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Béla Kun

Béla Kun (born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Kun worked as a journalist up until the First World War. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army and was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, after which he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Urals. Kun embraced communist ideas during his time in Russia, and in 1918 he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. He befriended Vladimir Lenin and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

In November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and set up the Party of Communists in Hungary. Adopting Lenin's tactics, he agitated against the government of Mihály Károlyi and achieved great popularity despite being imprisoned. After his release in March 1919, Kun led a successful coup d'état, formed a Communist-Social Democratic coalition government and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though the de jure leader of the republic was prime minister Sándor Garbai, the de facto power was in the hands of foreign minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radiotelegraph and received direct orders and advice from the Kremlin.

The new regime collapsed four months later in the face of Romanian advance. Kun fled to Soviet Russia, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy as the head of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee from 1920. He organised and actively participated in the Red Terror in Crimea (1920–1921), following which he participated in the 1921 March Action, 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. He was posthumously rehabilitated by Soviet leadership in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the De-Stalinization period under Nikita Khrushchev.

Early life
Béla Kohn, later known as Béla Kun, was born on 20 February 1886 in the village of Lele, located near Szilágycseh, Szilágy County, Kingdom of Hungary (today part of Hodod, Satu Mare County, Romania). His father, Samu Kohn, was a lapsed Jewish village notary, while his mother, Róza Goldberger, was Jewish. Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was educated at the Silvania Főgimnázium in Zilah (present-day Silvania National College, Zalău) and a famous Reformed kollegium (grammar school) in the city of Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

At the kollegium Kun won the prize for best essay on Hungarian literature that allowed him to attend a gymnasium. His essay was on the poet Sándor Petőfi and the concluding paragraphs were:

"The storming rage of Petőfi's soul... turned against the privileged classes, against the people's oppressor... and confronted them with revolutionary abandon. Petőfi felt that the country would not be saved through moderation, but through the use of the most extreme means available. He detested even the thought of cowardice... Petőfi's vision was correct. There is no room for prudence in revolutions whose fate and eventual success is always decided by boldness and raw courage... this is why Petőfi condemned his compatriots for the sin of opportunism and hesitation when faced with the great problems of their age... Petőfi's works must be regarded as the law of the Hungarian soul... and of the... love of the country'."

In 1904 he began to study law at Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Béla magyarized his birth surname, Kohn, to Kun in 1904, although the almanac of the university still referred to him in print by his former name as late as 1909. There is no archival evidence that he took any formal action to change the spelling of his name, although it is clear that from 1904 all those around him referred to him as Béla Kun rather than Kohn, and he likewise used the Magyar variant in his signature.

Before World War I, he was a muck-raking journalist with sympathies for the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in Kolozsvár. In addition, Kun served on the Kolozsvár Social Insurance Board, from which he was later to be accused of embezzling. He had a fiery reputation and was involved in duels several times. In May 1913 he married Irén Gál, a music teacher of middle-class background from Nagyenyed (today Aiud, Alba County); they had two children, Ágnes, born in 1915, and Miklós, born in 1920.

Early political career
During his early education at Kolozsvár, Kun became friends with the poet Endre Ady, who introduced him to many members of Budapest's left-wing intelligentsia.

Kun fought with the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, and was captured and made a prisoner of war in 1916 by the Imperial Russian Army. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Ural Mountains, where he was exposed to Communism. The Russian Revolution in March 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik coup the following November not only set him free, but provided him with unforeseen opportunities.

In March 1918, in Moscow, Kun co-founded the Hungarian Group of the Russian Communist Party (the predecessor to the Party of Communists in Hungary) with other former Hungarian POWs. He travelled widely, including to Petrograd and Moscow. He came to know Vladimir Lenin there, but inside the party he promoted ultra-radical left-wing political opposition to Lenin and the mainstream Bolsheviks. Kun and his friends, such as the Italian Umberto Terracini and the Hungarian Mátyás Rákosi, aggregated around Grigory Zinoviev or Karl Radek. Whereas Lenin advocated making peace with the Central Powers, despite the harsh conditions they imposed, in order to "save the revolution", Kun and his group took the side of Nikolai Bukharin, who wanted to continue and expand the war to transform it into an international revolutionary struggle to impose Communism on the rest of Europe. Lenin often called them "kunerists", and said of Kun, "We can see that this man comes from a country of poets and dreamers."

In the Russian Civil War in 1918, Kun fought for the Bolsheviks. During this time, he first started to make detailed plans for a Communist revolution in Hungary. In November 1918, with at least several hundred other Hungarian Communists and with a large sum of money provided by the Soviets, he returned to Hungary.

Hungarian People's Republic
In Hungary, the resources of a shattered government were further strained by refugees from lands lost to the Allies during the war, and which were due to be lost permanently under the Treaty of Trianon. Rampant inflation, housing shortages, mass unemployment, food shortages and coal shortages further weakened the economy and stimulated widespread protests. In October 1918, the Aster Revolution saw the inauguration the Hungarian People's Republic, under an unstable coalition government of Socialists and other radicals. Led by Béla Kun, the inner circle of the freshly established party returned to Budapest from Moscow on 16 November 1918. On 24 November they created the Party of Communists from Hungary (Hungarian: Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja).

He immediately began a highly energetic propaganda campaign against the government of President Mihály Károlyi, and his Social Democratic allies, accusing them of betraying the working class, of lack of class consciousness, of not wanting to continue the expropriation of large domains and the big capital. His aim was to copy the tactics Lenin had used so successfully, which included pandering to the demands of all the discontented in society: unemployed, pensioners, veterans, employees; relentlessly denouncing the Government and the parties that supported it; as well as infiltrating the trade unions, discrediting their executives, and undermining the Socialist Party by dividing the more moderate leaders from the more extreme ones.

