Regicide at Marseille

RESPITE AND AGONY

The Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact of 1935 became a milestone in the history of Danubian decadence, for it definitely ruined all attempts at unification which the more farsighted leaders of the Successor States believed to be the only policy that in the long run might save the Danubian nations from Nazi domination. It also strengthened the popular support of Hitler and his arrogant programme in and outside of Germany, since the Soviets, favored by Benes, were generally considered by the rest of their neighbors as the worse one of the two menaces. Disheartened by the Nazis' absorption of Austria (March 12, 1938), the British "Appeasers" dispatched Lord Runciman to Prague in a distasteful attempt to placate Hitler by the amputation of the Sudetenland. Deprived in Munich of its defensible frontiers, in Marcb 1939, Hacha, the successor of Benes, then placed the truncated Czechoslovak State "trustingly in the hands of the Fuehrer." The Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia was the last helpless bit that remained of Czechslovakia six months after Munich, a conglomerate whose historic role Benes had so poorly judged.

In the last book he wrote, Benes boastfully pointed to a prejudice which had dominated his entire policy and led twice to the ruin of his country. "Since 1922 - he confessed - our effort has been oriented towards the Slav East (Russia) . . . . We never changed our ideas or our plans. . . . We worked methodically. Our endeavors to maintain this "Eastern" and "Slav" line were conscious and premeditated; they were based on a new conception of Europe's future."¹

The consequences of the mistaken Peace Treaties upon Central Europe's destiny opened the way for the pernicious expansion first of the Nazis, and then of the Soviets. These basic structural mistakes deprived the interdependent Danubian area of its vital defenses: the Carpathians, against incursions from the East; and the Sudeten Mountains, against interference from the West. The consequences of the latter blunder were almost instantaneous. At a conference, held in Warsaw six weeks after Munich, Colonel Joseph Beck, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, informed his leading diplomats² that "the

¹ Dr. E. Benes, "Ou vont les Slaves?" Edition "Notre Temps" (Paris, 1946), p. 18.

² Comte Jean Szernbek, Memoirs Plon, Paris, 1952, p. 369-370.

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weakness of that state (Czechoslovakia) surpassed everything that we originally may have expected. Before the war, there was much complaint about the Balkans, because the organization of the states there had been weak and they were used by others as instruments. After the war, all of Europe was 'balkanized' as far as the Carpathians. . . In principle, Hungary may be considered as being more resistant than the other countries. . . We have to see to it that we obtain as quickly as possible a common frontier with Hungary." Colonel Beck also remarked that "England and France were totally disinterested" in the Hungarian territorial claims which, according to the Munich Agreement, were to be settled by direct negotiation between Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Colonel Beck's reference to the lack of interest in the Hungarian claims on the part of England and France - the two Great Powers primarily responsible for the debacle of the European Continent - proved to be an understatement. After Munich, these Powers not only dropped their interest in the Hungarian territorial claims, but completely abandoned Hungary and the rest of the Danubian States to Hitler and Mussolini, as the dictators' sphere of influence with which they did not wish to interfere. Since no agreement was reached between the Hungarians and the Slovaks at the Conference held in Komarom, the Hungarian Government requested the four Munich Powers to arbitrate the Hungarian claim concerning the South-Slovakian territories densely populated by Hungarians.

The French and British declarations of disinterestedness caused serious embarrassment to the Hungarian Government, for it had to content itself with arbitration by Germany and Italy - the only available Munich Powers - or create an accomplished fact, the method recommended by Poland. The Prime Minister of Hungary, Bela Imredy, leaned towards the latter policy and asked the Regent to sign an order to mobilize the Army. But Horthy refused and insisted that a peaceful solution be found concerning the revision of the Hungarian-Slovak frontier based on the ethnic principle. "I am a soldier," he told Imredy, "and I know what war means. I will not risk war for a result that can be achieved by other means."

Among the responsible Hungarian leaders who remained at a distance from Henlein, the Sudeten-German leader, and counseled moderation to Hungarian hotheads, was Count John Eszterhazy, the leader of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. An aristocrat, not only

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by birth, he was the sole member of the Slovak Parliament who dared to vote against the "Nuremberg" anti-Jewish laws after Munich. He survived Hitler, but after the return of Benes in 1945, he was handed over to the Red Army to be deported for slave labor to Soviet Russia. Years later, with both lungs destroyed by lead poisoning through working in a mine, Eszterhazy, once a strong, handsome young man, was sent home to die; but back in Czechoslovakia, he was kept in jail to bis last day - he was too popular among his people.

