Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/22

 handing over the government to the Soviets. This would appear to express the sum total of the bourgeois opposition, as there is no sign of their having any active organization, and as the work of disarming them was very thoroughly carried out by the Red Guard.

The Government met the discontent of the women by holding twelve public mass-meetings especially for them, at which Bela Kun and the other Commissaries explained the situation. The speakers stated that under the old government the proletarians had never had enough to eat, but that in spite of the Entente blockade, Hungary was now better fed than any country in Central Europe.

The traveller in Hungary is struck with the vast number of freight cars standing idle and the spasmodic train service. Wood is the only fuel to be had, as the Czechs and Roumanians occupy Hungary's coal areas. Nobody knows just when a wood burning engine will be available. The result is that not only all seats and corridors inside the trains are filled to overflowing, but the peasants, women as well as men, climb up to the top of the cars, and there sit clinging to their huge bundles of food, and probably praying that the wooden sparks from the engine will not set them on fire. Hundreds of peasants travel all night and all day in this way.

The problem of transporting food was the only subject discussed at the meeting of the Budapest Soviet which I attended. Of the five hundred members elected by districts in the city, twenty are women, and over sixty per cent, are proletarians, and few are over forty years old. The meeting was open to the public, and the most violent protests came from the soldiers. President Bokanyi opened the meeting quite informally by asking if anyone wished to speak. A Communist from Austria brought a greeting, saying if the people must starve, it must be for the revolution, and not for the capitalists.

Stephen Biorman, one of the governing city council said, "Women are protesting against standing so long at distribution