Tibor Szamuely

Who was Tibor Szamuely?

Tibor Szamuely was a Hungarian Communist leader.

Born in Nyíregyháza, a city in the Northeast of Hungary, Szamuely was the oldest son of five children of a Jewish family. After completing his university studies, he became a journalist. He started his political activities as a member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party.

Szamuely was drafted and fought as a soldier during World War I; in 1915, he was captured by the Russians. After the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he was released. By then Szamuely had become a Communist. In Moscow he organized a Communist group together with Béla Kun among the Hungarian prisoners of war. Many of them, including Szamuely and Kun, joined the Soviet Red Army and fought in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Bolsheviks. Szamuely later went to Germany and in December 1918 he took part in the formation of the German Communist Party with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Szamuely was militant in his views and violent and extreme in his choice of methods: in February 1919, as the communists in Budapest became emboldened to challenge the government, he wrote in the pages of the Vörös Újság: "Everywhere counter-revolutionaries run about and swagger; beat them down! Beat their heads where you find them! If counter-revolutionaries were to gain the upper hand for even a single hour, there will be no mercy for any proletarian. Before they stifle the revolution, suffocate them in their own blood!"