For two decades the territorial status quo in Europe could not be changed, for the "have-nots," even though restive, did not possess enough power to lend sufficient weight to their demands, however rightful these may have been. The Peace Treaty of Trianon had forced one out of every four Hungarians to live outside of his fatherland, scattered in five foreign countries. Yet, for 18 years the just and modest demand of Hungary for the rectification of her arbitrarily drawn frontiers had been consistently frustrated by the victorious Powers. But with the massive rearmament of Nazi Germany, a radical shift developed in the power-political equation of Europe which, in 1938, was to bring about a corresponding change in the status quo. When Britain and France withdrew from Central Europe, they created a completely new situation: they abandoned to the overlordship of Hitler the entire valley of the Danube. Further they put the Little Entente Alliance out of business and opened up the road toward the revision of the Trianon Treaty.

Germany and Italy, the two Great Powers deeply dissatisfied with the Paris Peace Treaties, thus obtained a position which would allow them to reshape jointly the badly mangled Danubian situation. Unification or any step toward a federation of these small states would be considered a provocation and be ruled out by Hitler, for he planned to incorporate them one by one, isolated and under pressure, into his "South-Eastern living space." Meanwhile, urged on by Mussolini, he consented to revise the Hungarian boundaries on the basis of the ethnic principle, as proclaimed, but disregarded by the Western Allies.

It might be of interest to note the similarity between the pressures in Europe at that time, caused by a change in the balance of power, and those presently developing in our world. Hider had succeeded in building up sufficient Nazi power during the period of Western complacency, with which to dominate the Continent. In the same manner,

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Stalin was allowed to expand and stabilize the Soviet Empire, after the war, while the West, still having the monopoly of the atom bomb was unquestionably superior to the Soviets. By now, the Soviets have added to their much stronger ground forces the atom arm and rocketry capable of global offense. The field where they are testing the new power equation is Berlin. Khrushchev wants his Yalta sphere of influence expanded so that all of Berlin should come behind the Wall. Then Berlin would constitute the "Munich" of our days.

Western attempts to prolong the present stalemate cannot lead to a favorable solution, for in an endless game of nuclear 'chicken' Khrushchev has a clear advantage over the West."³ Two changes in the Western approach appear as indispensable and timely: (a) it does not suffice to prepare for defense, we must have the determination to win; and (b) an all-out effort is needed to surpass the Soviet power beyond anybody's doubt and in every respect. Only then can we live at peace with Russia.

The irrepressible Hungarian demand for revision succeeded under the changed circumstances after Munich. On November 2, 1938, the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Italy met in Vienna to settle the new frontier line between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. According to the 1941 Hungarian census, the first Vienna Award returned to Hungary, along her frontier with Slovakia, a population of 1,081,247, of whom 83.2% were Hungarians. The same two Great Powers, in the second Vienna Award on August 30, 1940, revised the frontier between Rumania and Hungary with the consent of the interested Foreign Ministers: Count Csaky for Hungary and Mr. Manoilescu for Rumania. Of the population of 2,577,291 then returned to Hungary, 52.4% were Hungarians and 37.2% Rumanians.⁵ Including later territorial adjustments effected during the Second World War, a total of 2.7 million Hungarians rejoined life under their own Government. This considerable peaceful success could not have been achieved but for the perseverance and moderation of the Hungarian people's demand for peaceful revision which Hitler preferred not to disappoint.

Both in theory and in practice, the Vienna Awards were achieved in complete accord with international law and without the use of force. They corrected, in areas inhabited by mixed races, gross violations of

³ Stewart Alsop, The Saurday Evening Post, (January 27, 1962).

⁴ Magyar Statisztikai Szemle, (Budapest, 1947), pp. 8-10.

