Lenin Boys

The Lenin Boys (Hungarian: Lenin-fiúk) were a band of Communist enforcers formed to support the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. The group consisted of about 200 young men dressed in leather jackets, acting as the personal paramilitary and bodyguard of Tibor Szamuely, Commissar for Military Affairs. Their unit commander was József Cserny. The Lenin Boys were used as an instrument to violently suppress counter-revolutionary movements against the communist government.

Tibor Szamuely, the leader of Lenin boys meets with Vladimir Lenin in Moscow

József Cserny, a commander of Lenin Boys

After a failed counter-revolutionary coup attempt in June 1919, Communist leader Béla Kun is said to have unleashed the Lenin Youth in an even more savage fashion, in order to stamp out any more counter-revolutionary movements among his opponents. Tallies of the number of victims of the terror vary; different sources generally count the dead at close to 600. A book published by Dr. Albert Váry in 1922, titled "The Victims of Red Terror in Hungary" documents 590 suspects executed by the communist police.

After Hungarian-Romanian war, Romanian troops entered Hungary and took Budapest from the Hungarians on August 6, 1919. Kun and his Party of Communists colleagues fled. After the arrival of Miklós Horthy's counterrevolutionary Hungarian paramilitaries in Budapest three months later, stalwartly anti-Communist officers carried out a wave of retributive violence against Communists and their supporters (as well as suspected leftists of any stripe) known as the White Terror. As many communist leaders were ethnically Jewish, this encouraged anti-semitic lynchings in Budapest by these paramilitary forces. The Lenin Youth were also particular targets by the counter-revolutionary forces.

Cserny was captured, tried and executed by the new regime in December 1919, along with several other Lenin boys.[1]