“Long live the ladies!” shouted the whole room, but again nothing happened, and the meeting dispersed without having come to any decision—just like the time before.
When I left, the soldiers were no longer loafing near the entrance. A rabble crowded the streets, and an acquaintance whom I met said to me:
“Do you see this mob? It has come from the mass-meeting, where it has been listening to the Communists’ speeches.”
The meeting started as a demonstration and ended by becoming the occasion for the unfurling of the Communist banner. At the request of Lieut.-Colonel Vyx the police had handed over nine Russian Bolshevik Jews to the French, and they had been expelled. A part of the population of Budapest now gets up a demonstration in favour of these nine foreigners, though it made not the slightest protest when Károlyi delivered several millions of Hungarians to the Czechs, Serbians and Roumanians. Jewish officers with red cockades organised the meeting, and the people of the ghetto were thronging there among disbanded soldiers, Galileist students, apprentices, and crazy women. The whole place was crammed with a human stream primed with hatred. The galleries creaked under their weight, and in the corridors a crowded-out throng shouted furiously.
On the platform the red phalanx of the Communist leaders surrounded Béla Kún, who opened the meeting and spoke of the revolution of the world’s proletariat and the counter-revolution of the capitalist order, the two forces which, according to his materialistic views, are fighting a death struggle in Europe to-day. He attacked the Government because it had delivered up the red “comrades” and because it was hindering the westward advance of the Soviet Republic. Then he referred with enthusiasm to the struggle of the German Spartacists, speaking of them almost reverently.
“Long live the Spartacists, we’re Spartacists too!” the soldiers shouted frantically: “we’re all Bolsheviks!”
“Our first duty is to arm!” shouted Béla Kún. Then he bellowed into the hall: “Lenin makes an appeal to you through me!” At the mention of Lenin’s name the whole gathering rose. Women applauded like furies. “Lenin sends you this message: ‘change the war of imperialism into an international class-war!’”
Somebody shouted “Death to the Bourgeoisie!” and the whole hall took up the cry. Then there was an interruption. The Red soldiery would not allow Garbai, the Socialist leader, to speak. Béla Kún, shouting from the top of the table, tried to make order: “If a bourgeois came to speak here, I should be the first to say ‘throw him out of the window;’ but Comrade Garbai has come from the other camp of the workers, with whom we have yet to join up in our fight for freedom.”
Comrade Garbai said something to the same effect: “The Socialists and the Communists agree on every point: their aims and their enemies are the same, but the time has not yet come.”
Vágó shouted in a hoarse voice: “The Communists want no freedom of speech, no democracy; arm the whole proletariat, disarm the bourgeoisie, proclaim the Soviet Republic!...”