Béla Illés (writer)

Béla Illés (Born: Béla Lipner from Kassa, Austria-Hungary; now Košice, Slovakia), March 22, 1895 – Budapest, January 5, 1974) was a Hungarian left-wing and Communist writer and journalist of Jewish descent, who spent over 20 years of his life in exile in the Soviet Union.

However, he was used as a writer of articles intended for the masses glorifying the communist system and the Soviet Union.

In 1948, he came up with the (almost certainly fictional) story of the Belarusian cavalry captain Alexei Gusev, who had opposed the tsarist intervention in the suppression of the 1848 revolution in Hungary in 1848, and had been executed for it in Minsk along with six companions.

In 1948, a Hungarian delegation travelled to the Soviet Union to pay their respects at the graves of Gusev and his companions.

However, in contemporary Communist propaganda, Gusev became a symbol of the (purported) centuries-old Russian-Hungarian and then Soviet-Hungarian "friendship", coincidentally with the centennial of the 1848 revolution, which was celebrated in Hungary on a grand scale.