He has certainly retained a middle class consciousness in spite of five years of actual revolutionary experience, in spite of what is known in Russia as a steady revolutionary past. I don’t think his idea of Communist discipline can be very well defined. He likes to be magnanimous and promises everything to everybody. He is generous, and since it is hard to be generous in a Socialist State where one owns nothing to be generous with, his only recourse is to be generous with the property of the State. In a glow of hospitality he once gave a sable coat worth thousands of dollars to a lady he admired and was genuinely astonished and grieved, I think, by the bitter criticisms then hurled at him. Had there been enough “trusted and trained” men to go round (which there never are in any government), this particular attack of giving might have cost him his career, though in any other society his actions would have been quite normal. Kaminev is an excellent subordinate and capable of making a fortune in a capitalist society. He cannot be accused of having no ideals; he can be accused only of having the average politician’s moral stamina. Bela Kun is the only other Soviet official who parallels Kaminev’s distrust of the press. I once went to Bela Kun’s office to get a statement. After ten promises and ten delays, I was in a small rage myself and asked him why he had not said in the first instance that he had no intention of giving a statement. He looked up from his desk, ran his chubby fingers through his hair, and said in a bewildered way, “Well, you see, I have just taken aspirin.” A young Russian officer sitting nearby smiled at me and said dryly, in English, “No wonder the Hungarian Soviets fell!” Kaminev will probably remain in office many years for no better or no worse reason than the reason for which many of our Senators are returned to Washington term after term. Zinoviev’s position is much more important and much harder to define. Aside from being in the Cabinet, he is President of the Petrograd Commune and President of the Third International. He really has great power and he is known to be wilful and arbitrary. His party opponents claim that his capriciousness has split the German Communist party into six factions and confused and alienated most of the parties in the other countries. A Russian professor, who was interested in political movements merely as an observer, explained Zinoviev’s curious tenacity in office in this way: “The Communists,” he said, “insist so strongly upon party discipline and party loyalty that they have never been able to face the fact that Zinoviev is not a leader.” Zinoviev’s appearance is against him. He is short, heavily built, flabby. Yet he is not devoid of vanity; he is the most photographed man in Russia. And while he has little imagination, he has real dramatic sense, he has a way of staging everything.