⁵ Ibid,

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the ethnic principle comitted arbitrarily by the Trianon Peace Treaty. These facts had to be stated clearly, for at the end of the Second World War the Vienna Awards were assailed by Little Entente propagandists as acts of Hungarian aggression. It is a baseless accusation that in alliance with Hitler, Hungary participated in the looting of Czechoslovakia. The truth is that a part of Hungary's territory inhabited by Hungarians for over a thousand years had been restored to her through the internationally accepted legal process of arbitration. Having asked for revision for eighteen years, how could Hungary have refused the homecoming of a part of her nationals?⁶

Twentieth Century peacemaking, with statesmanship yielding to demagoguery, can hardly be regarded as successful. Defects in the Paris peace treaties caused almost constant irritation because for two decades no improvement could be achieved by peaceful means. As made clear previously, President Wilson did wish to provide the possibility of treaty revision in the Covenant, irrespective of power politics. But the League of Nations, deprived since its inception of American dynamism, stiffened into a one-sided instrument for the defense of the status quo. The Monarchs at the Congress of Vienna (1815), more foresighted than the leaders of our era, did grant to defeated France, five years later, substantial treaty revision.⁷ Much trouble could have been avoided had the Allies at the end of the Second World War provided for the automatic revision of their agreements. It also seems that the right of holding plebiscites in disputed territories should have been secured for the United Nations. The peaceful liquidation of colonialism might have been aided thereby. And the day may come, after all, when the problems of the Danube Valley will be given honest consideration. Besides those accorded in the two Vienna Awards, there were other territorial changes in the Trianon Treaty effected during the Second World War. In areas which once had formed a part of Hungary, the fortunes of war created power vacuums, in Czechoslovakia as well as in Yugoslavia, which the Nazis would fill unless occupied by the Hun-

⁶ The British historian C. A. Macartney ("October Fifteenth," Edinburgh University Press, 1956, p. 250) has criticized severely those "writers who, a little later, were so self-righteously branding Hungary with the vulgar and entirely inappropriate name of 'jackal.'" They "might in common decency have remembered her (Hungary's) repeated appeals to their own country's (Britain's) sense of justice and the renunciations made by her (Hungary) in that cause of claims whkh in her own eyes were justified on every score.

⁷ 0n May 15, 1820, in the Final Act of Vienna.

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garians. 'The first such change through an accomplished fact occurred in Sub-Carpathia, also called Ruthenia (or Carpatho-Ukraine), a narrow strip of wooded land separating Hungary from nearby Poland. The majority of its population of 621,976 was composed of mountaineers of Ukrainian descent living under primitive conditions, According to the 1941 census - there was no indigenous Czech population at all in that province, and only 140,340 Hungarians. This forest land lacking in natural resources had been thinly populated during centuries by immigrants from the Ukraine. But for over a thousand years it had always formed a part of Hungary as a key position in the Carpathian defense system, The headwaters of the rivers, indispensable for the irrigation of the Great Hungarian Plain, originate in these mountains while the valleys used to serve for comunication between the two friendly neighbors, Poland and Hungary. Annexed in 1919 by Czechoslovakia, Sub-Carpathia became completely useless to faraway Prague and according to President Masaryk's statement - was only held in trust for the time when it would be handed over to the Russians. Ruthenia was to constitute part of a Pan-Slav Corridor between Moscow and Prague; meanwhile it was transformed into a barrier to isolate Hungary from Poland. High tariffs prevented the transportation of goods, such as much-needed coal, from Poland to Hungary and caused superfluous railway tracks to be torn up. The Ruthenian mountaineers lost their nearby Hungarian market for their timber and gazed longingly from their rocky abode towards the vast Hungarian Plain bearing the grains which once they had been harvesting.

In mid-March, 1939, when Slovakia declared her independence from Bohemia, the Ruthenians drove out their cumbersome Czech administrators, But the danger was iminent that Hitler would lay his heavy hands on that helpless province. Urged also by the Poles, Hungarian forces marched to the ancient frontier, the watershed of the Carpathians, and restored direct contact with Poland. Thanks to this escape route, tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, including the Army Corps of Lwow, were saved a few months later in September, 1939, from extermination, when Stalin stabbed Poland in the back in alliance with Hitler.

Hitler had tried to keep Hungary out of Ruthenia, for he wished

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ To Mr. Gilerson, a representative of the Red Cross (Narodny Listy, July 11, 1924).

