REVIEW: An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune – Cécile Tormay (1923; Antelope Hill Press, 2020)

Revolution is the midnight agony of a passing age, when the vision of the future appears only through the blood and sweat of the dying. The senile age dies in the revolution. And when the disorder of the dawn ha passed and morning breaks, man becomes a child again and an autocratic power takes it by the hand and leads it back to order, to law, to church, to early Mass, into the presence of God.¹

Hungary weathered two revolutions and a mild restoration over the course of 1918-1919. The War had not gone well for the then-Kingdom, pressure from the Entente had urged a liberalizing of their political apparatus, and with the success of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were running roughshod over Eastern Europe. Mihály Károlyi led a revolution of Social Democrats to overthrow the crumbling Hapsburg political regime, and managed to consolidate power enough to run the country for about four and a half months. But March of 1919 saw Bela Kun’s takeover of the country in a second revolution: Béla Kun’s takeover of the country had been aided by his communist faction merging with Károlyi’s Social Democrats, and then promptly ousting him from power. The result was martial law followed by private asset seizure, more radical land redistribution, purges, and rather quickly, Hungarian bodies hanging from trees and piling up in alleys.

Enter Cécile Tormay: already an established writer and a right-wing organizer of the Hungarian Women’s League in Budapest, the forty-three-year-old knew the moment the news of Kun’s coup was announced that she’d have a target painted on her back. Unlike what contemporary histories like to presume, the people of Eastern Europe knew what was transpiring under the Bolshevist takeover of nearby Russia. The Red Terror across southern Russia and Crimea were not as secretive as Western powers like to pretend; when the Bolshevist forces invaded Romania, Hungary, Poland, and pressured Germany and Austria, the citizenry knew what was in store if they won.

Tormay would later go on to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice, first in 1936 and then again in 1937, back when the award actually meant something. She’d written novels and short stories prior to 1923’s An Outlaw’s Diary, and it shows; the work is written with the literary flair of a seasoned writer. Her personal commentary about the political and social situation of Communist Hungary is seamlessly woven into the harrowing experiences of living in a daily state of constant fear.

Politics

Tormay’s critique of the Kun regime follows along the lines very familiar to the right. The Bolshevists hollowed out and replaced old institutions with ones that had benign-enough sounding names, replacing their purposes with those that safeguarded Bolshevist interests and furthered the international Communist cause. In practice, this meant famines, widespread unemployment, long-term martial law, and summary executions, all while Hungary was at the time trying to fight off incursions from the north by the Czechs and from the east by the Romanians. The Entente powers, predictably enough, had no particular interest in safeguarding Hungary’s sovereignty or well-being, and sought only someone in a position of power to come to the negotiating table; the Entente sought merely the dissolution of the old Austrian empire.

On the subject of the Crown, she bears some resentment toward the then-ousted Hapsburg regime, somewhat bitter about the problem of an emperor-king whose loyalty was to the multi-ethnic composition of the whole empire. This resulted in tensions between its nations causing undue stress, something hardly deniable as the nineteenth and later the early twentieth centuries played out. As she explains:

The Hapsburgs never understood that our strength was their strength and our weakness their weakness. Their whole country was made up of peoples which were attracted by their kindred beyond the borders. The peoples of the Monarchy were all looking outward. The petted Austrians looked towards Germany, the Poles towards Warsaw, their favorites, the Czechs, toward the Slav giant, the Roumanians towards young Roumania, the Southern Slavs toward Serbia, the Italians towards Italy, the Jews toward the Jewish Internationale. The Hungarians alone had no such kin. We did not look longingly anywhere, nobody tempted us beyond the frontiers. And yet the rulers preferred all the other peoples to us, and loaded them with goods, treasures, and power. And now the peoples have gone, taking with them our land, our goods, our treasures.²

Understandable nationalist fervor aside, the broad strokes with which Tormay paints flattens the complexity of the situation at the time. Nonetheless, it can’t be denied that there were inter-ethnic sympathies across national lines, particularly after the First World War roused such bitter indignation against imperialism. It was, in fact, one of the contributing factors to the Empire’s dissolution (as the recently-reviewed book on Blessed Karl touches on). All the same, as Tormay herself recognizes, it can’t be said that deposing the Hapsburgs resulted in a government any more attuned to or representative of Hungarians’ interests. She characterizes the Social Democrats of Károlyi as ineffectual at best and traitorous at worst. And the Communists of Kun were genocidal.

