The Proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in Budapest on March 21, 1919, placed Hungary at the center of a revolutionary crisis spreading across postwar Europe. The new republic’s alliance with Lenin’s Russia and its attempts to recover lost territory through military action made it more than a domestic political change: it became part of a volatile struggle over the settlement left by the war.

Background in a Revolutionary Europe

The proclamation came during months of mounting expectation that revolution might overturn existing governments. In Munich, socialists had declared Bavaria a republic; a later Bavarian Soviet Republic gave way first to communist rule and then collapsed. In Budapest, Sándor Garbai and Béla Kun proclaimed Hungary’s Soviet Republic on March 21, as workers and political movements across Europe confronted the unsettled postwar order.

The book places these developments within a climate of fear and anticipation. In Milan, crowds gathered amid the expectation of a revolutionary cataclysm, while millions of returning soldiers sharpened the sense that old political arrangements were under pressure. Hungary’s new republic thus appears both as a particular political project and as one episode in a broader contest over what would replace the institutions and borders shaken by war.

Aims and Military Action

The republic’s leaders formed an alliance with Lenin’s Russia. Their stated objective, as the narrative presents it, was to recover territories lost through defeat in the war. In pursuit of that aim, Hungarian forces invaded Slovakia and attacked Romania. The account therefore links the new government’s revolutionary alignment to a territorial struggle: its politics looked outward as well as inward, and its effort to revise the postwar settlement involved armed action beyond Hungary’s borders.

This combination of revolutionary aspiration and territorial recovery gave the proclamation a tension that the surrounding narrative repeatedly returns to. The new order invoked a political transformation, yet it also sought to alter the map produced by the war. Its international alliance and campaigns made the republic part of a wider European crisis rather than an isolated experiment.

Collapse and Reversal

The Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed within a few months. The narrative offers this brevity as a sharp reversal of the hopes placed in it by its supporters, including Nicola Bombacci and his comrades, who had praised the Hungarian example. It does not present the later events in Ukraine as the cause of the Hungarian collapse: instead, it sets them alongside it as evidence of how precarious revolutionary gains remained across the region.

In Ukraine, the counterrevolutionary commander Denikin allied with the Germans against the Bolsheviks and approached Kiev with his Cossacks. He had already abolished the communists’ decree distributing land to peasants. The juxtaposition makes the collapse of the Hungarian republic part of a wider pattern of advance and retreat, in which revolutionary governments and their reforms could be rapidly challenged or undone.

Place in the Narrative

The proclamation helps establish the scale of the postwar revolutionary wave against which the book traces Italy’s political upheaval. It gives concrete form to the fear that the old order might be swept away, while its rapid collapse complicates any simple story of revolutionary inevitability. For the narrative, Hungary’s brief Soviet republic is both an international precedent that Italian radicals celebrated and a reminder that revolutionary power could prove short-lived.