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to secure that strategic position as a base for his coming campaign against Poland. On the other hand, Hitler used maximum pressure to force Hungary to participate in the invasion of Yugoslavia in April, 1941. He needed aid in urgently carrying out the military as well as political destruction of Yugoslavia. On March 26, General Simovitch of the Yugoslav Air Force carried out a putsch ousting Prime Minister Cvetkovitch and his Government who had signed, two days earlier, the Three Power Pact to joining Yugoslavia to the camp of the Axis. Hitler flew into a violent rage; this defection was a delaying manoeuvre, shortly before his invasion of Soviet Russia, which he had not expected. The Hungarian Minister to Berlin, General Sztojay, was put on a plane to get from Regent Horthy "an immediate and positive answer" to the Fuhrer's request not only to agree to the transportation of German troops across Hungary but also to participate with Hungarian forces in the occupation of Yugoslavia.

At that time, at the invitation of President Roosevelt, I was on my way to America, never to return to the country of my birth which I love. On March 1, 1941, the German Army crossed the Lower Danube in force, from Rumania into Bulgaria, to destroy the heroic resistance of the Greek people against Italian aggression. My last exit from encircled Hungary, the one through the Balkans, would soon be blocked by Hitler and I decided that I would not be trapped by the Nazis. On taking leave of the Regent, I found him over-optimistic concerning coming events. He agreed that the showdown in the Balkans was quite near but refused to believe that Hitler would wish to drag Hungary into it. An outdoor he-man, the Admiral would worry about a clash in Parliament which he did not relish, but placidly considered the fortunes of war with which he was familiar. Sir Alfred Chatfield, the First Sea Lord of Britain in the thirties, told me of an interesting encounter he had with Horthy during the First World War in the Straits of Otranto. Commander of a much smaller hostile fleet, Horthy flagged to the oncoming British forces, including two dreadnoughts: "Send the two Big Boys away, I wish to fight you!" Horthy hated to turn tail when challenged and the British Admiral seemed to appreciate his spirit.

But in 1941, it was Horthy's main desire to stay out of the war waged by Hitler - a person whom the Admiral despised. In 1937,

¹⁰ Concluded on September 27, 1940, by the Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, Japan.

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just back from a naval parade in Kiel where Hitler had tried to impress Horthy with his new modern fleet, the Regent complained to me about "the vulgarity of that character" whose power was terriflying, but with whom he would never have anything to do. Now, in March, 194], Horthy had no doubt that the Nazis would be defeated in a few years' time, "somewhere in distant Asia or Africa." But he felt certain that the danger of war had passed away, well beyond Hungary, and that our neutrality could be maintained up to the war's end. He assured me that he would certainly refuse to join in Hitler's war or to resign under Nazi pressure which might enable Hitler to take over Hungary.

On March 7, 1941, I left Hungary via Belgrade. Under Nazi prodding, the Hungarian Foreign Office had intervened in Belgrade to refuse me a transit visa. My good friend, Rashitch, the Yugoslav Minister to Hungary, informed me of this when he handed me the requested visa. He also told me that instructions were given by the Yugoslav Government to facilitate my journey across their country. The manly contest, honestly fought in Geneva, had created ties of mutual friendship between us. It proved difficult, however, for me to get out of Hungary, for more than a hundred Gestapo agents crowded the railway platform in Budapest with orders to prevent my departure, if need be, even by force. My trusted friend, Joseph Sombor, who had assisted me in Geneva, sent twice as many detectives of the Budapest Police to the station, to take care of the Gestapo agents. This is how I started on my one-way trip to America.

The night before, I had spent hours alone with Count Paul Teleki the Hungarian Prime Minister. Although a leader of the Opposition - I enjoyed much closer friendship with him than most members of his own Party. He foresaw the gloomy future of Hungary and was determined to face it, come what may! Under no circumstances would he allow our country to drift into the war. This statement was good enough for me, for it was supported by Christian faith and the moral strength of a gentleman. But in those tragic first days of April, it was not Hitler's ultimatum alone which threatened Hungary. George Barcza, our Minister to London, reported that Mr. Eden threatened to break off diplomatic relations, unless Hungary prevented the march of German trops across her territory. The choice left for Teleki was between two disastrous alternatives: immediate destruction of Hungary by German land and air forces, or a state of war with Britain. Only a

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few months earlier (December 12, 1940), Hungary had concluded a Pact of Friendship with Yugoslavia to end Nazi intrigues playing one country against the other. Could Teleki now support the ruthless German attack against Hungary's friend? On April 3, at midnight, Teleki was informed of the subservience of General Werth, the Chief of the Hungarian General Staff, to the German Army Command. This was too much for him to bear. Next morning I learned in Cairo the tragic news of Teleki's suicide. In his farewell letter to the Regent he expressed the hope that "with my death I may perhaps perform a last service to my country."¹¹ Churchill declared on the radio that the sacrifice of the Hungarian Prime Minister may not be forgotten and "at the coming peace conference a chair shall be reserved for him." But it was Stalin, at the war's end, who was sitting in Teleki's chair to take care of Hungary, as he pleased.

