Comrade Béla Kun was well known to me back when he was a prisoner of war in Russia and more than once came to me to discuss questions of communism and the communist revolution. Therefore, when the news of the Hungarian communist revolution arrived, and moreover a report signed by Comrade Béla Kun, we were eager to speak with him and to ascertain more precisely how matters stood with this revolution. The first reports about it gave some cause for apprehension that there might have been deception on the part of the so-called socialists or social-traitors, that they might have outmanoeuvred the communists, especially since the latter were in prison. And so, the day after the first report of the Hungarian revolution, I sent a wireless telegram to Budapest[5], asking Béla Kun to come to the apparatus, posing questions of a kind to verify whether it was indeed he present there, and asking him what real guarantees existed as to the character of the government and its actual policy. The reply given by Comrade Béla Kun was entirely satisfactory and dispelled all our doubts. It turned out that the Left socialists had come to Béla Kun in prison to confer on forming a government. And only these Left socialists, who sympathised with the communists, together with the centrists, formed the new government, while the Right socialists – the social-traitors, the irreconcilable and incorrigible, so to speak – left the party entirely and did so without taking a single worker with them. Further reports showed that the policy of the Hungarian government was most resolute and so communist in direction that, whereas we began with workers’ control and only gradually proceeded to the socialisation of industry, Béla Kun, by his authority and his confidence that the vast masses stood behind him, was able at once to enact a law on the transfer into public ownership of all industrial enterprises in Hungary that had been run on capitalist lines. Two days passed, and we were fully convinced that the Hungarian revolution had at once, with extraordinary rapidity, taken the communist path. The bourgeoisie itself surrendered power to the communists of Hungary. The bourgeoisie has shown the whole world that when a severe crisis comes, when the nation is in danger, the bourgeoisie cannot govern. And that there is only one truly popular, truly people-loved power – the power of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.

Long live Soviet power in Hungary!