His speeches had a considerable impact on his audiences. One who heard such a speech wrote in his diary:

"Yesterday I heard Kun speak... it was an audacious, hateful, enthusiastic oratory. [...] He knows his audience and rules over them... Factory workers long at odds with the Social Democratic Party leaders, young intellectuals, teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks who came to his room... meet Kun and Marxism."

In addition, the Communists held frequent marches and rallies and organised strikes. Desiring to achieve a revolution in Hungary, he communicated by telegraph with Vladimir Lenin to garner support from the Bolsheviks, which would ultimately not materialise.

Despite Kun's efforts, by February 1919 the Communists had fewer than 30,000 members, compared with the 700,000 of the Social Democrats. Kun knew that if the upcoming elections went ahead, they would be a disaster for the Communists. Therefore, the Communist press launched a campaign against a fictitious "reactionary conspiracy" which they claimed the Károlyi government was either unaware of, or unwilling to crush. On 20 February 1919 the Communists invaded and pillaged the headquarters of the Socialist daily newspaper. The attack left a few dead and many injured, primarily policemen who had tried to stop the Communist aggression. Kun and 67 other Communist leaders were arrested.

However, despite the apparent failure of this adventure, there were two factors that worked to Kun's advantage. First, the press, even the non-socialist press, claimed that the imprisoned Communists had been mistreated by some members of the police force that supposedly wanted to avenge the death of their colleagues, and also publicised the supposedly courageous attitude of prisoner Béla Kun, a man previously little known outside his circle of followers. This greatly increased the popularity of Kun and sympathy toward the Communists among the general public. Concerned by this unintended shift in public opinion, the government gave orders that while in prison Kun be allowed to carry out any political activity he wished, which meant he was able to continue directing the Hungarian Communist Party from his cell. There were days in which Kun received up to four hundred visitors, mainly far-left Social Democrats who now considered Kun, whose stature was already increased by the prestige of participating in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a martyr.

The second was that on 19 March 1919, French Lt-Col Fernand Vix presented the "Vix Note", ordering Hungarian forces to be pulled back further from where they were stationed, clearing the areas of Debrecen and Makó. It was assumed that the military lines would be the new frontiers that would be established by the peace conference between Hungary and the Allies. Károlyi resigned, perhaps in order not to link his name to the acceptance of that imposition, and soon after a proclamation was made public in his name stating that he had voluntarily given up his powers to a "new government of the proletariat", i.e., the Socialists. Later in his life Károlyi denied that he had made such a statement, though he did not disavow it at the time or in the following years during which he remained quietly in Hungary. The Vix Note created a massive upsurge of nationalist outrage, and the Hungarians resolved to fight the Allies rather than accept the new demarcation lines.

The Social Democrats approached Kun on the subject of a coalition government, hoping he would be able to use his Bolshevik connections to bring the Red Army to Hungary's aid. So desperate were they for support from Moscow that it was Kun, a captive, who dictated the terms to his captors. This was despite the Red Army's full involvement in the Russian Civil War and the unlikelihood that it could be of any direct military assistance. Kun proposed the merger of the Social Democrat and Communist parties, the establishment of a Soviet Republic and several other radical measures, which the Social Democrats agreed to.

Hungarian Soviet Republic
On 21 March 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second Communist regime in Europe after Russia itself, was proclaimed; the Social Democrats and the Communists merged under the interim name Hungarian Socialist Party, and Béla Kun was released from prison and sworn into office.

The nominal head of the Soviet Republic was a Socialist leader, Sándor Garbai, but in practice power rested with Kun, although officially he was only People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and from April 1919 also People's Commissar for Defence. As he told Lenin, "My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me."

The Social Democrats continued to hold the majority of seats in government. Of the thirty-three People's Commissars of the Revolutionary Governing Council that ruled the Soviet Republic, fourteen were former Communists, seventeen were former Social Democrats and two had no party affiliation. With the exception of Kun, every Commissar was a former Social Democrat and every Deputy Commissar a former Communist. Despite the fact that the Socialists were by far more numerous, they passively accepted the leadership and the programme of the smaller but far more active and determined Communist Party, which claimed to represent the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

In the hope of placating the new Hungarian regime, the victorious Entente expressed willingness to bring the military demarcation to the line specified by the armistice of Belgrade the previous November, stating however that it would have no relevance to the final clauses of the peace treaty. This gesture was an undeniable success for the Socialist-Communist government which was thus offered some badly needed breathing space. However Kun rejected the proposal, declaring during a rally on 19 April: "Comrades, we do not profess the doctrine of territorial integrity, but we want to live, and this is why we did not accept that our freed proletarian brothers living in the neutralised zone be rejected under the yoke of capitalism. To do so would deprive the Hungarian proletariat of the physical means necessary to live. [...] It is a matter, therefore, which concerns the struggle between the international revolution and the international counter-revolution."However he stated in a letter to Lenin a few days later, on 22 April, possibly to exculpate himself from the suspicion of harbouring nationalist sentiment: "Whatever happens, all our actions will be dictated by the interests of the world revolution. We do not think even for a moment to sacrifice the interests of the world revolution to those of one of its components. Even if we were obliged to sign a peace 'à la Brest-Litovsk', we would do it with the clear conscience which inspired you when you made the Brest-Litovsk peace, concluded against my will and against the will of the Left Communists." Given the disparity in power between Hungary and the Allies, Hungarian chances for victory were slim at best. To buy time, Kun tried to negotiate with the Allies, meeting the South African General Jan Smuts at a summit in Budapest in April. Agreement proved impossible, and Hungary was soon at war later in April with the Kingdom of Romania (as part of the Hungarian–Romanian War) and Czechoslovakia (as part of the Hungarian–Czechoslovak War), both aided by France.

