Jenõ Landler

Born Nov. 23, 1875, in Gelse, in the megye (county) of Zala; died Feb. 25, 1928, in Cannes, France. Hungarian labor figure.

A lawyer by education, Landler in April 1904 defended the leaders of the general strike of railroad workers, and in October 1906 he was one of the leaders of the strike of Budapest streetcar workers. In 1906 he became a member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, and in 1908 he became an active member of its left wing. During World War I he engaged in antiwar work and organized antiwar strikes (1918); in June 1918 he was arrested.

Landler was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919: first he was people’s commissar of trade, then people’s commissar of internal affairs, commander of the III Corps (May-June) and commander in chief of the Hungarian Red Army (July 1919). In 1919 he became a member of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP). While an émigré after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he worked as a member of the HCP Central Committee to organize the illegal work of the HCP and to create the Socialist Workers’ Party of Hungary in 1925. He participated in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Congresses of the Comintern. He died in Cannes, in the Maritime Alps, and his ashes were interred in Moscow at the Kremlin wall.