Proclamation of the Hungarian Republic. Communist Béla Kun returned from the nascent Soviet Union with considerable funding, and in November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and founded the Hungarian Communist Party. Adopting Lenin’s tactics, he immediately opposed Mihály Károlyi’s government and achieved great popularity despite being imprisoned. After his release in March 1919, Kun led a successful coup, formed a Communist-Social Democratic coalition government, and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Although the republic’s de jure leader was President Sándor Garbai, de facto power rested with Foreign Minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radio and received direct orders and advice from the Kremlin. The new regime collapsed four months later in the face of the Romanian advance and the widespread dissatisfaction of the Hungarian population (among those fleeing to other countries was the young Janos Lajos Neuman, aka Johnny von Neumann, who would become one of the fathers of the computer, information technology, and the atomic bomb). Kun fled to the Soviet Union, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy, heading the Crimean Revolutionary Committee from 1920. He organized and actively participated in the Red Terror in Crimea (1920-1921), following which he participated in the March Action of 1921, a failed communist uprising in Germany. During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of Trotskyism, arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession.