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was characterised from almost the beginning by harsh measures not only against the old ruling classes, but also against the peasants. The first action of the new government was the nationalization of the large majority of private property in Hungary. Despite their promises, Béla Kun's government chose not to redistribute land to the peasantry. Instead, all land was to be converted into collective farms and former estate owners, managers, and bailiffs were to be retained as the new collective farm managers. The Communists remained highly unpopular in the Hungarian countryside, where they had little to no actual authority, and from which the communist paramilitary group the Lenin Boys confiscated food for the cities.

Furthermore, the initial measures of the government in the military field included the elimination of "non-proletarians" from the new Hungarian Red Army, the abolition of conscription and the introduction of voluntary recruitment. The result was catastrophic: in three weeks only 5,000 "workers" had asked to enlist. Equally ineffective were the social measures, beginning with the reduction of the rental fees and wage increases immediately negated by inflation. The failures of the Communists in economic issues meant that in three weeks they were excluded from economic affairs by the ex-Socialists. The Communists, however, retained control of the political police. They unleashed terror gangs of thugs called the Lenin Boys who went hunting for "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionaries", and committed armed robberies, kidnappings, shootings, and hangings.

This indiscriminate terror, in which Kun's friends, Tibor Szamuely and Ottó Korvin, proved especially bloodthirsty, attracted protests from the sole representative of the Allied governments in Budapest, Italian lieutenant colonel Guido Romanelli, which Kun rejected. It also had the effect of splitting the government and dividing the Communists themselves, some of whom doubted the usefulness of the atrocities committed. Kun proved unable to control his more extreme followers, particularly Ferenc Jancsik, Ferenc Münnich, Szamuely, and Mátyás Rákosi. Members of the government demanded Kun either stop the atrocities committed by his men, or face the hostility of organised workers and unions. In response Kun sent his friends as political commissars to the front where, however, the situation was not much better.

The Romanian Army had launched an offensive on 17 April 1919 and by the end of the month they were only 60 km from Budapest. On 26 April Kun was forced to admit publicly that he had made a mistake in rejecting the proposals of the Allies, and spoke of resignation. The leaders of the trade unions still controlled by ex-Socialists recruited an army of 50,000 men who managed to halt the Romanian troops and to reoccupy the most important cities which had been lost in Upper Hungary. However, this victory was attributed to the People' Commissar for Defence, Vilmos Böhm, and his soldiers, all from the Socialist Party, and not to the Communist political commissars Rákosi and Münnich.

In the second half of June, Georges Clemenceau proposed a memorandum that promised a cessation of hostilities by the Entente in return for an immediate evacuation of Upper Hungary by the Hungarian Army, which Kun accepted, though he stated in a speech that "The imperialist peace that we are forced to conclude will not last longer than that of Brest-Litovsk, because of the revolution that will inevitably burst out in other European countries." One of these "inevitable" revolutions was to be the insurrection Hungarian Communist agents were planning in neighbouring Austria. However, Austrian police discovered the plot and arrested the organisers the day before the coup was to be carried out.

The domestic situation was rapidly worsening as a result of the regime's actions, with not only former army officers and Catholic and Protestant clergy but urban workers, the Communist's primary base of support, becoming increasingly disaffected. On 24 June, an uprising against the regime in Budapest was suppressed after twenty hours of fighting in the streets. At the same time an anarchist conspiracy was uncovered and suppressed (its members shot) in Budapest and other cities. The government retaliated with secret police, revolutionary tribunals and semiregular detachments such as Tibor Szamuely's bodyguards, the Lenin Boys; this renewed campaign of repression became known as the Red Terror. Of those arrested, an estimated 370 to about 600 were killed; others place the number at 590. Subsequently, the White Terror that followed the fall of the Communist regime claimed 10 times as many victims.

At the front, the Hungarians had suffered repeated defeats at the hands of the Romanians. In the middle of July 1919, Hungary launched a major counter-offensive against the Romanian invasion. The Allied Commander in the Balkans, the French Marshal Louis Franchet d'Esperey, wrote to Marshal Ferdinand Foch on 21 July 1919:"We are convinced that the Hungarian offensive will collapse of its own accord... When the Hungarian offensive is launched, we shall retreat to the line of demarcation and launch the counteroffensive from that line. Two Romanian brigades will march from Romania to the front in the coming days, according to General Fertianu's promise. You see, Marshal, we have nothing to fear from the Hungarian army. I can assure you that the Hungarian Soviets will last no more than two or three weeks. And should our offensive not bring the Kun regime down, its untenable internal situation surely will."

The Bolsheviks promised to invade Romania and link up with Kun and were on the verge of doing so, but military reversals suffered by the Red Army in Ukraine halted the invasion of Romania before it began. When the Romanian Army crossed the river Tisza at the end of July they met virtually no opposition. However, by this point the regime was facing, in Kun's own words, a "crisis of power, economy and morale" and most fatally, of popular support. The former Social Democrats had withdrawn completely from government; the rural peasantry were disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of land redistribution and by the decision of the regime to pay for agricultural products in a new paper currency they did not trust. Most fatally, the "industrial proletariat" in whose name the dictatorship had been established refused to fight for a cause they no longer considered their own.

The only hope for saving the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been "the military intervention of the Red Army or a revolution in one or more other European countries." Both these hopes had now failed. On 1 August, Kun gave his last speech in Hungary, stating: "The Hungarian proletariat betrayed not their leaders but itself. [...] If there had been in Hungary a proletariat with the consciousness of the dictatorship of the proletariat it would not collapse in this way [...] I would have liked to see the proletariat fighting on the barricades declaring that it would rather die than give up power. [...] The proletariat which continued to shout in factories, 'Down with the dictatorship of the proletariat', will be even less satisfied with any future government.'" He fled to Austria a few hours after, and the Romanian forces took Budapest three days later. Historian and former Italian diplomat to Hungary Alberto Indelicato attributed the downfall of the regime not to external military intervention by the allies, but to the regime's own internal flaws, stating "Whereas the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could be proclaimed as a result of international political events which weighed heavily on the whole affair, the fall of 'the Republic of Councils' did not occur because of the intervention of the reactionary circles of the Entente or of the 'White' Hungarian counter-revolution (as a Communist legend maintains and is still affirmed by some partisan historians), but because of its inherent weaknesses, the consequence of its internal, social and economic policies."

