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dinner, perhaps for the time being unsatisfactory, free housing, light, etc. We are introducing all this very slowly, in very troublesome circumstances, for the Soviet Republic is experiencing hard times. We are still forced to fight. But there is a way out, there is hope, and there are plans to make our hopes come true. But in a bourgeois country like Germany, where the depreciation of money is proceeding rapidly, where the paper currency inudates the country, where the State indebtedness amounts to hundreds of milliards and grows every week—there is no hope. Modern Germany cannot find a way out of this, so long as there is private property and paper currency. Germany is bound to become more and more involved in debts, she is bound to face a still greater financial bankruptcy, in fact the most utter ruin, for a bourgeois order without some stability in the money market is utter nonsense.
The foundation of bourgeois welfare in Germany is cracking, and we see instances of it at every step. The victorious Allies continue to rob Germany every day. And the most hopeless thing about the state of Germany is that she is not aware as yet how much precisely she owes to the Allies. The French and English bourgeois are still unwilling to state definitely how far they want to skin Germany. In this sense the peace of Versailles is far worse than that of Brest. The Brest treaty stated definitely the amount of the contribution we had to pay. But the French and English bourgeoisie do not wish as yet to tell the Germans how much they must pay. The victors are afraid to ask too little, and prefer to snatch ad. lib. as much as they can squeeze out of Germany.
They prefer to take in kind. They have seized the best of German transport, nearly all the motor lorries, they have taken all the ships, all the best locomotives, hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. Recently, while we were in Germany, a new demand of the Entente for 120,000 of the best cows in Germany. This is sheer robbery. After our departure we read a telegram demanding all the Diesel engines in Germany. In a word everything that is good, everything that they can lay their hands on is seized by the French in the most shameless fashion. The French capitalists have dispatched to Germany a regular gang of officials, who act as controllers. Germany
