Béla Kun (1886-1938), born Béla Kohn, was a Hungarian revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Following the fall of the Hungarian revolution, Kun emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy.

During the Great Terror of the late 1930s, Kun was arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the critical reassessment of Stalinism.

Béla Kohn, latter known as Béla Kun, was born on 20 February 1886 in the village of Lele, located near Szilágycseh, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (today Lelei, Romania). The Kohn family were ethnic Jews, and his father worked as a village notary.

Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was educated at the Calvinist College in Zalău and a famous Reformed kollegium (grammar school) in the city of Kolozsvár (modern Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

At the kollegium Kun won the prize for best essay on Hungarian literature that allowed him to attend a gymnasium. Kun's essay was on the poet Sándor Petőfi and his concluding paragraphs were: