The Right-Radical Ideology in the Hungarian Army, 1921–23

Abstract

The army’s contribution to the success of the Hungarian counter-revolution of 1919–20 has been well documented. The formation of a new National Army (Nemzeti Hadsereg) in the southern Hungarian town of Szeged in June 1919, its subsequent march across western Hungary and into Budapest, its initial responsibility for the restoration of law and order and the ensuing ‘white terror’ carried out by some of its soldiers have all received considerable attention. From 1921 onwards, the new regime consolidated its position, the ‘white terror’ subsided; the civilian authorities reasserted their authority; and the army was, in the words of Andrew Janos, driven ‘off the streets and out of politics’. In assessing the army’s response to this reduction in its political influence, differences of opinion have emerged among historians. For Marxist historians, the army was always merely a tool of ‘class interests’. As Istvan Pataki puts it, the regime had ‘brutally and efficiently’ consolidated its position; ‘it dressed itself in a more constitutional form’ and the army’s political role was ended. Any tensions between the army and the civilian administration were an unimportant consequence of this ‘changing of the guard’. The official history of Hungary published in 1976 presented an almost identical argument, claiming that the only difference between the pre-1921 and the post-1921 army was a change of ‘methods’: the ‘extremist bureaucratic-military layer [. . .] was merely driven into the background’. Lorand Dombrady presents a more complex assessment. He argues that foreign policy prerogatives (the requirements of the Trianon peace treaty, the desire to break out of diplomatic isolation and the need for a foreign loan) led the government to drastically curtail the army’s political influence. The army’s leaders, however, far from passively accepting this, ‘felt that they had been sidelined’; were dissatisfied because ‘they could not take part, in a manner fitting to their capacity in the running of the country’; had ‘differences of outlook