Time Will Run Back: A Novel About the Rediscovery of Capitalism

  “You are probably wondering,” Stalenin now resumed very calmly, “as I said before, where you fit into all this.... During these years, as your mother’s accusation has festered in me, I have thought that my life might be terminated before I could prove to her that she was wrong. And it has occurred to me that it might be at least some satisfaction to select you as my successor, you who have been brought up according to her ideas of what an education should be, and defy you to try to create true communism—since I wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”

  “But, Your Supremacy, as I told you yesterday, I am completely unequipped—”

  “Of course you are. The idea, as I originally conceived it, had no sense. It was merely an emotional daydream of revenge. It began to evaporate, in fact, the moment I first saw you two weeks ago.”

  “I realize, Your Supremacy, that I am quite untrained for politics; but that doesn’t mean that I am not equipped for other-”

  “That has nothing to do with why I changed my mind. I had always thought of you as her son. But at my first glance at you as a man instead of a child, I suddenly realized that you are my son. And now I want you to succeed me, when I pass on, for a better reason, a real reason. And that is why, if you prove equal to it, I’m going to give you a chance to become the next Dictator. I’d like to think of the flesh and blood of Stalenin carrying on. I can understand how the old kings felt—”

  “Your Supremacy—”

  “When we are alone you may call me ‘father.’ “

  “Father.... I don’t want to succeed you as Wonworld Dictator. I know that sounds amazing, but... I have no reason to suppose that I would have any particular aptitude for it. I have no training for it.... I have no heart for it. I’d like to devote myself to music—”

  Stalenin cut in with another impatient wave of his pipe. “Music may be all right as a hobby, but it’s not a full-time occupation for a serious man. Besides, I’ve already told you—your life is in imminent danger. Do you imagine for a moment that, if anything happened to me, whoever took my place would let you live? Let you become a potential rallying point for a plot against him? You have only one choice: succeed me as Dictator or be annihilated.”

  Peter was silent. He said at last: “What do you want me to do, father?”

  “The first thing I intend to do is to introduce you to the Politburo at tomorrow’s meeting. Your presence in Moscow is bound to be known soon. Bolshekov already knows of it, though he still may not know just who you are. The best way to lull suspicion is to appear to be perfectly frank and introduce you as my son.... But I shall treat you with a certain contempt. That is one reason why I have given you the status of a Proletarian. Anyway, you ought to know what it’s like to be a Proletarian. The next thing for me to do is to see that you get a real communist education. You shall get the best. I will put your education directly in charge of Bolshekov himself.”

  “Wouldn’t that give him even more opportunity—?”

  “It will lull his suspicions. He has already been spying on you. Now it will not be necessary. But you can watch him, with a perfect excuse. By the way, I had almost forgotten to tell you: every member of the Politburo must be addressed as ‘Your Highness.’... Any further questions?”

  Peter had none. “The meeting of the Politburo is at four o’clock. You will be here ten minutes before then.”

  At five minutes after four the next day Peter followed Stalenin through a short corridor leading from his office to another room of the same size—and found himself in the presence of the Politburo.

  Eleven men in black, and one in the red coat of an army officer, were seated along a large oblong table, half a dozen on each side. At the moment of Stalenin’s appearance they stood up.

  “Comrades,” said Stalenin, “I have a surprise for you. Let me introduce my son, Peter Uldanov!”

  He took Peter around the table and introduced him to each member individually, beginning with His Highness No. 2, Bolshekov. It was only the second time that Peter had even seen Bolshekov. He was tall and gaunt—about two inches taller than Peter himself. Even more striking than his high cheekbones and prominent nose were his eyes. They were a distinct green.

  Next came His Highness No. 3, Adams, a shrewd-looking Yankee below average height, thin and wispy. But there were humor and good-nature in his wizened face, and Peter liked him immediately. There was also something vaguely reminiscent about Adams that Peter could not quite identify.

  He followed his father around the table.... No. 4, Marshal Zakachetsky, head of the Army.... No. 5, André Giraud, Commissar of Provinces.... No. 6, Ivan Orlov, Commissar of Propaganda and editor of the New Truth.... No. 7, Nickolas Petrov, “our oldest member.”... No. 8, Vladimir Kilashov, Commissar of State Security, and head of the secret police.... Peter began to lose track of the names.

  He did keep track of the Soviet Republic from which each member originated. Adding his father’s identifications, he counted eight Russians, one American, one Frenchman, one German, one Englishman and one Argentinean.

  Stalenin took his seat at the top of the table, and waved Peter to a chair at the bottom. All sat down.

  The Dictator filled his pipe and began to tell the Politburo the story of his son’s life. He concealed few outward facts, but his tone was now heavily derisive.

  “And so,” he concluded, “when his mother died a year ago, I had to decide his fate. Should he be kept on the island for the remainder of his life, a burden to himself and an ideological menace to Wonworld?? Or should he be exterminated? Or should we try, belatedly, to turn him into a Marx-fearing Communist and a useful member of society?”

  A dozen pairs of eyes turned on Peter as if he were some strange, newly discovered kind of animal.

