The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

Battalion of Kassa, on the northern Italian front.
And thus, we return to the forcible grabbing of power on October 31, 1918
by Mihály Károlyi and his ‘circle,’ actually, up to the day of his coup d’état,
when Archduke Joseph August, homo regius, 16 named Károlyi as Prime
Minister. On the same day, around 5:30pm, armed soldiers broke into the house
of Count István Tisza, former Prime Minister, and killed him. 17 Earlier, one
Otto Korvin (1894-1919), the leader of the revolutionary Socialists, personally
prepared an assassination attempt on Count Tisza, carried out by János Lékai
(1895-1925) on October 16. On top of all this, due to all the accusations spread
by Károlyi and his circle, the majority of public opinion held Tisza responsible
for Hungary’s entry into the war. Yet, it was a fact little known by the public
that, after the assassination of the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand (June 28,
1914), in opposition to the rest of the responsible decision makers of the
Monarchy, the Hungarian Prime Minister opposed, for long weeks, military
action against Serbia. Tisza only agreed to a declaration of war against Serbia
after getting assurances that South Slav territories would not be annexed to the
Monarchy, as that threatened, in his eyes, to unravel the Dualist system.
The past decades’ Marxist-Communist historiography missed no
opportunity to trumpet that István Tisza, precisely the day following the
unsuccessful attempt on his life by Lékai, admitted in parliament that the war
was lost. The truth is very different, as proven by the Parliamentary Record for
1918, unavailable for a long time. What did happen, among other things, in the
parliamentary chamber on the day of the attempt on Tisza’s life? On October
16, 1918, during the 823rd sitting of Parliament convened on June 21, 1910
[The election of 1914 was cancelled due to the outbreak of war-ed.], Prime
Minister Sándor Wekerle described the political situation of the day, the peace
offer made to President Wilson and the plans to alter Austria’s make-up into a
federative union. In the heated debate, Count Károlyi, too, got the floor and
began with: “Honored House! We have lost the war. Now, it is important for us
not to lose the peace. We have lost the war and the situation today must be
16 Homo regius: the king’s man. The ruler’s confidante, charged with handling difficult
situations. King Charles IV named Archduke Joseph August (1872-1962) homo regius
on October 27, 1918, a position from which neither the democratic civil revolution nor
the revolution of the proletariat could displace him. The so-called unionist government,
led by Gyula Peidl (1873-1943), was in power from the first day after the fall of the
Commune, August 1, 1919, until its removal by a coup on August 6. On that day,
Archduke Joseph announced that he will temporarily assume the role of head of
government as Governor. The following day, he named István Friedrich (1883-1951)
and his government officials. At the request of the Entente Powers, who were afraid of
a return of the Habsburgs to the Hungarian throne, he resigned his post on August 26.
17 Szász, Károly: Tisza István. Élet- és jellemrajz [István Tisza. Biography and
character portrait]. Budapest, 1921; Fogarassy, László: Kik ölték meg gróf Tisza Istvánt
[Who killed Count István Tisza]? In: Történelmi Szemle, 1980, issie 2, pp. 338–341;
Pölöskei, Ferenc: Tisza István [István Tisza]. Budapest, 1985.
12