Early next morning, following Teleki's suicide, German tanks were rambling in the streets of Budapest. In his memoirs, written in exile, Horthy gives the following account ¹² of Hungary's role in the occupation of the Bacska:¹³

"Having received Hitler's imperative demand, we found ourselves in a compelling situation to act." If we stayed away from the Bacska surrounded by German troops, a vacuum would be created and the large Hungarian national group there would become the defenseless victim of the Serb Chetniks. We also had to reckon with the certainty that if we rejected the demands of Hitler - that is, if we did not occupy the Bacska - the German Army Command would feel compelled not only to direct its own troops there, but also to occupy militarily the uncooperative "Hinterland" for the protection of its lines of communication, including its center, the capital, Budapest. "We had no doubt that this would mean the end of Hungary's independence."

Hitler invaded Yugoslavia at dawn, on April 6. But only on April 10, 1941, were the Hungarian troops ordered to occupy the Bacska after Croatia had proclaimed her independence and Yugoslavia had disintegrated within four days. Nowhere in Europe had the World War produced an outbreak of such wild hatreds and mass murder as erupted then among Serbs and Croats, soon to be topped by the fratricidal

¹¹ Nikolaus von Horthy, Ein Leben fur Ungarn (Bonn: Atheneum Verlag, 1953) p. 228.

¹² Ibid., p. 231.

¹³ Hungarian province annexed by Yugoslavia in 1919.

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struggle among Tito's partisans and Mihailovitch' Chetniks. The role of the Hungarian Army remained restricted to the occupation of the Bacska and only up to the old Hungarian frontier. The Bacska formed about one half of the Voivodina, a territory which Yugoslavia had annexed from prewar Hungary, and Hungary did not try to recuperate the other half, called the Banat. Nor did the Hungarian troops participate in Hitler's war in the Balkans, for which the Fuhrer did not disguise his resentment. Altogether, a mixed population of 1,066,122 returned under Hungarian administration, of whom 44.4% were Hungarians, while the aggregate of the various Southern Slavs amounted to 39.1% of the entire population. Horthy had stated correctly in his Memoirs that with his war against Yugoslavia Hitler had created a vacuum in former Hungarian territory. The strongest national group there, the Hungarian, certainly did need protection, not only against the Serb Chetniks, but also against the uncontrollable Montenegrin and Macedonian settlers, called the "Dobrovolci," dreaded for their savagery. The Hungarian occupation of the Bacska did not come under the meaning of peaceful revision; neither did it constitute an act of war. Under the existing circumstances, even the British did not see sufficient reason for breaking off diplomatic relations with Hungary, as they had previously threatened.

With the exception of 600,000 Hungarians left outside of Hungary, the nation was now united in its own State. Then came the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the partition of Europe at Teheran and Yalta, with Hungary falling into the sphere of the Soviets. The Soviet Union had branded the Trianon Treaty an "imperialistic peace" before the war, but now reversed its attitude, for it found it more convenient to lure the three former Little Entente Powers into the Communist fold at the expense of Hungary which "had been in no hurry to adopt the Soviet political patterns and consequently received little support from the Soviet Union during the treaty negotiations."¹⁴ Beshaming decency and comon sense, the outrageous Trianon Treaty was again enacted in 1947 in Paris, even in a more malignant form than it had been originally drafted in 1919.

The woeful history of this aberration lies outside the scope of this book. Yet, may this much be noted for the reader's enlightenment,

¹⁴ John C. Campbell, The United States in World Affairs, 1945-47 (New York, London, 1947), p. 117.

