Two Big Storms were still to come: Bela Kun and Spanish Flu

In the last days of October, the streets of Budapest began to fill again with protesters.

The ranks of demonstrators had swollen ever more in recent months, as increasing numbers of P.O.W.s were returning home from Russian war camps and spreading the agitprop of Bolshevism. The insurgents plucked brightly-colored asters from the autumn ground and stuck the flowers into their lapels or hatbands to mark who they were: Revolutionaries determined to set a new course for Hungary. 

A week earlier, the Hungarian National Council had formed. It was a body intended to fill the void caused by the imminent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The emboldened rioters tore through the streets. They stormed the Parliament building and demanded that the head of the National Council, Mihály Károlyi, be installed as prime minister. Just before dawn on Thursday, October, 31, unknown assailants assassinated former prime minister István Tisza. 

A week and a half later, on November 1, a Great War truce was signed between the major factions of the Allied and Central Powers. The Austrian Empire, which had reigned over Central Europe since the Middle Ages, crumbled. The one-thousand-year-old Kingdom of Hungary was hastily dissolved. It re-emerged as the Hungarian Democratic Republic.

The fledgling state already faced two perils. The first came from the Allied Powers: They were threatening to carve up Hungary as a spoil of post-war peace. The second came from a radical Communist named Béla Kun, a P.O.W. who was backed by the Bolsheviks and plotting his coup from a Moscow hotel room on the eve of his return to Budapest.

Hungary had never been more bleak. It had sent three and a half million men to the battlefields and gotten back more than two million casualties. The Blockade of Europe was still in effect. Food was a precious commodity to city dwellers: Wheat production was minimal, as there were fewer farmers to work the fields. No fertilizer or machinery for the farms was available. Yields that were produced had a hard time getting through to the capital because of the mass number of broken railcars and railroads. Starvation and death in Budapest were rampant. No medicine or medical supplies had entered the country in more than two years.

And a new plague had hit. The American press would label it “Spanish Flu.”

No one might have believed it, but Hungary’s darkest days were yet to come.