A népuralom kísérlete és bukása

Abstract

József Sipos was the supervisor of my thesis that analysed the activities of the Social Democrats in 1918–1919. Later, a decisive element of our teacher-student and increasingly friendly relationship was a multitude of our professional discussions about the revolutionary period, one of the central issues of which was the failure to build a democratic system in 1918–1919. József Sipos believed that one of the most important reasons for this failure was the fact that a worker-peasant alliance – historically been burdened anyway in our current terminology – could not be realized. Accordingly, his analyses focused on the conflicts between the workers’ and peasants’ parties, as well as on their relations to their own social bases. In this present paper, I focus on the assumption that the consolidation carried out by a worker-peasant coalition in the spring of 1919 was a political reality. I examine the activities of the social democrats and smallholders through a few nodes: (1) the relation to Mihály Károlyi’s political programme; (2) the rural expansion of the political basis and (3) the debate on the land system; (4) the relation to the interpretation of the revolution in connection with the government crisis of December and January; (5) the participation in Berinkey’s coalition government. Despite political tendencies towards a worker-peasant alliance, the difference between political identities between social democrats and smallholders represented a fundamental problem. As opposed to the emancipation marks, the identity of the social democrats remained revolutionary, while the smallholders fully identified themselves as an emancipatory political movement. The resolution to this conflict was the most pressing question in the event of a coalition that appeared to be a political reality. Elections to clarify the balance of political power were not held, the political shock caused by the Vix Note swept away the chance for consolidation. The revolutionary identity of the social democrats led to their involvement in the dictatorship of the proletariat.