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that in contravention of the ethnic principle and the right of self-determination granted widely, even to African tribes in the jungle, in the Soviet zone of Central Europe it was again the populations which were adjusted to the boundaries and not the boundaries drafted according to the wish and needs of the populations. ¹⁵ To exclude all outside interference with Comunist designs, the protection of the minorities was altogether dropped from these peace treaties. In order to help the wobbly Czechoslovak State to achieve some degree of stability, the Potsdam Conference ordered the "humane" transfer of the German and Hungarian populations to their countries of origin. Could inhumanity be exercised humanely? Out for revenge, Edward Benes, the reinstated President of Czechoslovakia, held the minorities under his rule responsible for the disintegration of the State in 1938. Applying the Nazi principle of "collective guilt," he deprived more than four million of them of their citizenship and ordered all their properties to be confiscated.¹⁶ Penniless, they were driven across the border from their homes where their forebears had been living for centuries.

In agreement with Benes, Stalin annexed Ruthenia, thereby cutting a wide road across the Carpathians for the Soviets' march into the heart of Europe. One by one, the Soviets transformed the nine Central and Eastern European nations in their zone into Communist satellites, including helpless Hungary, isolated by her neightbors and squeezed again into the straightjacket of the impossible Trianon boundaries. By 1948, the entire process was completed, and in 1956, when the youth of Budapest, mowed down by Soviet tanks, cried for help, the West could not be stirred into action. Half a century ago, Western pro-Slav propagandists had branded the respectable Austro-Hungarian Monarchy "the jail of nations." Many have contributed since then to make out of the false accusation of that time a lasting reality on the banks of the Danube.

Students of history may have become aware by now that small nations like the Finns, the Hungarians, or even the Turks who all share the tragic fate of living in the shadow of Russia, had to defend their supreme values in both World Wars primarily against that despotic Power. Both under Tsarism and Bolshevism, Muscovite imperialism

¹⁵ Article XIX of the Hungarian Armistice Terms, signed on January 22, 1945, in Moscow, declared: "The Vienna Arbitration award of November 2, 1938, and the Vienna award of August 30, 1940, are herewith declared to be null and void."

¹⁶ Presidential Decree No.33, published on Apri l 2, 1945, in Prague.

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was intent not only on depriving these peoples of their freedom and national independence, but also of their human rights which Russian oppression would put into jeopardy. Four times victimized within a century by the Russians,¹⁷ the Hungarian people never had a choice of the side on which to fight. But by defending themselves against the crushing attacks of Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia, they have been sacrificing their lives for the same ideals of freedom and independence at the service of which the youth of the Western Allies marched to their death. There were right and wrong causes involved in the World Wars, but no side could be considered as entirely right or wrong. This still unfinished War of the twentieth Century has been fought all the time by coalitions with the Kaiser and then with Hitler on the side of the Central Powers, and on the other side with the Tsar and the Soviets included among the Democracies. Decency and sound morale were not exclusively on one side, and Hungary's struggle against the onslaught of the Red Army was no less justified and honorable than the resistance of France to invasion by the Germans.

Victors, as a rule, will reap the fruits of their military triumph and reserve for themselves the toga of rectitude also. But peacemakers pronouncing moral judgments, should rather use one and the same yardstick for all concerned if they wish to achieve peace through better understanding. The vulgar repetition in 1947, of the Trianon Treaty, known to be unjust, cannot be explained away with the hypocritical argumentation that Hungary bad been fighting again "on the wrong side."

In the defense of cherished human values, the Hungarian people revolted in 1956 against their oppressors. Tbe youth of Hungary was massacred by the Red Army but earned undying glory for its heroism. It was the same foe, whom the Hungarian people had been fighting in the World Wars, and the same motive, their love of freedom, which consistently had spurred them into action. For the same patriotic stand, they were abandoned to Stalin's mercy at the war's end, but showered with praise by the Free World a decade later, when the Soviets had been recognized as "the wrong side."

"That is the greatest wrong which is accomplished in the form of right," taught Plato, two thousand years ago.

¹⁷ The Tsarist Army destroyed in 1849 Louis Kossuth's glorious fight for independence; at the end of the First World War Soviet agents established the first Communist dictatorship in Budapest under Bela Kun (1919) and they repeated the same disgrace in 1947, under the protection of the Red Army. In October 1956, Soviet tanks stamped out the Hungarian people's heroic fight for freedom, as will be still remembered.

Regicide at Marseille