“They have been promised a new world for a quarter of a century,” Lanny reminded his wife. “They have been clinging fast to that hope through all their sufferings.”
“Are they any better off than they were?” she wondered.
“In wartime, not much, I imagine. But they have the hope, and that is what human beings live by. And at least they know what they don’t want—to be ruled by Hitler.”
“I try to see the good side of this system, Lanny; but I shrink so from thoughts of the terror. It seems to me these streets must smell of blood.”
“Yes, darling; but you must remember, it’s very old blood. The tsars ruled by terror, ever since we have any record of them.”
“But does it have to go on forever? Communism promised to bring peace and fraternity.”
“The Soviet revolution was a mild affair at the outset,” explained the husband who had watched it. “Many of the Old Bolsheviks were gentle idealists, who hoped to convert their opponents. There was no terror until the attempt on Lenin, and later the assassination of Kirov.”
Laurel had never heard the name of this friend and right-hand man of Stalin, who had been shot by a Soviet official with “White” connections. It had been that deed which had let loose the terror and the series of purges. “God knows I hate killing,” declared Lanny; “but I didn’t make this world, and I have to start from where it is. I face the uncomfortable fact that France and Belgium and Norway and the Balkan countries all went down before Hitler because he was able to find quislings who hated their own governments so much that they were willing to sell them out to an invader. But you don’t hear anything about Soviet quislings—and why?”
“They were shot, I suppose.”
“They were shot in advance, before they had a chance to do any of their quisling. Much as it hurts me, I have to face the fact that if Stalin hadn’t purged his pro-Nazi elements, including his generals, there wouldn’t have been any Soviet Union at this moment; Hitler would have the whole of this country, and that means he would have the world. If he is able to get Russia’s resources, and make slaves out of the workers as he is now doing with Poles and Frenchmen and the rest, we could never beat him—not in the thousand years that he talks about.”
There seemed to be no answer for that. Laurel said: “Of course we have to take what allies we can get.”
“We have to pitch in and help win this war; then, when we lift the fear of invasion from the hearts of the Soviet people, we can hope they will discover the advantages of freedom, just as we have. The people we see about us are little different from ourselves; they want the comforts of civilization, they want knowledge, and the chance to apply it to living. Karl Marx predicted that the state, as a part of capitalism, would wither away under Communism; it was his belief that the state existed for the repression of subject classes, and that once there were no such classes, the state would become an agency of co-operation, a menace to no one. We don’t see much signs of that in wartime, but we may be surprised how quickly the change would come if we could get peace and a system of world order.”
V
Hansi and Bess were out of town, and Lanny was afraid he was going to miss them; then he learned that they were scheduled for a concert in Moscow, and they showed up, having been brought by plane. They came to the Guest House, and what a time they had exchanging reminiscences! Lanny and Laurel had traveled something like three-quarters of the way around the earth for this meeting, and Hansi and Bess had traveled the rest of the way. Neither of the musicians had ever heard of Laurel, but now they read her story in Pravda and were in a state of excitement over the honor done to an American writer. When Bess had listened to an account of the Yenan visit she put her arms about Laurel and exclaimed: “For years I have been hoping for this to happen to Lanny. My dear, you are just the right woman for him, and I am happier than I can tell you.”
The two couples were driven to the concert together. Hansi had got himself a pair of fur-lined gloves to protect his precious hands from the cold, and when they got to the concert hall he soaked them in hot water for several minutes. Then they went onto the stage of the immense Tchaikovsky Hall, and all of a sudden Laurel had her wish granted—she got at the souls of the people of Moscow. They stood up to welcome these two American artists, whose coming was not merely a musical but a political event, symbolical of the aid that was promised from overseas. The audience listened entranced while Hansi played Russian music which they knew, and then American folk music which he wanted them to know.
Laurel listened, too, and now and then stole glances at the rapt faces about her; so she learned what was in the hearts of the ill-clad and hungry people whom she had been watching on the streets of this war-torn city. They wanted beauty, they wanted love, they wanted the fire of the spirit, the dreams and the glory—all the gifts which Hansi Robin had been laboring for thirty years to put into his music. When he finished they hailed him with such a tumult of applause as Laurel had never heard in any concert hall; they would have kept him there all night if he had not played the International, with which his wartime concerts were concluded.
Next day there came to the Guest House a uniformed officer of the Red Army, who requested an interview with Mr. Budd alone, and identified himself as being on the staff of Premier Stalin. In precise and proper English he inquired whether Mr. Budd would be prepared to meet the Premier that evening at twenty-three o’clock. Mr. Budd replied that he would be completely prepared, and gladly. The officer informed him that he would be on hand with a car at twenty-two-thirty precisely, and Mr. Budd promised to have on his new fur coat and fur-topped boots at that hour.
He told his wife about the appointment, assuring her that the important personage was a member of his sex and not of hers. “He could not be more important if he tried,” said Lanny—and while this wasn’t telling her, it was certainly giving her a good chance to guess. He left her to the company of a group of her colleagues, male and female, who had read “The Herrenvolk.” Soviet intellectuals like to sit up all night discussing world literature—while the head of their government and army sat up discussing world statecraft.
