How can the attitudes of 200 million people be switched on and off like a
light bulb? How can one set of facts be made to produce three widely differing
pravdas? By complete control of all communications from the cradle to the grave.
Almost all Soviet women work. Their babies are placed in kindergartens at an
average age of 57 days, so we were told, and what we saw supported the allegation.
We visited several kindergartens, on collective farms and in factories. By the
posted schedules, these babies spend 131/2 hours each day in kindergarten- they are
with their mothers for perhaps an hour before bedtime.
At the Forty-Years-Of-October Collective Farm outside Alma Ata some of the
older children in one of the kindergartens put on a little show for us. One little
girl recited a poem. A little boy gave a prose recitation. The entire group sang.
The children were clean and
neat, healthy and happy. Our guide translated nothing so, superficially, it was the
sort of beguiling performance one sees any day in any American kindergarten.
However, my wife understands Russian:
The poem recounted the life of Lenin.
The prose recitation concerned the Seven-Year Plan.
The group singing was about how “we must protect our Revolution.”
These tots were no older than six.
That is how it is done. Starting at the cradle, never let them hear anything
but the official version. Thus “pravda” becomes “truth” to the Russian children.
What does this sort of training mean to a person when he is old enough,
presumably, to think for himself? We were waiting in the Kiev airport, May 14. The
weather was foul, planes were late and some 30 foreigners were in the Intourist
waiting room. One of them asked where we were going and my wife answered that we
were flying to Vilno.
Vilno? Where is that? My wife answered that it was the capital of Lithuania,
one of the formerly independent Baltic republics which the USSR took over 20 years
ago-a simple historic truth, as indisputable as the fact of the Invasion of Normandy
or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But the truth is not pravda.
A young Intourist guide present understood English, and she immediately
interrupted my wife, flatly contradicted her and asserted that Lithuania had always
been part of the Soviet Union.
The only result was noise and anger. There was no possibility of changing
this young woman’s belief. She was telling the pravda the way she had been taught it
in school and that was that. She had probably been about three when this
international rape occurred. She had no personal memory of the period. She had never
been to Vilno, although it is less than 400 miles
from Kiev. (Soviet people do not travel much. With few exceptions the roads are
terrible and the railroads are scarce. Russians are required to use internal
passports, secure internal visas for each city they visit and travel by Intourist,
just like a foreigner. Thus, traveling for pleasure, other than to designated
vacation spots on the Black Sea, is almost unheard of.)
In disputing the official pravda we were simply malicious liars and she made
it clear that she so considered us.
About noon on Sunday, May 15, we were walking downhill through the park
surrounding the castle that dominates Vilno. We encountered a group of six or eight
Red Army cadets. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Vilno. Almost no tourists go
there. So they stopped and we chatted, myself through our guide and my wife
directly, in Russian.
Shortly one of the cadets asked us what we thought of their new manned
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rocket. We answered that we had had no news lately-what was it and when did it
happen? He told us, with the other cadets listening and agreeing, that the rocket
had gone up that very day, and at that very moment a Russian astronaut was in orbit
around the earth-and what did we think of that?
I congratulated them on this wondrous achievement but, privately, felt a
dull sickness. The Soviet Union had beaten us to the punch again. But later that day
our guide looked us up and carefully corrected the story: The cadet had been