The Terror

After the communist takeover in March, Tormay fled first to Berczel before moving on to Balassagyarmat, where she stayed for the duration of the regime’s existence. The border town was directly threatened by the Czechs across the Ipoly river, and with an unresolved war being waged, this meant Balassagyarmat’s occupation by Red forces. Although less heavily policed than Budapest, the enemy across the river was not much of a distraction for the legions of communist forces suspicious of the native Hungarian citizenry.

During her stay in Balassagyarmat, Tormay remained up to date on the events across the country thanks to a sympathetic network of quasi-resistance—mostly those sensible men who harbored antipathy for the Kun regime. She had disguised herself under an alternative alias and sought shelter under the roof of Aladár Huzsár, noted general of the War and an esteemed figure on the Hungarian right. It was during this period that the Red Terror in Hungary started to get worse.

Two figures deserve special note when it comes to mention of the Terror, and both are spoken of at length in the pages of An Outlaw’s Diary:Tibor Szamuely and Bela Kun. Both were Hungarian Jews who fought in the War, and both were made prisoners by the Czarist regime and sent to Russia. While they were encamped as POWs, they both grew supportive of the communist revolutionaries, and when they were freed, after the Bolshevist takeover of the government in November of 1917, they both became well-acquainted with Bolshevik higher-ups and mobilized Soviet defenses. These men were sent back to Hungary with the explicit intention to make it a Soviet state—and as we can see, for those four and a half months in 1919, they succeeded.

This is where their paths diverge a little. Kun became the head of the Soviet government and stayed mostly in Budapest during that year. Szamuely, on the other hand, was given a government position, but apparently preferred to travel around by locomotive and dictate, oversee, and according to Tormay, perform himself, the executions of suspected dissidents and counter-revolutionaries. When Szoboszló was threatened by Czech forces, Szamuely’s train encountered those retreating from the position and, after flogging the man who delivered the news, he rushed into town himself:

He arrested three men at random, Körner a mill-owner, Joseph Tokay a police officer, and Ladislaus Fekete the mayor, and had them hanged on trees in front of a chemist’s shop. “Be quick!” he said, and cleaned his nails while the execution was being carried out. Then he boarded his train again and went on. In Kaba he had the curate, the notary and the magistrate hurriedly tortured, and moved on again, because the Rumanians were coming. Thence he went to Szolnok, where he took hostages and had them hanged. One hundred and fifty were executed. They were all Hungarians—and Christians…³

And sometime later:

he went to Kapuvár and entered the place with a band of a hundred and fifty Terrorists armed with machine-guns and hand grenades. All he asked the prisoners was their name. “Hang them!” he cried. The mayor, the police sergeant and three others were led in front of the Catholic Church. He reprieved one of them on the way, because he was told he was the president of the Jewish congregation. In this place, too, the prisoners were beaten on their way to execution. The rope broke when police sergeant Pinter was hanged. His two little children ran up and implored mercy, but Számuelly would not relent. He then imposed a fine of millions on the town, and all the cattle he could lay hands on were driven away. Then he went on, without remorse […] ⁴

These are by no means the only depictions of the Red Terror contained in An Outlaw’s Diary; indeed, the depictions are so numerous, particularly by about halfway through, that they can scarcely all even be noted. Suffice it to say that the Terror, particularly the portion headed up by Szamuely and his band of terrorists (known as the Lenin Boys), was a harrowing experience for all in Hungary that brushed up against it. Contrary to their revolutionary propaganda, the Bolshevist revolutionaries of the 10s and 20s resembled marauders embroiled in a near-genocidal hatred of everything not their own.

