Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

what improvements, if any, they have made in handling tourism. I could plead age and

health but I shan’t-one trip to USSR is educational; twice is masochism.

If you have been to the USSR recently and if you know enough Russian that

you could and did slip the leash occasionally and poke around and get acquainted

without permission of Intourist, please write to me and tell me about it-what you

saw with your own eyes, what you touched, what you counted, how you were treated. I

am not interested in second-hand reports, not even from other Americans you trust,

and I most emphatically am not interested in anything your guides told you.

If you know no Russian and took one of the standard Intourist trips-around

the Black Sea, or the Len ingradMoskva-Sochi trip-don’t waste your time writing. I

hope you had fun.

If you took the long railway trip, Vladivostok to Leningrad or Moskva-or

vice versa-do please write to me. If you knew no Russian at first, I’m betting high

odds that you spoke fluent (if ungrammatical) Russian long before you completed the

trip. You will know many things I don’t know as I have never been across Siberia.

Alma Ata, KSSR, north of the Himalayas and just short of Sinkiang, is as far as I

got.

Concerning believing what you see and ignoring reports: In thirty-odd years

of habitual travel, Mrs. Heinlein and I have not been simply sightseeing; we have

been studying other people’s ways. Sometimes trivia-e.g., in Peru they make far

better apple pie than Mom ever baked (treason!), Chile has us beat all hollow when

it comes to ice-cream sodas, and the Finnish ice-cream cone is a work of art that

makes what we call an ice-cream cone look sad.

But usually we are dead serious. Lately I’ve been making a global survey of

blood services-but that is another

story. Two things we have done consistently throughout the world: 1) See the slums;

2) evaluate the diet.

The fancy hotels and the museums and the parks are much the same the world

over-but the slums are honest criteria even though a traveller can’t assign a

numerical value. The street people of Bombay and of Calcutta tell far more about

India than does the glorious Taf Mahal.

Two other questions give direct, numerical comparisons: Q: How many long

tonnes of protein (meat, fish, cheese) does this country consume in one year? (Then,

privately, divide by the population.) Q: How many minutes must a journeyman

carpenter work to earn enough to buy one kilogram of the local standard bread?

The first question tells the quality of the average diet; the second tells

you how rich (or poor) that country averages. If you have also managed to see the

slums, you have some idea of the range of wealth. You can’t tell by looking at the

extremely wealthy; all over the world they are careful to dress like upper middle

class, no higher. But slums are honest and the most extreme wealth range is to be

found in India.

The range of personal wealth in Russia, in 1960, was high, possibly greater

than the range in the U.S.A. But the range showed in “perks,” not in

money-privatelyassigned automobiles and chauffeurs, summer houses, assigned living

quarters. The Latvian Secretary (a Russian, not a Lett) of the Writers Union had as

his offices a marble palace, extremely ornate inside and outside and loaded with

sculpture and paintings (built-I was told- by the late Tsar for his favorite

mistress. True? I don’t know but I’ve never been in a more lavish palace and I have

been in many). After meeting his colleagues-and living through a Russian drinking

duel better left undescribed-we were taken by him out to the Baltic and shown his

Page 183

dacha . . . thereby showing us that he had a private car, a chauffeur, and a summer

home, as well as offices literally fit for a king. No mention of money, no need to-I

was convinced that he was not going home to a meal of black bread, potatoes, and

boiled cabbage.

Yet he was merely writer boss in Latvia, a small captive country-not General

Secretary of the Writers Union in Moskva. I was in the Writers Union general