Béla Kun

Béla Kun (20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938 or 30 November 1939), born Béla Kohn, was a Hungarian revolutionary and politician who de facto led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Following the fall of the Hungarian revolution, Kun emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy.

During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the critical reassessment of Stalinism.

Biography

Early life

Béla Kohn, later known as Béla Kun, was born on 20 February 1886 in the village of Lele, located near Szilágycseh, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (today Lelei, Romania). His parents were Jewish and his father was a village notary,

Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was educated at the Calvinist College in Zalău and a famous Reformed kollegium (grammar school) in the city of Kolozsvár (modern Cluj-Napoca, Romania).