Activity in Crimea
Béla Kun went into exile in Vienna, then controlled by the Social Democratic Party of Austria. He was captured and interned in Austria, but was released in exchange for Austrian prisoners in Russia in July 1920. He never returned to Hungary. Once in Russia, he rejoined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Kun was put in charge of the regional Revolutionary Committee in Crimea, which during the Russian Civil War changed hands numerous times and was for a time a stronghold for the anti-Bolshevik White Army. It was in Crimea that the White Russians led by General Wrangel fell to the Red Army in 1920. About 50,000 prisoners of war and anti-Bolshevik civilians who had surrendered after they had been promised amnesty, were subsequently executed, on Kun's and Rosalia Zemlyachka's order, with Lenin's approval. Mass arrests and executions were carried out under Kun's administration. Between 60,000 and 70,000 inhabitants of the Crimea were murdered in the process. The figures related to the massacre in Crimea remain contested. Anarchist and Bolshevik Victor Serge gave a lower figure for White officers around 13,000 which he claims were exaggerated. Yet, he condemned Kun for his treacherous actions towards allied anarchists and surrendering whites. According to social scientist, Nikolay Zayats, from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus the large, “fantastic” estimates derived from eyewitness accounts and White army emigre press. A Crimean Cheka report in 1921 showed that 441 people were shot with a modern estimation that 5,000-12,000 people in total were executed in Crimea.

The "March Action" in Germany
Kun became a leading figure in the Comintern as an ally of Grigory Zinoviev. In March 1921, he was sent to Germany to advise the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and encouraged the KPD to follow the "Theory of the Offensive" as supported by Zinoviev, August Thalheimer, Paul Frölich, and others which in the words of Ruth Fischer meant "the working class could be moved only when set in motion by a series of offensive acts."

On 27 March, leaders of the Communist Party of Germany decided to launch a "revolutionary offensive" in support of miners in central Germany. Kun along with Thallheimer were among the driving force behind the attempted revolutionary campaign known as "Märzaktion" ("March Action"), which ultimately ended in failure.

In the end, Lenin blamed himself for appointing Kun and charged him with responsibility for the failure of the German revolution. He was considerably angered by Kun's actions and his failure to secure a general uprising in Germany. In a closed Congress of the Operative Committee — as Victor Serge writes — Lenin called his actions idiotic ("les bêtises de Béla Kun"). György Lukács, moreover, claimed that Kun acted through "demagogy, violence and, if need be, bribery", and recounted an incident in the summer of 1920 when it was discovered that Kun bribed his supporters by sending them gold deliveries (he had supposedly stolen the gold from requisitioning that was carried out in the Russian Revolution). László Rudas admitted to receiving gold from Kun. But Kun did not lose his membership in the Operative Committee, and the closing document accepted at the end of the sitting formally acknowledged the "battle spirit" of the German Communists.

Kun was not stripped of his Party offices, but the March Action was the end of the radical opposition and of the theory of "Permanent Offensive". Lenin wrote "'The final analysis of things shows that Levi was politically right in many ways. The thesis of Thallheimer and Béla Kun is politically totally false. Phrases and bare attending, playing the radical leftist.'."

Throughout the 1920s Kun was a prominent Comintern operative, serving mostly in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, but his notoriety ultimately stopped him from being useful for undercover work.

Later career
Kun's final undercover assignment ended in 1928 when he was arrested in Vienna by the local police for travelling on a forged passport. Back in Moscow, he spent much of his time feuding with other Hungarian Communist émigrés, several of whom he denounced to the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, which arrested and imprisoned them in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the Comintern's "Third Period" from 1928 to 1935, Kun was a prominent supporter of the Social Fascism line that revealed the Social-Democrats' role as "social fascism" because they sought the preservation of capitalism precisely when it was in crisis, an animosity in large part owing to Kun's strained relations with the Hungarian Social Democrats, whom he believed had betrayed him sixteen years earlier. In 1934, Kun was charged with preparing the agenda for the 7th Congress of the Comintern, in which the Social Fascism line was to be abandoned and the Popular Front was to be the new line for Communists all over the world, a policy change that Kun opposed. Instead of submitting to party discipline, Kun did his best to sabotage the adoption of the Popular Front policy, which led to his formal sanction for insubordination. In 1935–36, the leadership of the émigré Hungarian Communist Party was thrown into crisis as Kun sought to prevent the adoption of the Popular Front policy, which occasioned a vigorous round of party in-fighting. Beyond policy, there was also a clash of personalities as Kun's abrasive and autocratic leadership style had left him with many enemies. These individuals saw the dispute over whether the Hungarian Communist Party was to adopt the Popular Front strategy as a chance to bring down Kun, whom many Hungarian émigrés deeply hated. His embattled position led Kun to denounce one of his leading enemies in the Comintern, Dmitry Manuilsky, to the NKVD as a "Trotskyite"; in turn, Manuilsky, who was sympathetic to the anti-Kun faction, had also denounced Kun to the NKVD as a "Trotskyite".

Death and legacy
During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of Trotskyism and brutally beaten and arrested by the NKVD on 28 June 1937. Little was known about his subsequent fate beyond the fact that he never returned. Even an official Hungarian Communist biographer with official access to the Communist International's archives in Moscow was denied information during the mid-1970s.