Tormay’s depiction of Szamuely, even if at times it reaches the heights of almost cartoonish villainy, is easier to believe when one is already familiar with the behavior of the revolutionaries in other periods—the French during their Terror, the Bolsheviks in Russia, even the English during their Civil War or the Anglican Reformation. The open disdain here, however, Tormay attributes to an explicit ethnic hatred of Hungarians on account of Jewish Bolshevism—a term considered today to be controversial despite its accuracy.

But before that’s addressed, a brief aside is worth consideration. For all of Szamuely’s active terrorism, and for all of Kun’s politicized disdain for Hungary, there is one other crucial point of similarity: apparently, though Tormay doesn’t mention this, both worked as journalists prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Funny, that.

Jewish Bolshevism

Contemporary Hungary’s moderately right-wing government has come under attack by the international media numerous times for its alleged anti-Semitism; a decade ago, the Fidesz party even unveiled a statue of Tormay. For those in international media, this understandably stank of anti-Semitism—Tormay, after all, ranks among the many contemporaneous right wing figures who connected Bolshevism with the secularizing elements of Judaism of the time. This comes out with some vehemence in An Outlaw’s Diary, which draws upon the very old and long-held Hungarian suspicions of Jewry’s traditional behavior to pitch the conflict in the country as fundamentally racial.

Untangling the historical relationship between Jewry and Europe is far too large a topic to dwell upon here, but neither is it sufficient to dismiss all so-called anti-Semitism of interwar Europe as the angry and hateful delusions of so many mobs of racist bigots. The accuracy or legitimacy of Tormay’s feelings about the Jews has never been in the discussion of whether or not she’s an anti-Semite—the international press, as well as just about anyone sensitive to the issue, most certain presumes that she was. But the international press didn’t watch their own country taken over by people who were effectively foreigners, and nor did they watch a brutality inflicted upon it evocative of The Triumph of Death.

How they hurry to cover and efface everything that was ours! Yet even while they are painting their ordinances with our blood, every successive beat of the country’s heart is louder and louder, more and more threatening. What have you done with our country? With our language, our honor, the purity of our children, the memory of our greatness? The throbbing of the Hungarian blood bodes ill, but they hear it not, though the anger of a deeply insulted nation is boiling up around them. They will not hear; they plunder and murder as before and hold meetings in the stolen house of our stolen country. Their newspaper chroniclers record with satisfied racial self-consciousness the arrival of the delegates: “They entered without the slightest embarrassment, without emotion, without fuss.”⁵

Tormay here is referring to the first national meeting of the Soviet congress in the old parliament building in Budapest. When she returns to Budapest at the end of the book—and even in the midst of her initial flight at the beginning—she notes Budapest’s transformation into a literal red city. Banners, paint, posters of all sorts, all painted red in the colors of the Comintern. Although foreseen by those who watched the takeover in March, the bright red of the flags and paint would come to be a mockery of the red-browned oxidized blood that the Bolshevists would spill during their stay.

She here, also, of the stolen purity of the Hungarian children. On this note, a somewhat frightening and less-talked about parallel to our own times needs to be addressed: the pressure of so-called sexual education upon the public schooling apparatus by communist infiltrators:

Sexual education grows apace. The purpose of nursery schools has been changed: the teachers have been informed confidentially that the kindergarten must be used to estrange the children from their mothers and supplant the family. All toys are declared common property in order that the children may forget the crime of private ownership. And while our rulers are forcing the present generation of youths into the Red army, the decree that playing with lead soldiers must be forbidden to the coming generation, lest one day the slaves dream of liberation.⁶

“Bolshevik education”, she writes, “is demoralization.”⁷ This should sound familiar! Tormay’s thrust throughout this passage, and those like it, is that the communists were not Hungarians. She doesn’t mean it in a semantic sense, as though those who reject their own heritage become something else. She meant it literally. Those who sided with the Bolshevist takeover were traitors to foreign interests—those of International Communism which, as even Jewish histories admit, shared enormous overlap with international Zionism.

