To Arms! To Arms!

FEGYVERBE! FEGYVERBE! - To Arms! To Arms! by Róbert Berény, 1919

An appeal to the Hungarian workers to join the Hungarian Red Army to defend the Revolutionary Hungarian Soviet Government, established in March 1919.

Róbert Berény was born in Budapest in 1887 and was an avant garde painter, part of a modern art movement that introduced cubism and expressionism to Hungarian art, including in literature and music. During the Hungarian Soviet of 1919 he was a member of the Art Directorate. After the collapse, he emigrated to Berlin. He returned to Hungary and continued to work. After the Second World War, in communist Hungary, he became a teacher at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. He died in 1953.

In 1969, Kiss István created a sculpture based on the poster, which was placed at Dózsa György Boulevard in Budapest. Currently preserved in Memento Park, where the guides will tell you that during the later stages of the Communist dictatorship people described it as looking like a cloakroom attendant running after someone who forgot their scarf.

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In the aftermath of the First World War, as the victorious Governments set about redrawing the boundaries of countries within Eastern Europe, the Liberal Government of Hungary resigned leaving a vacuum which was filled by the merger of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party who immediately proclaimed the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The new Government set about a programme of nationalising factories, housing and schooling, increasing wages and reducing rents.

Inherited boundary disputes between Hungary and neighbouring countries, Romania and Czechoslovakia, and refusal to negotiate with the Western allies - ultimately led to invasion by Romania and the Soviet Government collapsed after just three and a half months.