition government, with Károlyi as its leader. The National Council's manifesto promised withdrawal from the German alliance and immediate peace, the removal of the present governmental system, an independent Hungary, universal suffrage and the secret vote, autonomy for the ethnic minorities, land reforms for the peasantry and social provisions for the working class. Their programme, despite or perhaps because of all its illusions, proved most attractive to the masses. On October 31, after the collapse of the Italian front and the Viennese revolution, power in Budapest also fell into the hands of the spontaneously organised workers' and soldiers' councils and the National Council. There was no resistance. The sole victim of the aster revolution, so named after the flowers placed on caps and in button-holes, was István Tisza, who was killed by an ad hoc firing squad of soldiers as the symbol of war and wartime suffering. The entire policy of Mihály Károlyi, who after the abdication of the king was elected President of the Republic on January 19, 1919, was constructed around the misplaced belief that the Allies would be prepared to accept him, together with the whole of Hungary, as a friend, or at Sándor Bortnyik: Red Engine, 1918 (oil on canvas) A dynamic expressionist-cubist symbol of approaching revolutions