  “I decided on the last, and have brought him here. I am wondering, Your Highness”—Stalenin was addressing Bolshekov—“whether I can place him in your care? Would you be able to give him a little of your own time for a while, to make sure that he gets started right? Later we could hand him over to the right teachers and have him report to both of us regularly, so that we can watch his progress—or lack of progress.”

  “When do you want me to begin, Your Supremacy?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  Bolshekov turned to Peter. “Report to my office at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” “One thing more,” continued Stalenin. “I don’t want this young man to get any favors whatever simply because he happens to be my son. Whatever he gets or doesn’t get is to depend solely on himself. You will notice that I have given him simply the status of a Proletarian. However, it might be embarrassing, during the period of his education, to have a Proletarian wandering in and out of the Kremlin offices, where he would be constantly stopped by the guards. So beginning tomorrow morning, No. 2, before he gets to your office I will see that he gets the temporary status and uniform of a Deputy.”

  He looked sternly at Peter. “It will depend on how rapidly you learn, whether you will be allowed to keep that status.”

  Chapter 7

  SO!” said Bolshekov. He looked Peter up and down. “You know absolutely no history, absolutely none?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Well, that can only be made up by giving you a list of books to read. But I will sketch in the general outlines, so that you can get your bearings. Our histories, like our calendar, are divided roughly into two parts: B.M. and A.M.—Before Marx and After Marx. This, for example,”—pointing to a day calendar on the wall—“is the Year of Our Marx 282, which means 282 years after His birth. Certainly you learned at least that in the Communist schools before you were eight!”

  Peter nodded again.

  “But this is the older division. Our recent writers divide history into three great periods: Ancient History, the Dark Ages, and Modern History. Ancient History is all that period, of which practically nothing is now known, that came before what was amusingly called in the Dark Ages the Industrial Revolution. Of course it wasn’t a revolution at all; it wa
s a counterrevolution. The Dark Ages begin with the birth of capitalism. There is still some difference among historians as to the exact year in which the Dark Ages began. Some of them place it at 95 B.M., which was the year in which a bourgeois named Adam Smith was born; others place it at 42 B.M., which was the year in which a book appeared by this Adam Smith. This book gave birth to, and presented an elaborate system of apologetics for, the capitalist ideology.”

  “What was the name of the book?”

  “That is no longer known; but I will come to all that in a moment. The Dark Ages represents the whole period from the birth of capitalism until its final overthrow in the series of cold and shooting wars between about 150 A.M. and the final triumph of communism in 184 A.M.”

  “So modern history, Your Highness—history since the complete and final triumph of communism—is now just a couple of years less than a century old?”

  “Correct. Now I won’t go into the details of the long and complicated series of wars that led to the final overthrow of capitalism. Soviet Russia, of course, led the forces of communism. The forces of capitalism mainly centered around what we now know as the Disunited States, which kept losing allies, both without and within. But you will get all of that from your history books, of which I will give you a list before you leave.”

  He made a note on a small pad in front of him.

  “Yet I must impress upon you,” he continued, “the one central reason for communism’s success. We began with apparently every possible disadvantage. The enemy started with better arms, more technical advancement, more production, more resources. And yet we beat them in the end because we had the one tremendous weapon that they lacked. We had Faith! Faith in our own Cause! Faith that never for a moment wavered or faltered! We knew that we were right! Right in everything! We knew that they were wrong! Wrong in everything!”

  Bolshekov was shouting. He stopped for a moment as if to let this sink in.

  “The enemy never had any real faith in capitalism,” he went on. “They started out with little, and began rapidly to lose what they had. Those who had once embraced the gospel of communism were willing to die for it; but nobody was willing to die for capitalism. That would have been considered a sort of joke. Finally, the best thing our enemies could think of saying for capitalism was that it wasn’t communism! Even they didn’t seem to think that capitalism had any positive virtues of its own. And so they simply denounced communism. But their idea of meeting the challenge of communism was to imitate it. They gave lip service to capitalism and to something that they called private enterprise or free enterprise—nobody any longer knows what these old phrases meant—but every ‘reform’ they put into effect as an ‘answer’ to communism was another step in the direction of adopting communism. For every reform they adopted left the individual with less power and the State with more. Step by step the control of individuals over resources and goods was taken away; step by step that control was taken over by the State. It was at first not ‘ownership’ but merely the power of decision that was turned over to the State. But the fools who were trying to ‘reform’ capitalism did not see that the power of decision, the power of disposal, was the essence of ‘ownership.’ So they took away from private individuals, step by step, the power to set their own prices, or to decide what to produce or how much of it, or to hire or discharge labor at will, or to set the terms of employment. Gradually their governments themselves fixed all these things, but piecemeal, instead of in one grand logical swoop. It was amusing to see them slavishly imitate the Communist Five-Year Plans by their own ‘Four-Year Plans. These were, of course, like ours, all State plans. Incredible as it now seems, these people actually seemed to believe that calling them Four-Year Plans instead of Five-Year Plans would prevent everybody from recognizing the imitation. In fact, some of them were too stupid even to know at first that they were imitating.”

