Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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