The car came, an American Cadillac, and Lanny entered it and was driven to one of the Kremlin gates. The car was searched, to make sure there was nobody in it but the persons who were supposed to be. The Soviet Union wasn’t taking any chances with the head of its government and army. Lanny learned later that they had taken the precaution to cable to Washington and ascertain whether the son of Budd-Erling was what he claimed to be, and whether President Roosevelt considered him a person worth the Marshal’s time. Since the White House staff didn’t know anything about the aforesaid son, they had referred the question to the President, who had replied that Mr. Budd possessed his complete confidence and that the Marshal should talk to him as if it were the President himself. If Lanny had known this, he would have been less surprised by what was now to happen.
VI
They were driven to one of the buildings within the historic enclosure. At the door a soldier flashed a torchlight upon them; the soldier spoke a few words and they passed in. Lanny had read that Stalin lived in a simple apartment in one of these buildings, and he wondered if he was to be taken there. Or had the head man of Russia built himself a magnificent reception room, calculated to intimidate the visitor after the style of Mussolini and Hitler?”
Without the formality of a knock, the visitor was led through an anteroom into a ground-floor room in one of the ancient Kremlin structures; a room of moderate size, oval in shape and with a vaulted ceiling, its walls partly paneled in white oak while the other parts were of smooth white plaster. There were three windows which gave upon the yard. A narrow carpet led to a flat-topped desk with an empty armchair, and beside it another armchair which the guest was invited to take. In a smaller chair near by sat a youngish, slender man with dark hair and eyes; he rose, but was not introduced. Lanny guessed that he must be the interpreter.
The guest took his seat, an
d used a minute or two of time to inspect the room. At the right of Stalin’s chair was a small stand with several telephones, of different colors to distinguish them. The desk was pretty well covered with books, and against the wall was a bookcase containing the works of Lenin and two sets of encyclopedias, the Soviet and the Brockhaus. Near the entrance was a glass case containing the death mask of Lenin; beside it stood an old-fashioned grandfather’s clock in a case made of ebony. On the walls were portraits of Marx and Engels with their heavy whiskers. Through an open door Lanny could see a room with a long table and maps on the wall; doubtless it was the council room where the defense of the Soviet Union was discussed.
The officer went to a closed door and tapped gently. In perhaps half a minute the door was opened, and there entered a personage whose statue was in every school in the Soviet Union and whose portrait was in every home. In foreign lands, people who read magazines or newspapers had come to know these features as well as those they saw in the looking glass.
In the portraits Stalin had somehow looked like a large man. Perhaps he didn’t have large people about him, or perhaps it was the general tendency to assume that all Russians were large. He was five feet five, which was several inches shorter than Lanny; stockily built, but not fat. He was dressed informally, in a dark blue blouse and trousers tucked into boots. His hair and heavy mustache were both iron gray. He had a large head, and his complexion was sallow and marked by smallpox. His left arm was slightly shrunken, a defect he shared with the last of the German Kaisers.
He was a serious and busy man, and had little time for humor and none at all for formality. Lanny had risen, and they shook hands as if they were two Americans. Stalin said, in Russian: “Happy to meet you, Mr. Budd,” and the translator at once spoke the words in English. Stalin took the chair at his desk, and the interpreter placed himself in front of it; by turning his head slightly, he faced one and then the other speaker. The staff officer excused himself, and without further preliminaries the interview was on.
VII
Djugashvili was the name of this statesman’s parents, and when they had had him christened they added Josef Vissarionovich Ivanovich David Nijerdse Chezhkoy. It was Lenin who had suggested that he adopt the name of Stalin, which means steel, and is much easier to say. His father had been a drunken cobbler in the Georgian city of Tbilisi, which we call Tiflis. At great sacrifice the widowed mother had sent her bright little boy to a church school and then to a theological seminary, intending to make him a priest. But instead of concerning himself with the next world the bright little boy had taken up the notion of changing this one. He became a social revolutionary and scored a record: eight times imprisoned, seven times exiled, and six times escaped. He was not among those who retired to Switzerland or London and spent their time studying in libraries and expounding theories; he was a man of action, and came back to the battle again and again. Among his actions, according to reports, was the holding up of a truck carrying funds for a bank—this as a means of financing his revolutionary party.
Now in his early sixties Stalin had fought his way to the control of his party and his country, including an army of some four million men and growing fast. He had a deadly enemy who had attacked him without provocation and had crashed three or four hundred miles into his country, killing several million soldiers and civilians and dragging the able-bodied survivors off into slavery, after a fashion unknown in Europe for many centuries. Josef Stalin’s whole mind was occupied with the problem of defeating this enemy and hurling him out of Russia. He had sent the greater part of the government to safety, but he himself had stayed under the bombs. He hadn’t summoned Lanny Budd in order to meet a charming playboy or to hear a story of adventure, but to glean every fact that might conduce to the success of Soviet arms.