  He stopped to pour himself a glass of water.

  “In brief, step by step the capitalistic world accepted the basic premise of communism—that the individual, left to himself, is greedy, callous, stupid and irresponsible; that ‘individualism’ and ‘liberty’ are simply euphemisms for dog-eat-dog, the law-of-the-jungle, the-devil-take-the-hindmost—in short, euphemisms for anarchy—and that only the State has responsibility, only the State has wisdom, only the State can be just, only the State can be trusted with power. They accepted this premise, but they lacked the courage or the clarity to follow it to its logical end. They lacked the courage to see that the individual, because he is responsible to nobody, must be deprived of all power, and that the State, the State representing all the people, must be the sole depositor of all the power, the sole maker of decisions, the sole judge of its own—”

  He pulled himself up. “I hadn’t meant to get into all of this just now. But is it any surprise that the capitalist world was defeated? Is it any surprise that it kept losing supporters both from the outside and from the inside? Do you know what the American political leaders did at one time? They threw huge sums of money around the world to try to bribe the rest of the world not to go communist! They thought they could buy off faith by dollars!”

  “And what happened?”

  “What would you expect to happen? The other bourgeois countries found that the easiest way to get money out of the Disunited States was to hint that they might go communist if they didn’t get it. Soon they began to believe themselves that their chief reason for not going communist was as a favor to the Disunited States, and that their chief reason for arming against us was not for their own preservation but again as a favor to the Disunited States! If bourgeois America wanted them to arm, they felt, it could jolly well pay for it! And they used most of the other American funds, anyway, to finance socialist programs—in other words, to move in the direction of communism!”

  He grinned, then turned suddenly serious again. “Should there be any surprise that while they could bribe only a few spies among us, we had swarms of voluntary spies among them—people who gave us information gladly, of their own will; people whom we did not have to pay; people who ‘betrayed their countries,’ to use the phrase of condemnation that the capitalist nations tried to adopt—people who betrayed their countries exultantly, from a sense of duty, because their countries were wrong, and because they were serving a higher cause, the cause of humanity!” Peter was deeply impressed by the passion and conviction of this man. “Well, I hope you’ll forgive me,” said Bolshekov, “if I keep getting carried away from my point.”

  “No, no,” said Peter; “all this is precisely what I need to learn. But may I ask one question? Why did the bourgeois countries fight against communism at all?”

  “They fought against communism because they were ‘against’ communism. That was the only point on which they could agree. But they didn’t know what they were for. Everybody was for something different. Nobody had the courage to defend a capitalism that was true to the basic premises of capitalism. Each had his own little plan for a ‘reformed’ capitalism. They could stave off communism, they thought, only by ‘correcting abuses’; but all their plans for correcting abuses were steps toward socialism and communism. They quarreled among themselves as to how far they wanted to go toward communism in order to ‘defeat’ communism, as to how far they should embrace communist ideas in order to destroy communist ideas. I know all this sounds incredible, but I assure you it is true.”

  “But didn’t anybody have faith in capitalism?”

  “Not in the sense in which everybody on our side had faith and has faith in communism. The strongest among our enemies were halfhearted. They merely apologized for capitalism. They would say that capitalism, with all its faults—and then they would compete against each other in seeing who could admit the most faults—that capitalism with all its faults was probably as good as reasonable men could expect—and so forth and so on. And so we wiped them out.”

  Bolshekov made a quick movement with the flat of his hand to symbolize heads being cut off.
br />   “But we will have to get on with our history. Having utterly defeated them, having exterminated not only their leaders but everybody who could be remotely suspected of believing in capitalism, we decided that the job would not be complete, and that we might at a later time face the same struggle all over again, unless we stamped out the whole rotten capitalist civilization, so that the very memory of it would disappear from the minds of men!”

  “You mean that our ancestors stamped out everything? Didn’t they try to separate the good from the bad?”

  “The good? Separate? What could be good in a thoroughly rotten civilization? What could be good that was built on a lie? What could be good that was based on injustice, on the exploitation of class by class? What could be good in a bourgeois ideology? And as for separating—When the plague of 261 broke out in Moscow we had to shoot everybody who had it to keep him from contaminating the rest of us. Could we separate the ‘good’ people who had it from the ‘bad’ people who had it? They had the plague! Whoever or whatever carried the microbes of the plague was a menace to all the rest of us! And so it was with whoever or whatever carried the microbes of capitalism!

  “And so we began the work of stamping out every sign and memory of the rotten capitalist civilization. We leveled all the churches. You may not believe it, but there were people who dared to question that step. They called the churches ‘things of beauty,* ‘architectural monuments,’ ‘frozen music’ You have no idea of the nonsense they talked. Architectural monuments! Monuments to superstition! Monuments to lull and drug and enslave the people! As if anything could have beauty, except a poisonous and dangerous pseudo-beauty, that was built on a lie! Then of course we slashed and burned all the religious paintings, and shattered all the religious images and statuary. Wait till you read about the ridiculous fuss that was raised in the Italian Soviet, for example, about that!”