V tieni súperenia dvoch revolúcií. Južné Slovensko počas obdobia prechodu (jeseň 1918 – leto 1919)

Abstract

The processes of the disintegration of Hungarian statehood and establishment of Czechoslovakia overlapped in what is now southern Slovakia. On 29 December 1918, when Czechoslovak troops occupied Košice, the power of the Czechoslovak state was present in Slovakia, but the Hungarian/Magyar state was also still there: its institutions still existed, its laws were in force and, most importantly, its representatives lived there. It took almost a year, from autumn 1918 to autumn 1919, for Czechoslovakia to take over the role of historical Hungary and these months may rightly be regarded as a period of transition. The developments in southern Slovakia in that period were influenced by the dynamics of the events unfolding during the Czechoslovak Constitutional Revolution and the Hungarian Aster Revolution. These two revolutions mostly pursued conflicting goals and these contradictions became particularly evident in the February General Strike. The strike had two important objectives. On the one hand, the strikers wanted to express their commitment to Hungarian statehood and, on the other, they wanted to preserve the gains of the Aster Revolution. The paper concludes that the events of this transition period in Slovakia can only be meaningfully examined in the context of two interacting revolutions: the Czechoslovak Constitutional Revolution and the Hungarian Aster Revolution.