headquarters in Moskva, a large office building; I did not meet the General
Secretary. I assume that he lived at least as well as his stooge in Latvia.
How many levels are there between this minor boss in Riga and the members of
the Praesidium? How well does Khrushchev-excuse me; Brezhnev-live? I shan’t guess.
In the USSR it was not politic (risky) to ask the two key questions that I
always asked in other countries, and seeing slums was forbidden. Twice we saw slums
by accident, were hurried on past-primitive log cabins just outside Moskva, 1st
century mud huts in Alma Ata that were concealed by screening but from one elevation
we could see over the screening. . . until we were seen and cautioned not to stop
there and not to take pictures.
Since we couldn’t ask our standard comparison questions, Mrs. Heinlein
devised some “innocent” ones, and I concentrated on certain signs; both of us were
sizing up population. At that time the USSR claimed a population of 225,000,000 and
claimed a population for Moskva of 5,000,000 +. (Today, twenty years later, they
claim almost 300,000,000 and over 7,000,000.)
For many days we prowled Moskva-by car, by taxi when we did not want
Intourist with us, by subway, by bus, and on foot. In the meantime Mrs. Heinlein, in
her fluent Russian, got acquainted with many people-Intourist guides, drivers,
people who picked us up on the streets, chambermaids, anyone. The Russians are
delightful people, always happy to talk with visitors, in English if they know it
(and many do), in Russian if they do not.
Let me add that, if it suited her, Ginny could charm pictures off a wall.
She was able to ask personal questions (but ones people anywhere usually are
pleased to answer) by freely answering questions about us and showing warm interest
in that person-not faked; she is a warm person.
But, buried in chitchat, she always learned these things:
How old are you?
Are you married?
How many children do you have?
How many brothers and sisters do you have? What ages?
How many nieces and nephews do you have?
Put baldly, that sounds as offensive as a quiz by a Kinsey reporter. But it
was not put baldly-e.g., “Oh, how lucky you are! Gospodin Heinlein and I didn’t even
meet until the Great Patriotic War. . . and we have no children although we wanted
them. But we have lots of nieces and nephews.” Etc., etc. She often told more than
she got but she accumulated, painlessly, the data she wanted, often without asking
questions.
One day we were seated on a park bench, back of the Kremlin and facing the
Moskva river, with no one near us- a good spot to talk; a directional mike would
have to be clear across the river as long as we kept our backs to the Kremlin.
I said, “How big does that guide book say this city is?”
“Over five million.”
“Hmmph! Look at that river. Look at the traffic on it.” (One lonely scow-)
“Remember the Rhine?” We had taken a steamer up the Rhine three years earlier; the
traffic was so dense the river had traffic lights on it, just like the Panama Canal.
“Ginny, this dump isn’t anything like five million. More the size of Copenhagen, if
that. Pittsburgh. New Orleans. San Francisco, possibly.” (These are all cities I
know well, on foot and by every form of transportation. In 1960 all of them were in
the 600,000-800,000 range.) “Yet they are trying to tell us that this dump is bigger
than Philadelphia, bigger than Los Angeles, bigger than Chicago. Nonsense.”
(I have lived in all three cities. A big city feels big, be it Yokohama or
New York.) “Three quarters of a million, not five million.”
“I know,” she agreed.
“Huh?”
(I think I must mention that Mrs. Heinlein is a close student of Russian
history, history of the Russian Revolution, history of the Third International or
Comintern, and so skilled in Marxist dialectical materialism that she can argue
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theory with a Russian party member and get him so mixed up that he’s biting his own
tail.)
She answered, “They claim to have finished the War with about two hundred