Word: kun
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...Carpathian basin where Arpad had made his home a millennium earlier. Its predominantly Magyar population of 8,354,400 was 75% Roman Catholic, 20% Calvinist, and the balance Greek Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Jewish. In 1919, amid the anarchy of defeat and humiliation, a disciple of Lenin named Bela Kun, freed from a Russian prison camp and sent back to Hungary on a false passport, was put at the head of a reign of Red Terror that lasted almost four months...
...fanatic Kun nationalized all estates of more than 100 acres, abolished servants, ordered all jewelry seized, and decreed that a man could own no more than two suits, four shirts and four pairs of socks. Kun's strong-arm methods and inflationary money found no favor with the peasants, who boycotted the markets. Meanwhile, Hungary's military and aristocracy were rallying to another banner, that of Admiral Nicholas Horthy, a former naval aide to the Emperor Franz Josef and a naval hero in World War I. Horthy organized a counterrevolution to oust Kun, and Kun was forced...
Iron Paternalism. The victorious Horthy entered Budapest on a white horse, proclaiming. "I've come to punish this sinful city." The Red Terror became a counterterror, much of it directed against the Jews (Kun was Jewish). Though Horthy's country had been shorn of its seacoast and had no navy, he still used the title of admiral. As self-styled regent for an unoccupied throne, he ruled until 1944. During the early years of his long reign, under the premiership of Count Stephen Bethlen, Hungary was ruled by what was called an iron paternalism, but the iron gradually...
...with the Red army in control of Hungary, bulletheaded Communist Party Boss Matyas Rakosi, a onetime Kun lieutenant, set out to grab power. Using what he called salami tactics-a slice at a time-Rakosi cut off his opponents. Kovacs was sent to Siberia (where, after nearly nine years, he was released a few months ago). In 1947, with his four-year-old son held hostage, the Smallholders' Premier Ferenc Nagy, the last hope of a free Hungary, was forced to resign and flee into exile...
...Late Choice: Hungary was in a ferment that only grew with Khrushchev's posthumous "rehabilitation" of Bela Kun and Rajk. Students and intellectuals openly demanded "an end to this present regime of gendarmes and bureaucrats." The Russians sent First Deputy Premier Mikoyan down to Budapest to suggest that Rakosi take a health cure in Russia. The Russian solution: to supplant one gendarme bureaucrat by another. Old-Line Stalinist Erno Gero, the ruthless agent "Pedro" of the Spanish civil war (TIME, July 30), was pushed into the Hungarian leadership in July of this year, and told to clear his "liberalization...