Rakovsky sat here for months dreaming of nothing else. Joffe was the same when he came back from that tidy Berlin. I am ready to wager that he too has a scheme for general control waiting in his pocket. The thing cannot be done. The only way is, when something obviously needs doing, to put in some one we can trust to get it done.
Soap is hard to get.
Establish a commission and soap instantly disappears. But put in one man to see that soap is forthcoming, and somehow or other we get it. There are good factories, well equipped, here, but they are not working, partly for lack of material and partly, perhaps, because some crazy fool imagined that to take an inventory you must bring everything to a standstill. Litvinov asked him what he thought of the position as a whole. At present there are seldom more than twenty.