Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

mistaken, the rocket was not manned.

That evening we tried to purchase Pravda. No copies were available in Vilno.

Later we heard from other Americans that Pravda was not available in other cities in

the USSR that evening-this part is hearsay, of course. We tried also to listen to

the Voice of America. It was jammed. We listened to some Soviet stations but heard

no mention of the rocket.

This is the rocket the Soviets tried to recover and

later admitted that they had had some trouble with the retrojets; they had fired

while the rocket was in the wrong attitude.

So what is the answer? Did that rocket contain only a dummy, as the pravda

now claims? Or is there a dead Russian revolving in space?-an Orwellian “unperson,”

once it was realized that he could not be recovered.

I am sure of this: At noon on May 15 a group of Red Army cadets were

unanimously positive that the rocket was manned. That pravda did not change until

later that afternoon.

Concerning unpersons- Rasputin is a fairly well known name in America. I

was unable to find anyone in Russia who would admit to having heard of him. He’s an

unperson.

John Paul Jones is known to every school child in America. After the

American Revolution Catherine the Great called him to Russia where he served as an

Admiral and helped found the Russian Navy, negligible up to that time. I tried many,

many times to find a picture of him in Russian historical museums and I asked dozens

of educated Russians about him-with no results. In Russian history John Paul Jones

has become an unperson.

Trotsky and Kerensky are not unpersons yet. Too many persons are still alive

who recall their leading roles in recent Russian history. But they will someday be

unpersons, even though Dr. Kerensky is living today in California. In the USSR it is

always tacitly assumed that the Communists overthrew the Tsar. This leaves no room

for Dr. Kerensky. If pinned down, a Soviet guide may admit that there was such a

person as Kerensky, then change the subject. The same applies to Trotsky; his role,

for good or bad, is being erased from the records. We saw literally thousands of

pictures of Lenin, including several hundred group pictures which supposedly

portrayed all the Communist VIP’s at the time of the Revolution. Not one of

these pictures shows Trotsky even though many of them were alleged to be news photos

taken at the time when Lenin and Trotsky were still partners and buddies.

This is how unpersons are made. This is how pravda is created.

The theme of the May Day celebration this year was “Miru Mir”: “Peace to the

World.” A sweet sentiment. But it isn’t safe to assume that the dictionary

definition of peace has any connection with the official Communist meaning, since

even yesterday’s pravda may be reversed tomorrow.

“Cooperate with the inevitable’ means ‘Roll with the punch’- it does not mean

stooling for the

guards.” -L. Long

FOREWORD

“Don’t Go To Russia If You Expect Tidy Toilets” is the heading on an article by H.

Marlin Landwehr (News paper Enterprise Association) in the Santa Cruz SENTINEL,

Sunday, December 2, 1979. “Russian toilets,” writes Mr. Landwehr, “are uniformly

filthy, with no toilet seats,coarse (if any) toilet paper, and extremely low

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pressure.

From this and from many recent (1979) personal reports I know that my 1960

article INSIDE INTO URIST is still timely despite minor changes. Intourist still has

three classes of travel: Bad-Worse-Horrible. These are now called: “Deluxe Suite,

Deluxe, and First Class”- i.e., “First Class” is in fact third class-an Orwellian

pravda.

Dirty toilets and bad food explain themselves; relative prices are harder to

make clear, as the 1960 prices I cite as being outrageously high seem like bargain

prices in 1979. So I must adjust for inflation, not too easy when dealing with four

sorts of currency: 1) the 1960 dollar fully convertible to gold in the world market

at $35 = 1 troy ounce of fine gold; 2) the 1979 floating dollar having today, 3

December 1979, a price per troy ounce of fine gold on the world market of $432 and