Béla Kun (Hungarian: Kun Béla, born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who in 1919 governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Kun had worked as a journalist until World War I. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, and was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Ural Mountains. In Russia Kun embraced communist ideas, and in 1918 in Moscow he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the Russian Communist Party. He befriended Vladimir Lenin and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.