John Pepper

József Pogány, known in English as John Pepper or Joseph Pogany, (November 8, 1886 – February 8, 1938) was a Hungarian Communist politician. He later served as a functionary in the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, before being cashiered in 1929. Later as an official in the Soviet government, Pepper ran afoul of the secret police and was executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38.

Background József Pogány was born József Schwartz in Budapest in Hungary. He was the first of three children. His family were ethnic Jews, but he himself adopted the Hungarian name Pogány to de-emphasize his Jewish origins. His father, Vilmos Schwarz, was a tradesman who became a minor civil servant; he also served Chevra Kadisa synagogue in Pest. His mother Hermina Weinberger was a hairdresser. He was not related to artist Willy Pogany, as was once claimed by Whittaker Chambers. Pogány studied at the University of Budapest (1904-1908); he spent his last six months of studies in Berlin and Paris. He wrote his dissertation on János Arany.

Despite lack of military credentials aside from war reportage, at the time of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, Pogány found himself as the leader of the Budapest Soldiers' Soviet. While Pogány dedicated himself to promotion of what one historian has called "the often impossible demands of the soldiers," Bartha attempted to dodge this decision with the establishment of new disciplinary "flying squads," but this move was regarded as counterrevolutionary and Bartha was forced to resign on 11 December.

A Revolutionary Governing Council was established on 21 March 1919, with Pogány named People's Commissar of War. The first two decrees of the Revolutionary Governing Council instituted the death penalty for armed resistance to the new regime and a total prohibition of alcohol consumption in Hungary.

The former Communists did not trust the former Left-Socialists now enlisted as party allies, however. Pogány clashed pointedly with a number of hardline Communist Party radicals, including Tibor Szamuely and Béla Vágó. On 2 April, Pogány was shifted to the less sensitive position of deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, while Szamuely was transferred to the People's Commissariat of Culture, where he assumed responsibility for the revolutionary government's military recruitment campaign.

Pogány also joined Tibor Szamuely as an adherent of "Red Terror" — proposing that the Soviet government take as hostages 200 prominent citizens as a means of forcing an end to counter-revolutionary resistance. Although himself of mixed mind on the issue, Kun signed on to the plan. Upon arrival Pogány adopted a new Americanized name as his own, "John Pepper" — the name by which he was known for the rest of his life — and immediately set about learning the English language. Along with the Comintern's official representative to the CPA, Genrik Valetski, and its representative to the Communist Party's trade union movement, Boris Reinstein, Pepper attended the ill-fated August 1922 convention of the CPA, held in Bridgman, Michigan, narrowly escaping from the clutches of the police who raided the gathering.

Making use of his European erudition, storied past as a revolutionary leader, and personal magnetism, Pepper soon emerged as one of the CPA's most authoritative voices. Pepper wrote extensively on international developments and domestic policy questions for the party press, becoming the American Communist movement's most forceful advocates for abandonment of "underground" isolation and adoption of the strategy of constructing a mass Labor Party in America.

Pepper aligned with Jay Lovestone's pro-Bukharin faction, as Whittaker Chambers recalled in his memoirs: For the first and only time, I attended a Lovestone caucus meeting... I remember the short, arrogant figure of John Pepper, who, as Joseph Pogany, had been the commissar for war in the Hungarian Soviet Government, and who was now the official representative of the Communist International to the American Communist Party, and Lovestone's "gray eminence."

Pepper was made a member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the CPA's "above-ground" arm, the Workers Party of America, a position to which he was re-elected by the 3rd Convention in January 1924. Pepper allied himself closely with the Executive Secretary of the CPA's "legal" wing, C.E. Ruthenberg, and together the two headed one of the two primary factions in the American Communist Party throughout the second half of the 1920s.

Not surprisingly, Pepper was loathed by the opposition faction headed by William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon, who managed to have Pepper recalled to Moscow by the Comintern in 1925.

Soviet Union Once back in Moscow, Pepper headed the Information Department of the Comintern,

Death

Pepper was arrested by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) on 27 July 1937. The postcard cites Pogany as "founder of the American Civil Rights Movement" (which the John Birch Society deplored). It based this accusation on his pamphlet American Negro Problems (1928) (which, at the time, was part of CPUSA/CPSU support for a Soviet Negro Republic within the Black Belt in the American South). "There is almost nothing being written, preached, or done, under the "civil rights" slogan today, which is not in accordance and planning and instructions laid down by this alien Communist nearly forty years ago" (as of 1962). It also accuses him of helping to murder Hungarian prime minister Istvan Tisza in 1918 and to destroy the subsequent government of Mihály Károlyi in 1919.

Works Arany János politikai nézetei. Budapest: 1909. A Balkán-háború és az osztrák-magyar imperializmus. Budapest: 1912. Lemberg. Tíz hónap a cárizmus uralma alatt. Budapest: 1915. A meghódított Orosz-Lengyelországon keresztül. Budapest, 1915. A földre szállt pokol. Az Isonzo eposza: 1916. Dánia, a paraszt eldorádó. Budapest: 1918. Napóleon. (play) Budapest: 1919. For a Labor Party: Recent Revolutionary Changes in American Politics: A Statement by the Workers Party. New York: Workers Party of America, n.d. — Three editions: 1. No author listed, 1922; 2. 2nd Revised Edition, New York, 1923; 3. 3rd Revised Edition, Chicago, 1923. "The Farmers and the American Revolution," The Daily Worker, vol. 1, no. 317 (Jan. 19, 1924), section 2, pp. 5–6. "Lenin," The Daily Worker, vol. 1, no. 320 (Jan. 23, 1924), pg. 1. "Underground Radicalism": An Open Letter to Eugene V. Debs and to All Honest Workers Within the Socialist Party. New York: Workers Party of America, 1923. The General Strike and the General Betrayal. Chicago: Workers (Communist) Party of America, 1926. Why Every Miner Should be a Communist. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. . American Negro Problems. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928.