I renewed my association with Herr Erzberger, Philip Scheidemann, the Socialist leader, and Friedrich Ebert, later to become president. My best friend among the new leaders was Rudolph Breitscheid, head of the Independent Socialists, a tall, narrow-shouldered man, a little stooped, who to me personified the hopes and virtues latent in the Weimar Republic.

It is next to impossible for me to revive in their true perspective the memories of the new factor in world affairs I encountered in postwar Germany, the rise of the Soviet republic. Communism at that time was chiefly an important movement in Russia, with secondary importance in Germany. People generally had not yet adopted fixed reactions to it. The Soviet republic was weak and impoverished; it had had to sign the Brest Litovsk peace treaty as the only way to buy the freedom to begin establishing the new Marxist state in Russia. The beginnings had been made by the time I got back to Germany in 1920, but they were exceedingly flimsy, and Soviet power, as it now exists, was something undreamed of by most of the outside world.

Among the individuals I met in the new Germany were German Communists and representatives from the Soviet Union. The Communist revolution in Russia, as I came to know more about it and meet more of its participants, seemed to me fanatical and almost incomprehensibly doctrinaire. I was unschooled in the baffling rhetoric of dialectical materialism, though I hastily read Marx's Das Kapital in the hope of understanding it. I was sympathetic with the overthrow of Czarism and the objective of raising the political and economic level of the Russian peasantry, but that was not what most Communists talked about in my hearing.

Among the Russians of importance I met was Yuri Vladimirovich Lomonosov, who was a transportation official and had what surely was one of the most intractable tasks in post-war Russia. The railroads had been paralyzed by the war, many of the lines were torn up, and the rolling stock was virtually ruined by neglect or destruction. Lomonosov was in Germany to arrange for the repair and purchase of locomotives and freight cars. He had little money to pay for anything.

The new Germany was under the shadow of the coming reparations bill from the Allies and so was not able to lend. Lomonosov himself was an engaging and cultured man. He was not a professional Communist, and, as it turned out, he did not last long as a member of the Communist hierarchy. He was a technician who wanted to believe the best of the Bolshevik revolution, but he was not a veteran Marxist.

I had to thank him for giving me my first insight into the economic difficulties of the revolutionary regime in Moscow. A burly figure of a man, with a heavy brown beard, he was like a character out of the Russian fiction I had read. But he was kindly to me, and I saw him frequently.

Another Russian I met in Germany, and one who was to play a fateful role in Soviet history, was Karl Radek. He was the opposite of Lomonosov, a fully seasoned conspiratorial Communist who had served a brief prison term in Germany for Communist activities. Radek was a sharp-faced, bespectacled journalist and had a profound interest in what was happening everywhere. He had the talent I have encountered in one or two other Soviet journalists of being able to construct the news behind the news. He could read a communique and tell from the language that was used, or from what was said or omitted, just which faction or person in the Foreign Office of a government had prevailed over some other faction or individual. He may have been able to do this because Communist agents reporting on the differences between elements in government offices had supplied the background information. But he remembered it, and used it. It was a kind of scrutiny which I do not believe many United States diplomatic representatives applied to official statements in foreign countries. This faculty of Radek's greatly impressed me.

Later, when I returned to the United States and made the acquaintance of one or two Soviet journalists there, I discovered that their insight into American affairs that I happened to know about was sadly distorted by their Marxist doctrinal prejudices. So now I have become doubtful of the accuracy of the judgments of Karl Radek and other Soviet experts whom I wondered at in Europe. But one thing was sure: they took their journalism quite seriously. They knew that knowledge, if it was not of itself power, was essential to obtaining it.