Office of the Historian

Paris Peace Conf. 184.01102/450

Professor Philip M. Brown to Professor A. C. Coolidge23

No. 40
Budapest, 2 May, 1919.

Subject: Appeal addressed to President Wilson.

1.
I enclose herewith a copy of an appeal addressed to President Wilson by the Hungarian Soviet Government on the 28th or 29th of April, urging that he should arrest the advance of the Roumanians and Czecho-Slovak troops now actually fighting with the Hungarian Red Guard.
2.
I have been informed that this appeal was transmitted by wireless to Paris, and that its receipt was acknowledged. I presume that this merely means that the appeal was published to the world and in that manner was brought to the personal attention of President Wilson. It would appear to be an appeal of desperation, in view of the rapid approach of the Roumanian forces.
3.
I merely transmit it for your information and for any use you may think desirable.

Sincerely yours,

Philip Brown
[Enclosure]

Appeal of the Hungarian Soviet Government Addressed to President Wilson

[April 28 or 29, 1919.

Sir: Blood and smoke, the blood of a proletariat all but exterminated, and the smoke and ruins of the villages ravaged by war, mark the path pursued by your allies in the name of that higher civilization and love of peace which you proclaim. We do not believe that this proceeding is in conformity with the principles proclaimed by you, the essence of which is that every country must be allowed to determine its own fate as it deems best from the point of view of its future development or its present interests. The very dead in their silence, and the maimed by their groans, protest against the action of your allies against the Hungarian Soviet Republic, they protest against the mere notion of this action being undertaken in your name or with your approval.

We, the Revolutionary Governing Council of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, who wish to establish a commonwealth based on organised work in place of capitalistic anarchy, we who have assumed power [Page 454] to prevent indiscriminate bloodshed, civil war, and complete anarchy from ensuing in this country, we appeal to you to arrest this fresh bloodshed ere the working people of a whole country be buried under the ruins of their own nation and drowned in their own blood.

When we assumed power, we had no armed force to back us. But neither was our succession to power followed by sanguinary conflicts of any kind. Within a very brief space of time we have taken thoroughgoing and far-reaching measures of social reconstruction, both in the political and in the economic sphere, without encountering any resistance. This was done without occasioning any convulsions, in a manner unprecedented in the history of mankind. We owed these achievements to the fact that proletarian democracy, which is the desire of every working man and woman and thus of the overwhelming majority of the population of the country, offered the one possibility to ensure the continuance of production and the livelihood of the people after the utter breakdown of capitalism. No doubt those who acquired millions of money at the cost of the blood spilt in the war will not willingly acquiesce in the new order of things. They, and they alone, are the people that try in every way to restore the old hated order, and drum their lamentation in the ears of those whom they vilified in the most infamous manner. They appeal for protection now whose joy knew no bounds every time a ship was sunk, in callous disregard of the fact that hundreds of innocent women and children perished in those ships. In the same inhuman way they are now careless of the fact that such assistance to a tiny majority, which at best could only be temporary, would entail the sacrifice of many thousands of lives.

We appeal to you to take steps to arrest immediately all warlike action against us, the more so as we believe that the settlement of our own internal affairs could be left to ourselves in accordance with the principles proclaimed by you, without the international situation being thereby affected in any way. The Governing Council declares that it has no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. Therefore it feels it is entitled to ask you to stay the armed forces turned against the lives of our citizens and aimed at the overthrow of our internal order. We are ready to face all contingencies. We are ready to face the danger of our being exterminated to the last man.

The Revolutionary Governing Council of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
Garbai

President
Kun

People’s Commissary
  1. Transmitted to the Commission by Professor Coolidge under covering letter No. 263, May 5; received May 7.↩