Only some time after the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of certain archives in the aftermath did Kun's fate become public: after a brief incarceration and interrogation, he was hauled before a judicial troika on charges of having acted as the leader of a "counter-revolutionary terrorist organization." Kun was found guilty and sentenced to death at the end of this brief secret trial. The sentence was carried out later that day at the Kommunarka shooting ground.

When Kun was politically rehabilitated in 1956, as part of the de-Stalinization process, the Soviet Communist Party told its Hungarian counterpart that Kun had died in prison on 30 November 1939. In 1989, the Soviet government announced that Kun had actually been executed in the Gulag more than a year earlier than that, on 29 August 1938.

After World War II the Soviets set up the Marxist–Leninist Hungarian People's Republic under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi, one of Kun's few surviving colleagues from the 1919 coup.

title: Béla Kun


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The Hundred and One Dalmatians

The Hundred and One Dalmatians is a 1956 children's novel by Dodie Smith about the kidnapping of a family of Dalmatian puppies. It was originally serialized in Woman's Day as The Great Dog Robbery, and details the adventures of two dalmatians named Pongo and Missis as they rescue their puppies from a fur farm. A 1967 sequel, The Starlight Barking, continues from the end of the novel.

Plot
Dalmatians Pongo and Missis live with the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Dearly and their two nannies, Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler. Mr. Dearly is a "financial wizard" who has been granted lifelong tax exemption and lent a house on the Outer Circle in Regent's Park in return for wiping out the government debt. The dogs consider the humans their pets but allow them to think that they are the owners.

One day, while walking Pongo and Missis, Mr. and Mrs. Dearly have a chance meeting with an old schoolmate of Mrs. Dearly: Cruella de Vil, a wealthy woman so fixated on fur clothing that she married a furrier and forces him to keep his collection in their home so she can wear the pieces whenever she likes. She admires the two dogs and expresses a desire to have a Dalmatian-skin coat. Later, Missis gives birth to a litter of 15 puppies. Concerned that Missis will not be able to feed them all, the humans join in to help. As Mrs. Dearly looks for a canine wet nurse, she finds an exhausted liver-spotted Dalmatian in the middle of the road in the rain. She has the dog, who has recently given birth, treated by a vet and names her Perdita (meaning "lost"). Perdita helps to nurse the pups and becomes a member of the family. She tells Pongo about her lost love Prince and the resulting litter of puppies, which were sold by her neglectful owner. She had run away looking for those puppies.

Cruella happened to be in the house when the puppies started to arrive, and had expressed a desire to buy them, which was rebuffed. After she pays a second visit to the house and is told again that the Dearlys have no intention of putting the puppies up for sale, she hires thieves to steal them for her. The humans fail to trace the pups, but through the "Twilight Barking", a forum of communication in which dogs can relay messages to each other across the country, Pongo and Missis track them down to "Hell Hall", the ancestral home of the de Vil family in Suffolk. Pongo and Missis try to tell their owners the word "Suffolk", but they cannot make the "S" sound. The dogs decide to find the puppies themselves, leaving Perdita to look after the Dearlys. After a journey across the English countryside, with food and accommodation along the way arranged by dogs through the Barking Network, they meet the Colonel, an Old English Sheepdog. They get inside the mansion and discover that there are 97 puppies there, including Pongo and Missis' own 15.

Fearing police investigation, Cruella arrives and tells the Baddun brothers, whom she left in charge of Hell Hall, that they soon must slaughter and skin the dogs. Pongo and Missis realize they must rescue all of the puppies, who escape the night before Christmas Eve. One puppy, Cadpig, is a runt and too weak to walk the distance from Suffolk to London; Tommy, the Colonel's two-year-old owner, willingly lends her his toy farm cart. One litter of eight puppies is just the right age for two of its members to fit the cart's shaft, so they pull it in shifts.

The Dalmatians are nearly captured by Romani people, and one of the Barking Network dogs points out how conspicuous they are and helps them break into a chimney sweep's establishment, where they roll in soot to disguise themselves. They travel across the fields and spend part of an evening in a cathedral; Cruella nearly overtakes them when they are forced to return to the road, but they hide in an empty removal van at the invitation of a Staffordshire terrier whose "pets" own the van and are returning to London that night.

Once the dogs arrive in London, Cruella's Persian cat, who has been longing to avenge her many litters of kittens (all of which Cruella drowned), sees an opportunity and lets the dogs into Cruella's house, where they destroy her husband's entire stock of unpaid-for furs. The Dalmatians then return to the Dearlys' house. Pongo and Missis bark until Mr. Dearly opens the door, whereupon the whole mass of puppies streams inside and rolls on the carpet to remove the soot from their coats. The Dearlys recognize them and send out for steaks to feed them. The litter that pulled Cadpig's cart are proven to be Perdita's litter by Prince. Mr. Dearly finds out where the puppies had been when he discovers a label on the toy cart, which contains Tommy's name and address. The Dearlys also place advertisements seeking the owners of the other puppies, but it turns out that they had all been bought, rather than stolen as the Dearlys' were. Perdita's former owner, who never really cared for her, is happy to sell her to the Dearlys upon hearing the story.

Cruella's now-homeless cat drops by (and is invited to stay) with the news that the destruction of Mr de Vil's fur business has forced Cruella to leave the country and put Hell Hall up for sale. When the Dearlys visit Suffolk to return Tommy's cart, they realize that, with 97 puppies and three adult Dalmatians, a larger home would be a good idea, so Mr. Dearly buys the hall with money he has been given by the government for sorting out another tax problem. He proposes to use it to start a "dynasty of Dalmatians" (and a "dynasty of Dearlys" to take care of them). Finally, Perdita's lost love, Prince, turns up. His owners see his love for Perdita, and allow him to stay with the Dearlys and become their "one hundred and oneth" Dalmatian.

