“First of all I want to deal with Comrade Schwarz’s interruption,” the Commissary for Foreign Affairs said, and then proceeded to answer the comrade who had proposed: “if our party’s old programme contained the abolition of capital punishment, its present programme ought to contain it too.” In his answer Béla Kun made some humorous remarks concerning capital punishment and said that the old Socialist programme had claimed the right for everyone to install and operate small stills (loud laughter). Richard Schwarz interrupted: “I was not joking!” Béla Kun continued: “I know full well that Comrade Schwarz was not joking, for he is not a humorous man (laughter), and yet there was some unconscious humour in his proposal (hear, hear). When a programme like ours is under consideration ... a programme which forms the foundation of the Dictatorship ... it is unseemly to discuss such trifles. This settles, as far as I am concerned, the proposal made by Comrade Schwarz, and I propose its rejection. (Signs of approval.)” Finally, to complete his self-characterisation, he expressed his ideas on intellectual production: “It is in the nature of things that the Dictatorship is not over-favourable for the development of personal liberties, it is not propitious to the assertion of individuality; but if our intellectual life has declined, bear in mind that it is not _our_ intellectual life but the remnant of the bourgeoisie’s organisation of physical tyranny which it was pleased to call literature.” (Shades of Goethe, Arany, Shelley, Andersen, Flaubert, Dostoyevski, masters of your art, know you all that you are naught but that part of ‘the bourgeois organisation of physical tyranny which is called literature.’) The window near my bed is open. The birds twitter and I can hear the concert of frogs by the Ipoly. A dog barks. Birds, frogs and dogs all speak their own language: why do not the Budapest Communists debate in Hebrew? * * * * * _June 16th._ The Soviet assembled yesterday in Budapest and meetings were held from morning till night. The national delegates of our county’s Soviet attended. The Red newspapers this morning are bursting with pride, with ecstasy over the opening festivities. “The labouring people of Hungary have gone to Budapest to lay the foundations of a new Constitution which will create a new atmosphere and bring happiness in its wake.” As a matter of fact the labourers of Balassagyarmat are indifferent and miserable. Nobody bothers about the Soviets. They have no part in it. The whole thing is strange and distant to them. “The will of the millions,” say the newspapers. And there it meets, this curious assembly, elected by orders of the People’s Commissaries, by the privileged fraction of the population, with lists prepared in advance, under the supervision of soldiers with fixed bayonets.