She makes the same thrust here, which again will ring familiar to contemporary readers:

This order is without precedent in the history of human law. It destroys at a blow the progress of centuries. It endows the privileged and only recognized class, the Proletarians, with the monopoly of crime.

Even in the administration of justice, Bolshevism stands on the basis of class hatred and serves the class war. If the Proletarian has robbed a member of the middle-classes, he cannot be punished; if he has murdered a bourgeois, he cannot be condemned, because his actions were simply acts of self-defense against the tyranny of capitalism.⁸

After 2020’s summer of riots, as well as the last ten years of race-conscious extremism that scales the entire social ladder, such a passage needs only to replace “class” with “race” and it sounds like it might as well have been written today. It’s been said before that the communist playbook doesn’t change that much. If An Outlaw’s Diary is any indication, their playbook doesn’t change much because it doesn’t have to. There’s little need to fix a method that tends to work.

Conclusion

Although Tormay does not dwell on the previous lives of those figures directly at the heart of the Kun regime and its Red Terror, she dwells enough on the violence that they inflicted upon the nation and its people. Ostensibly Hungarian by geographical birth, it cannot be ignored that many of these figures, Kun and Szamuely especially, did not consider themselves Hungarians foremost. They were raised with a different ethnic identity, which was tied to a religion specifically antithetical to the Catholicism that dominated Hungary, and when they were both captured by the Russians during the War, they found a new ideology to replace the liberalizing Judaism of their roots. Revolutionary tendencies use ideology to build off of pre-existing conflicts—often ethnic. They draw out old hatreds with novel excuses to shed blood and oppress those believed, rightly or wrongly, to have been oppressors.

Let us not forget that Szamuely had been a journalist prior to the Terror. Kun had worked in journalism before the War. Both were radical Trotskyites, but only Kun met his end during Stalin’s purges in the thirties; Szamuely was arrested during a border crossing in 1919, amid Soviet Hungary’s collapse, whereupon he shot himself.

When we consider, today, the length of four months’ time, it’s easy to consider the days blurring into one another, especially after an unprecedented year of lock downs, layoffs, shortages, closures, and isolation. Although the Bolshevist Soviet occupation of Hungary only lasted for a hundred and thirty-three days, An Outlaw’s Diary makes it clear that sometimes a year’s worth of events can be packed into the space of only a few months. Not unlike Pytor Wrangel’s depiction of the Russian Revolution in Always with Honor, the speed at which things escalate, accelerate, and plunge into chaos can never be overestimated.

At the start of Kun’s regime, Tormay enunciated what is perhaps the only sensible individual praxis that can be held to when any counter-force to the revolution is outmaneuvered, undermined, subverted, or otherwise unable to openly resist:

Yet still we trust and have faith. Why? Nobody knows. Yet how often have I felt in me that faith which is stronger than our fate, and how often have I noticed it flaming up in others? What is it? The mysterious desire for existence? Or is it more than that, is it the subconscious knowledge of our vitality?⁹

Cling to the Faith. Trust not in princes, Scripture reminds us over and over again. The Catholicity of Hungary persevered through the Terror, and it did so without overtures to ‘traditionalism’, to novelty, to ideas or liturgy or even to leaders and parties. It did so because Catholicism was part of the Hungarian identity, and to some extent, remains so today. The Faith must be the bedrock of any identity if one is looking to survive the chaos of the revolution with his sanity and his soul intact.

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1177.

247-48.

3131.

4142.

5144.

683-84.

783.

876.

925.