Adaptations
Disney adapted the novel into an animated film, released to cinemas on 25 January 1961 as One Hundred and One Dalmatians. It became the tenth highest-grossing film of 1961, and one of the studio's most popular films of the decade. It was re-issued to cinemas four times, in 1969, 1979, 1985 and 1991. The 1991 reissue was the twentieth highest earning film of the year for domestic earnings. It was remade into a live action film in 1996.

In both the live-action and animated adaptations, there is only one nanny, Missis and Perdita were combined into one character, and other characters, such as many of the other dogs, Prince, Tommy, Cruella's cat, and Cruella's husband, were omitted. In the animated film, Pongo and Missis' owners' last names were changed to "Radcliffe" from "Dearly", and in the live-action film, Cruella (portrayed by Glenn Close) appears as the spoiled magnate of an haute couture fashion house, "House of DeVil". Disney kept the book's characters Horace and Jasper Baddun in both versions, but represented them as the thieves hired by Cruella to steal Pongo and Missis' puppies. In the novel, Horace is named Saul, and they are merely caretakers, the puppies having been stolen by hired professional thieves some days before. Disney later created an animated television series starring three of the puppies (Lucky, Rolly and Cadpig), and a second series that stars mostly descendants of Pongo and Perdita. Disney also released a sequel film for each of their film versions (One Hundred and One Dalmatians II and 102 Dalmatians), but both were largely criticized for poor story and lack of originality. In 2021, Disney released a live-action reboot of the franchise, titled Cruella, which revolves around the origin of the title character and her partnership with Jasper and Horace.

The novel has been adapted for the stage by Debbie Isitt for the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in 2000 (followed by productions at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton in 2007 and Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2017), by Bryony Lavery for the Chichester Youth Theatre in 2014 and was devised by the company (directed by Sally Cookson) for Tobacco Factory Theatres in 2014. The novel was also adapted into a 2009 musical which opened in Minneapolis prior to a US tour. Another stage musical adaptation was due to open at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in 2020, before being postponed twice to 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1996, the BBC adapted Dodie Smith's novel into a full-cast musical audio dramatization, starring Patricia Hodge as Cruella. This version is very faithful to the source material, in that it has all the characters, but events are slightly changed - Cruella's husband argues with her more than in the novel, and they do not leave London after the destruction of the fur stocks, nor do the Dearlys ever find out she was the mastermind. Furthermore, Perdita and Prince's story is greatly abridged, Mrs. Willow helps the Colonel attack the Badduns to prevent them following the Dalmatians, and the White Cat does not join the family until after the move to Suffolk. Amazon Audible later released this production as an Audiobook, available for streaming online or through the app.

Reception
The book gained a positive response from critics.

The British writer Siobhan Dowd has cited the thieving Romani characters in the book as one example of a long history of anti-Romani stereotypes in English literature.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Hundred and One Dalmatians


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Talk:Timeline of aviation history

Well, the question is - is there non-western points in aviation history?

Another (local) view might be found at http://www.aviation.ru/calendar/

-jno

A good question, jno, but it seems that most, perhaps all, of the major milestones were Western achievements. I've looked over link you gave, but couldn't find anything that obviously seemed to merit inclusion.

When we come to spaceflight, of course, it is a very different story. In fact, that leads me to wonder if this list of aviation firsts couldn't more usefully be a list of Milestones in aerospace, and include the current material, plus Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin's first orbit, the moon landing, and so on. As the list stands, it's not going to get much longer (unless we start including all sorts of trivial things - which would be a bad idea), so adding space firsts as well would be an all-round good idea. What do people think? Tannin 12:00 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

Hmmm. "Aviation" is a more familiar term to most people, I think. On the other hand, a more inclusive list is probably in order since this one can't expand much further. Anyway, if you decide to keep it under aviation, it should probably be moved to Milestones in aviation. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:00 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

This page needs merged into List of years in aviation as its duplicating info. Greyengine5 23:12, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok the merger is done now, merged all the entries into List of years in aviation. Greyengine5 01:51, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Timeline of aviation history


text:
Talk:Hyundai Motor Company

Pic removal
I thought it reasonable to remove all three existing pics from this article when I loaded in my fresh five because: - none of the three have any copyright information whatever, - the uploader can't be contacted because he/she (called Brothering) has no talk page, - two of the three pics are very small even when clicked on. For all these reasons, a fresh start seemed OK. - Adrian Pingstone 21:58, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

J.D. Power and Associates
In 2004, Hyundai tied with Honda for initial brand quality in a survey/study from J.D. Power and Associates, for having 102 problems per 100 vehicles.

102 problems for 100 vehicles doesn't sound very good at all. Is this accurate? siafu 16:49, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That IS very good, that means that there is only about one problem per car. -Karrmann

add your email address
Please add your email and postal address so that we can communicate with you —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)

New cat
Please could we add Category:Companies in the S&P Asia 50 ? 92.71.60.62 (talk) 11:17, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Hyundai vehicle Kenyan agent
Hi. Have acquired a Hyundai Elantra saloon car from the government of Kenya which requires some spare parts for it to be functional. These spare parts are internal fixtures which have tried to contact the Nairobi agent but in vain. Have sent the list to them but no response at all. This my first vehicle to own but the agents here are not responsive to our request. What should I do?

William 0725635579 wilyeeithy@gmail.

me 197.179.86.148 (talk) 13:54, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Hyundai Motor Company


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Climate of Antarctica

The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry (it is a desert ), averaging 166 mm of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the continent, because of the katabatic winds. Most of Antarctica has an ice-cap climate (Köppen classification EF) with extremely cold and dry weather.

Temperature
The highest temperature ever recorded on Antarctica was 19.8 C recorded at Signy Research Station, Signy Island on 30 January 1982.

