Robert Service: "What I Found in Mr. Hoover's Papers"
[Robert Service is the Tad and Dianne Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a fellow of the British Academy and St. Antony's College at Oxford University.]
... [Herbert] Hoover had an intense interest in communism; his philanthropic food-relief work was tied to a struggle to prevent the westward spread of communist influence from the Soviet state. Thus, the Hoover Archives constitutes the largest holding of documentary and audiovisual data on the world communist movement outside Moscow itself; in many cases what is conserved at Stanford is unavailable in the former Soviet capital.
I have been struck by many surprising discoveries in the archives while working on a history of communism around the world. It had not occurred to me, for example, that there would be much on this in the files of the American Relief Administration after World War I, but I could not have been more mistaken.
Following World War I, several young U.S. officials and army officers were sent to Budapest to investigate the Hungarian political situation. One of them was Philip Marshall Brown, who arrived in April 1919. Defeated in war, Hungary had succumbed to a communist revolution led by Béla Kun. On coming to power, Kun instigated a process of communization even faster and deeper than the Communists in Russia had attempted in the October 1917 revolution. What is remarkable about Brown’s dispatches? Histories of revolutionary Hungary tend to focus on decrees, personnel appointments, and the swirl of military campaigns. Brown, though, gives us a portrait of Kun as a personality. He brings out more sharply than any subsequent writer the chaotic conditions that confronted the communist regime. Kun had recently been released from custody, and indeed he walked out of prison right into high office. The police he started to command had been beating him up only days before. Seated with him to conduct an interview, Brown noted that Kun’s head “still shows the wounds he received.”
As it happens, Brown was not the best-informed U.S. visitor, having been fooled by Kun, who misrepresented himself as a good Hungarian nationalist, not a communist fanatic. Brown thus concluded that Kun’s regime might be employed by the Western Allies as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Kun’s policies of dictatorship, terror, and property seizures were convulsing the country. Another American saw the situation more clearly—Cap-tain T.T.C. Gregory of the American Relief Administration. Gregory wrote to Herbert Hoover in June 1919 explaining why Kun had lasted as long as he did: Romanian and Czechoslovakian forces were a constant menace to Hungary at the time, and Kun’s ferocious determination to resist occupation restricted the popular will to seek his overthrow. Kun also understood the theatrical side of politics. As Gregory reported, Kun had foreign prisoners of war marched up and down the streets of Budapest to demonstrate the prowess of his Red military contingents....
Read entire article at Robert Service writing at the website of http://www.hoover.org (Date accessed.)
... [Herbert] Hoover had an intense interest in communism; his philanthropic food-relief work was tied to a struggle to prevent the westward spread of communist influence from the Soviet state. Thus, the Hoover Archives constitutes the largest holding of documentary and audiovisual data on the world communist movement outside Moscow itself; in many cases what is conserved at Stanford is unavailable in the former Soviet capital.
I have been struck by many surprising discoveries in the archives while working on a history of communism around the world. It had not occurred to me, for example, that there would be much on this in the files of the American Relief Administration after World War I, but I could not have been more mistaken.
Following World War I, several young U.S. officials and army officers were sent to Budapest to investigate the Hungarian political situation. One of them was Philip Marshall Brown, who arrived in April 1919. Defeated in war, Hungary had succumbed to a communist revolution led by Béla Kun. On coming to power, Kun instigated a process of communization even faster and deeper than the Communists in Russia had attempted in the October 1917 revolution. What is remarkable about Brown’s dispatches? Histories of revolutionary Hungary tend to focus on decrees, personnel appointments, and the swirl of military campaigns. Brown, though, gives us a portrait of Kun as a personality. He brings out more sharply than any subsequent writer the chaotic conditions that confronted the communist regime. Kun had recently been released from custody, and indeed he walked out of prison right into high office. The police he started to command had been beating him up only days before. Seated with him to conduct an interview, Brown noted that Kun’s head “still shows the wounds he received.”
As it happens, Brown was not the best-informed U.S. visitor, having been fooled by Kun, who misrepresented himself as a good Hungarian nationalist, not a communist fanatic. Brown thus concluded that Kun’s regime might be employed by the Western Allies as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Kun’s policies of dictatorship, terror, and property seizures were convulsing the country. Another American saw the situation more clearly—Cap-tain T.T.C. Gregory of the American Relief Administration. Gregory wrote to Herbert Hoover in June 1919 explaining why Kun had lasted as long as he did: Romanian and Czechoslovakian forces were a constant menace to Hungary at the time, and Kun’s ferocious determination to resist occupation restricted the popular will to seek his overthrow. Kun also understood the theatrical side of politics. As Gregory reported, Kun had foreign prisoners of war marched up and down the streets of Budapest to demonstrate the prowess of his Red military contingents....