At the Peace Conference, and on other occasions since, Lanny had been annoyed by persons who spoke Rumanian or Armenian or what not, and would pour out floods of eloquence without giving the interpreter a chance to get in more than a sentence or two. But the master of the Soviet Union was not among these futile ones. He spoke in a quiet, even tone, and when he had said a sentence or two he waited until the interpreter was through. Lanny followed the same technique, and was interested to observe that while he, Lanny, was speaking, Stalin was apparently staring at the pit of Lanny’s stomach. This continued while the interpreter was speaking, and only when Stalin spoke did he raise his eyes to his auditor’s. Then he seemed to be boring into the auditor’s soul. Manifestly, he was a judge of men and a stern one; he was a prober of secrets, and if Lanny had been a Russian with secrets to hide, he would have been uneasy in his mind. But Stalin couldn’t do any harm to Lanny, and all Lanny had to think about was that he might do some good to Stalin.
There were cigarettes and a tobacco box on the desk, and the host offered them. When Lanny said he did not smoke, Stalin proceeded to stuff a large and well-worn pipe. Thereafter, when he was not speaking, he puffed—but Lady Nicotine did not exercise her supposed soothing effect upon his mind. He pressed the visitor with questions: why had Hongkong fallen so quickly, and what had been the attitude of the Chinese there, and what were food conditions in the interior of the country, and to what extent was Chungking keeping its truce with Yenan? Now and then he made a note on a pad. A P.A., no stranger to diplomatic subtleties, wondered if this was a pretence, and if a recording was being made of this interview.
VIII
Lanny told what he had seen in Yenan, and whom he had met. How was Mao Tse-tung getting along, and what had he said about his prospects? Lanny described the circumstances of the interview, and repeated everything the head of the Border Government had spoken. Lanny had heard many stories about the operations of the Chinese guerrillas, and these were important, because Stalin was training great numbers of Russians to operate in that way against the Germans; supplies would be dropped to them by parachute, information would be sent by radio codes, and they would cause a steady draining of German resources.
The Premier brought up the subject of Budd-Erling. He had heard about its product, and was pleased to have one of America’s industrial achievements described to him. Lanny said: “You must understand, I am six months behind the time. I have no doubt that since Pearl Harbor the enterprise has been growing like a mushroom. For many years my father has been telling me that the future of the world would be decided by airpower, and now he is having the chance for which he has been asking.”
“Your father used to make planes for the Nazis, I am told,” remarked the Red chief, with studied casualness.
“Understand, I don’t defend his course. I pleaded with him against it, but he took the stand that he was a businessman, and offered his wares in the open market. The Germans kept his enterprise alive for several years.”
“I am familiar with the point of view, Mr. Budd. Business is business.”
“I repeat what my father has told me many times: it is not the planes which are important, but the power to produce planes; and that remains in America.”
“It is the planes which are important to us at present.” This with grim decisiveness.
“I can only tell you what my father and his experts were discussing last September, before I left home. The problem as regards your country is not so much the making of planes as of their delivery. If we ship them by way of Archangel, the submarines will get most of them. If we ship them by the Persian Gulf, it is difficult to assemble them in the midst of desert sand. There seemed to be general agreement that the solution of the problem must be by way of Alaska and Siberia.”
“It is too cold, and there are too many fogs, Mr. Budd. If we are to use the northern route, it would be shorter to fly over the North Pole.”
“You are speaking of bombers, sir; but the Budd-Erling is a fighter plane, with short range. We already have bases in Alaska, and I take it for granted that we are now constructing a chain of them. If you could do the same from the Chukotsky Peninsula westward, the problem would be solved. It is my
father’s opinion that the losses would be small, compared to those which would be inevitable over the Archangel route. My father does not like that route, and I doubt very much if our government does either.”
“We are considering the matter from every point of view, Mr. Budd. My understanding is that Admiral Standley is coming here as ambassador, and doubtless he will bring a technical staff with him.”
IX
Now and then, as this interrogation went on, the visitor would be wondering: “Does he know that I have been a friend of the head Nazis?” It seemed unlikely that Stalin’s efficient secret service would have failed to unearth such a fact. Lanny had decided that he wouldn’t bring up the subject; he could suppose that Uncle Jesse might have taken the liberty of passing on his guess that Lanny had been a secret agent of President Roosevelt working in Germany. In any case, Stalin would have his suspicions; there had been an old saying among Russians: “Lenin trusts only Stalin and Stalin trusts nobody.” And the record showed that Lenin had distrusted Stalin!
Perhaps that was the basis of the great man’s next remark. “I should like to ask you, Mr. Budd—how does it happen that the son of a great American capitalist is sympathetic with the Soviet point of view?”
“I must be frank, sir, and inform you that I am a Socialist, not a Communist. But I am against Hitlerism with all my soul, and I welcome every ally in that fight. It was my mother’s elder brother, Jesse Blackless, who gave me my first push toward the left, when I was a small boy. He took me to meet an Italian syndicalist, Barbara Pugliese, of whom you may have heard.”