The highest temperature on the Antarctic mainland was 18.3 C at the Esperanza Base (Argentina) on 6 February 2020. The lowest air temperature record, the lowest reliably measured temperature on Antarctica was set on 21 July 1983, when a temperature of −89.2 C was observed at Vostok Station. For comparison, this is 10.7 C-change colder than subliming dry ice (at sea level pressure). The elevation of the location is 3488 m.

Satellite measurements have identified even lower ground temperatures, with −93.2 C having been observed at the cloud-free East Antarctic Plateau on 10 August 2010.

The lowest recorded temperature of any location on Earth's surface at -81.8°N, 63.5°W was revised with new data in 2018 in nearly 100 locations, ranging from −93.2 C to −98 C. This unnamed part of the Antarctic plateau, between Dome A and Dome F, was measured on 10 August 2010, and the temperature was deduced from radiance measured by the Landsat 8 and other satellites. It was discovered during a National Snow and Ice Data Center review of stored data in December 2013 but revised by researchers on 25 June 2018. This temperature is not directly comparable to the –89.2 °C reading quoted above, since it is a skin temperature deduced from satellite-measured upwelling radiance, rather than a thermometer-measured temperature of the air 1.5 m above the ground surface.

The mean annual temperature of the interior is -43.5 C. The coast is warmer; on the coast Antarctic average temperatures are around -10 C (in the warmest parts of Antarctica) and in the elevated inland they average about -55 C in Vostok. Monthly means at McMurdo Station range from -26 C in August to -3 C in January. At the South Pole, the highest temperature ever recorded was -12.3 C on 25 December 2011. Along the Antarctic Peninsula, temperatures as high as 18.3 C have been recorded, though the summer temperature is below 0 C most of the time. Severe low temperatures vary with latitude, elevation, and distance from the ocean. East Antarctica is colder than West Antarctica because of its higher elevation. The Antarctic Peninsula has the most moderate climate. Higher temperatures occur in January along the coast and average slightly below freezing.

Precipitation

The total precipitation on Antarctica, averaged over the entire continent, is about 166 mm per year (Vaughan et al., J. Clim., 1999). The actual rates vary widely, from high values over the Peninsula (15 to 25 inches a year) to very low values (as little as 50 mm in the high interior (Bromwich, Reviews of Geophysics, 1988). Areas that receive less than 250 mm of precipitation per year are classified as deserts. Almost all Antarctic precipitation falls as snow. Rainfall is rare and mainly occurs during the summer in coastal areas and surrounding islands. Note that the quoted precipitation is a measure of its equivalence to water, rather than being the actual depth of snow. The air in Antarctica is also very dry. The low temperatures result in a very low absolute humidity, which means that dry skin and cracked lips are a continual problem for scientists and expeditioners working on the continent.

Weather condition classification
The weather in Antarctica can be highly variable, and the weather conditions can often change dramatically in short periods of time. There are various classifications for describing weather conditions in Antarctica; restrictions given to workers during the different conditions vary by station and nation.

Ice cover
Nearly all of Antarctica is covered by a sheet of ice that is, on average, at least 1500 m thick. Antarctica contains 90% of the world's ice and more than 70% of its fresh water. If all the land-ice covering Antarctica were to melt — around 30 e6km3 of ice — the seas would rise by over 60 m. The Antarctic is so cold that even with increases of a few degrees, temperatures would generally remain below the melting point of ice. Higher temperatures are expected to lead to more precipitation, which takes the form of snow. This would increase the amount of ice in Antarctica, offsetting approximately one third of the expected sea level rise from thermal expansion of the oceans. During a recent decade, East Antarctica thickened at an average rate of about 1.8 cm per year while West Antarctica showed an overall thinning of 0.9 cm per year. For the contribution of Antarctica to present and future sea level change, see sea level rise. Because ice flows, albeit slowly, the ice within the ice sheet is younger than the age of the sheet itself.

Ice shelves
About 75% of the coastline of Antarctica is ice shelf. The majority of ice shelf consists of floating ice, and a lesser amount consists of glaciers that move slowly from the land mass into the sea. Ice shelves lose mass through breakup of glacial ice (calving), or basal melting due to warm ocean water under the ice.

Melting or breakup of floating shelf ice does not directly affect global sea levels; however, ice shelves have a buttressing effect on the ice flow behind them. If ice shelves break up, the ice flow behind them may accelerate, resulting in increasing melt of the Antarctic ice sheet and an increasing contribution to sea level rise.

Known changes in coastline ice around the Antarctic Peninsula:
 * 1936–1989: Wordie Ice Shelf significantly reduced in size.
 * 1995: Ice in the Prince Gustav Channel disintegrated.
 * Parts of the Larsen Ice Shelf broke up in recent decades.
 * 1995: The Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated in January 1995.
 * 2001: 3,250 km2 of the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated in February 2001. It had been gradually retreating before the breakup event.
 * 2015: A study concluded that the remaining Larsen B ice-shelf will disintegrate by the end of the decade, based on observations of faster flow and rapid thinning of glaciers in the area.

The George VI Ice Shelf, which may be on the brink of instability, has probably existed for approximately 8,000 years, after melting 1,500 years earlier. Warm ocean currents may have been the cause of the melting. Not only are the ice sheets losing mass, they are losing mass at an accelerating rate.

Climate

 * Temperature data from the READER project
 * A pamphlet about the weather and climate of Antarctica
 * Antarctica's central ice cap grows while glaciers melt
 * Antarctica Climate and Weather
 * Antarctica Climate and Weather

Climate change in Antarctica

 * Western Antarctica warming confirmed 23 December 2012 USA Today
 * NASA experts explain ice melt in Antarctica (2014)

title: Climate of Antarctica


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Texas German language

Texas German (Texasdeutsch) is a group of German language dialects spoken by descendants of mid-19th century German settlers, Texas Germans. They settled the Texas German Country, running from Houston to the Hills Region, and founded the towns of Bulverde, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Boerne, Pflugerville, Walburg and Comfort in the Texas Hill Country; Muenster in North Texas; and Schulenburg, Brenham, Industry, New Ulm and Weimar in East Texas.

