page_title: Béla Kun
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Béla Kun / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Español: Béla Kun y familia en 1915.
context_page_description: Béla Kun was a Hungarian Communist activist and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919.
  Though the de jure leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was president Sándor Garbai, the de facto power was in the hands of foreign minister Béla Kun, who maintained direct contact with Vladimir Lenin via radiotelegraph. It was Lenin who gave the direct orders and advice to Béla Kun via constant radio communication with the Kremlin.
  Following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Kun fled to the Soviet Union, 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, following which he participated in the March Action, a failed Communist uprising in Germany.
  During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet regime in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the critical reassessment of Stalinism.
context_section_description: Béla Kohn, later known as Béla Kun, was born on 20 February 1886 in the village of Lele, located near Szilágycseh, Transylvania, 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 a Jewish convert to Protestantism. 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.
caption: Béla Kun with his family in 1915
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