Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/7

 word is addressed to you, with an attentive questioning inflection, by the porter at the hotel, (who refuses your tip, saying he earns a good salary), by the street-car conductor, or by the Red Guard at the entrance of Bela Kun's office. If you are not a particularly observant person, you do not notice the red flag floating from the Imperial Palace, or the red bunting decorating the pillars of the Grand Hotel Hungaria, now the Soviet House, where all the People's Commissaries and their families live.

Bela Kun says that he believes it absolutely necessary to have a show of force to support the Government until Communism is thoroughly established, but there are fewer soldiers in the streets than in Vienna, and entrance to the Soviet House is far simpler than showing credentials at the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, whore the American Commission to negotiate Peace resides, or at the Astoria, where I went to one of Lord Robert Cecil's interviews, to say nothing of approaching within a block of Wilson's residence. All members of the Red Guard are proletarians, as only Trade Union members can be admitted to the Army. There is such a rush of men volunteering for the army on the three fronts, where Hungary is now fighting invasion, that every day the recruiting station opposite the Houses of Parliament has two long queues of working men waiting for the chance to enlist. Most of the People's Commissaries are young "intellectuals," tried in the dangerous labour of Communist and Socialist teaching under a reactionary Imperialist Government. To one used to the formulas and evasions of Peace Conference "interviews," the hours spent with these Commissaries, discussing frankly work already accomplished in two months and hopes and problems of the immediate future, are a distinct surprise. Observation of these same Commissaries, from the vantage point of residence in the Soviet House, reveals them to be working all the hours of the day and night, utterly devoid of any ostentatious show of power, and although not one pretends that the Government is democratic (it is a dictatorship which they believe to be necessary during the transition period) the dining room of the Soviet House is filled with proletarians (chauffeurs, labourers,