History and documentation
While most heritage languages in the United States die out by the third generation, Texas German is unusual in that most German Texans continued to speak German in their homes and communities for several generations after settling in the state. The State of Texas recognized German as having equal status to Spanish from 1846 up until World War I. Afterwards, Texas schools mandated English-only instruction, and required children to learn English in school regardless of what language they spoke at home. Due to the assimilation of these communities and strong Anti-German sentiment during both World War I and World War II, Texas German speakers decided to stop transmitting the language to their children, and shifted towards speaking only English.

Currently, Dr. Hans Boas at the University of Texas is recording and studying the dialect, building on research originally performed by Dr. Glenn Gilbert of Southern Illinois University Carbondale in the 1960s.

"It's an odd mixture of English and 19th-century German," says Boas ... "Hardly any of the Texas Germans speak alike. There's a lot of variation in the dialect. Texas German borrows about 5 to 6 percent of its vocabulary from English.'"

Boas' book on the language, The Life and Death of Texas German, describes the German dialects which may have been the source of the language spoken in Texas.

A short documentary project named "All Güt Things" was produced about Texas German in 2016.

An episode with the title "Texas German" was published on the podcast Yellow of the Egg in 2022, where Dr. Hans C. Boas (Director of the Texas German Dialect Project) was a guest.

Current distribution and population
As of the U.S. 2000 Census, some 1,035 people report speaking German at home in Fredericksburg, the town with the largest community of Texas German speakers, representing 12.48% of the total population, 840 in New Braunfels, 150 in Schulenburg, 85 in Stonewall, 70 in Boerne, 65 in Harper, 45 in Comfort and 19 in Weimar, all of which except for Schulenburg and Weimar, lie in the traditional Texas German heartland of the Hill Country. Gillespie County, with the communities of Fredericksburg, Harper, Stonewall, and Luckenbach, has a German-speaking population of 2,270, 11.51% of the county's total. In all, 82,100 German-speakers reside in the state of Texas, including European German speakers.

Comparisons with German and English
Texas German is adapted to U.S. measurement and legal terminologies. Standard American German words typically were invented, introduced from other German dialects of the region, or English loanwords were introduced for words not present in 19th-century German. Dialect leveling is also found throughout many of the American German dialects including Texas German. In some cases, these new words also exist in modern Standard German, but with a different meaning. For instance, the word Luftschiff (used for "airplane") means airship in Standard German.

The table below illustrates some examples of differences:

title: Texas German language


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Hutterite German

Hutterite German (German: Hutterisch) is an Upper German dialect of the Bavarian variety of the German language, which is spoken by Hutterite communities in Canada and the United States. Hutterite is also called Tirolean, but this is an anachronism.

Distribution and literacy
Hutterite is spoken in the US states of Washington, Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Oregon; and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Its speakers belong to the Schmiedleit, Lehrerleit, and Dariusleit Hutterite groups, but there are also some few speakers among the older generations of Prairieleit (the descendants of those Hutterites who chose not to settle in colonies). The Schmiedleit, Lehrerleit, and Dariusleit each have their own distinct dialects. Hutterite children who grow up in the colonies learn and speak Hutterite German before learning English, the standard language of the surrounding areas.

As of 2003, there are about 34,000 speakers in the world, 85% of them living in 333 communities in Canada and the remaining 15% in 123 communities in the US. Canadian adults are generally literate in Early New High German (also called "Biblical German", and the predecessor to Standard German used by Martin Luther) that they employ as the written form for Scriptures while Standard German is used in the US for religious activities. Children learn English at school; Canadian Hutterites have a functional knowledge of English. Hutterite is for the most part an unwritten language, though in August 2006 Hutterite author Linda Maendel released a children's story titled Lindas glücklicher Tag (Linda's Happy Day) in which all the dialogue is written in the dialect. Maendel is also working on a series of biblical stories with Wycliff Bible translators.

History and related languages
Hutterite German is a koiné language originally based on the Bavarian dialects spoken in Tyrol, home of Jacob Hutter and many early Hutterites, but it shifted its base to Carinthia dialects in the mid-18th century when so-called "Landler", Crypto-Protestants from Carinthia, were forced by empress Maria Theresia to resettle to Transylvania. A larger group of them joined the scattered remnants of the Hutterites who had been able to settle in Transylvania where there was more religious tolerance than in other parts of the Habsburg monarchy. This tolerance for different Christian groups emerged when Transylvania was ruled by the Ottoman Empire whose rulers did not care for theological differences among the "infidels" they ruled.

Hutterite German is only about 50% intelligible to a speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, as the latter variant is based on dialects spoken around the Electoral Palatinate. Hutterite German therefore belongs to the Southern Bavarian dialect group which is spoken in the southern parts of Bavaria and Austria except for the westernmost part (Vorarlberg).

The language has adopted a limited number of Russian and also many English loan words, which are the result of Hutterite migrations into Eastern Europe and now North America. The core vocabulary is still almost exclusively of German origin.

Literature

 * Helga Lorenz-Andreasch: "Mir sein jå kolla Teitschverderber" - die Sprache der Schmiedeleut-Hutterer in Manitoba/Kanada, Wien 2004. (Contains a short description of Hutterisch)
 * Herfried Scheer: Die deutsche Mundart der Hutterischen Brüder in Nordamerika, Wien 1987. (A Hutterisch - Standard German - English dictionary of about 1.0000 words on 321 pages)
 * Herfried Scheer: Die deutsche Mundart der Hutterischen Brüder in Nordamerika, Wien 1987. (A Hutterisch - Standard German - English dictionary of about 1.0000 words on 321 pages)

title: Hutterite German