Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/6



To one who has been in Budapest before the Communist rule the city appears to have undergone little change on the surface. To be sure the stores are all closed pending their organisation into socialised units, there is no alcohol for sale anywhere, and the "chic" population formerly attracted to the city by its famous racecourse is conspicuous by its absence, because the racecourse has been turned into an experimental food station worked by "intellectuals." At the cafés on the river bank you can now obtain only pink lemonade, but every table is taken, and the Hungarian population takes as many hours to sip their one glass as they did formerly over their wine. At the Soviet House I had better food, and ate my first egg since leaving Switzerland, although the seven or eight course dinners I remembered in 1910 are now reduced to soup, sauerkrout, or one other vegetable, and two pieces of pastry which one is devoutly thankful to get. One gets the impression that he has landed in a New England town on a Sunday and that the people strolling as usual along the bank of the Danube are good Puritans, far from the madding crowd, and still further from any suggestion of Red Guards or Red Terrors. Some of the posters on the walls read: "Proletarians! Do not drink but work!" "Proletarian Comrades! The Entente Peace is our ally for no such unjust peace can last!" "Comrade workers! will you have a proletarian dictatorship, or an Entente throttle?" "Elftach" (comrade) is the greeting you get from the tall Red Guards at the Hungarian side of the little bridge at Bruck, and the same