Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Robert had picked up a cold on May Day, and he was glad to get out of town on May 4, headed to Alma Ata, near the border with Tibet and about a hundred and thirty miles from the border with Red China. This was the most remote part of the Soviet Union they could get to (they were not allowed into Siberia—in fact, the American consul in Moscow had been slightly faint at some of the places they planned to go). They had an overnight stay in Tashkent—more down-at-heels hotel luxury—and in the morning continued on to Alma Ata where their hotel had just been opened, though the decor literally dated back to Czarist days—crushed velvet curtains with ball fringes. When Robert closed the door for the first time, the entire locking assembly came away in his hand. He asked Ginny how to say “Good morning” in Russian, and then went to greet their floor’s dragon at her desk, handing her the lock. She was quite startled.13

  When the Heinleins came back from breakfast, they found a repairman trying to reinstall it, but, Robert said, he was complaining that the screws were too short. Robert had scarcely a word of Russian, and the repairman spoke no English—but somehow they communicated that to each other.14

  Their InTourist guide took them to the Forty-Years-of-October collective farm where they received gifts of hothouse tomatoes and a bottle of the local raisin wine and were guests of honor at a special pageant presented in their honor by the local kindergarten class—recitations and songs. It was all very charming indeed, Robert said—but he wasn’t following the actual words, the way Ginny was: When they got outside, she told him the recitations were the Life of Lenin and the Seven Year Plan, and the song was about preserving the October Revolution.15 When their guides got them back to the hotel, they found a summons to the local InTourist office.

  On May Day, while they were crowded on a sidewalk in Moscow, the Russian military had been able to shoot down one of the American U-2 spy planes making a high-altitude overflight to photograph military intelligence. That day, the Russians connected with Francis Gary Powers’s plane over Sverdlosk, halfway into his flight from Pakistan to Norway, and he had to bail out when the plane began to break up. Powers survived the parachute jump but was promptly arrested by Soviet authorities. Premier Khrushchev delayed making the announcement of the capture of plane and pilot to make use of the propaganda opportunity. On May 5, 1960, the lid came off. Two days later, he let it be known that they had the plane’s cameras and gear—and the pilot, who had survived and would be put on trial for espionage.16

  Robert and Ginny were harangued by the local InTourist head about the incident,17 claiming a moral high ground the Heinleins were certainly not going to concede. Robert had drilled into Ginny that she must never lose control of her temper while in the Soviet Union, but he lost control of his own, shoving the tomato and wine “gifts” across the man’s desk.18 Their guide, Mikhail, tried to keep up with him, translating. Ginny tried to maintain her own cool, answering in her best Russian,19 but Robert losing his temper was very bad for her. She jumped in feet first, pointing out that a nation that kept slave labor concentration camps had no right to any sort of moral high tone. In 1960 the Gulag still did not officially exist, and the commissar denied it. Ginny began pointing out the location and name of the installations they had seen, supplemented with statistics they had deduced from stray facts picked up in casual conversation about how many slave laborers had been worked to death in each.20 Robert took the opportunity of the stunned pause in the harangue to gather Ginny up and stomp out of the room, without being dismissed.

  They went back to the hotel room, shaking: There was no telling what might happen to them. They were 3,500 miles inside the Soviet Union, at a place their State Department had specifically told them the United States could not reach to protect or rescue them. They stood a very good chance of being arrested and disappeared. They slept that night in their shoes, prepared for the five A.M. pounding on the door that meant Vorkuta21 for them.22 But they stood their ground. Summoned again to the InTourist office the next day, they refused to go. Eventually the InTourist commisar gave up on them and returned their passports and tickets for the next leg of their trip.23

  But from that point on, Ginny remarked, it was as if a curtain had fallen over them. The atmosphere turned icy: No one was warm and friendly anywhere they went. Americans were officially disapproved.24

  Their itinerary took them back to Tashkent overnight, and then on to Samarkand—another of Ginny’s particular choices for this trip, and the reason, she said, she had agreed to go to Russia in the first place. Samarkand is a place of golden legend, in turn-of-the-century romantic literature. The tomb of Tamburlane the Conqueror is there.

  The reality was not golden: Their hotel was standard-issue Soviet model, but so crowded with furniture it required forethought to move around in it. The bathtub was being repaired, and there was no hot water at all. No bottled water. No boiled water. Ginny quadrupled the halazone tablet dosage to purify the water, but it didn’t do any good. Spit-baths for them—and another case of amebic dysentery for Ginny.

  But the area itself was beautiful and romantic, the landscape littered with blue onion domes. Samarkand is in a predominantly Muslim part of the Soviet Union, and Ginny photographed women in the head-to-toe version of the abaya, with the burqa, the required “veil,” with its curtain-window of gauze (purdah) to see out (officially no longer permitted, but evidently tolerated). They were allowed to tour the tombs of Tamburlane’s relatives, and finally even the Great One’s tomb, two stories underground and not lit at all. Robert got taken on one of their huge boatlike swings rocked by a German girl from the Volga region. He could not remember the Russian for “stop!”—urgently necessary for someone who gets seasick—and was badly shaken up.

  That was the fun part of the trip. From there to Tblisi (unbearably hot), and on to Kiev for a few days, where it was cold and damp and rainy. They were glad for the opportunity to rest up, for Robert’s cold contracted on May Day was worse. Ginny told him to stay in bed while she went out to find a bookshop for something to read. Kiev showed conspicuous signs of shelling left over from the Great Patriotic War. She found just two books—something by Mérimée and another book that had first been published in English in the eighteenth century. In Russia, they publish books in limited editions and might or might not reprint when the supplies become exhausted. Books of all types tended to disappear rapidly.25 Worse, she was coming down with Robert’s cold—but found he had used the last of the tissues they had brought from the United States.

  They were gradually making their way north and out of the country. The Paris summit was scheduled to start on May 16. From Kiev they went to Vilno (Vilnius) in Lithuania. At the airport, they encountered at first hand the “pravda” about the Baltic states: In a casual discussion with other American tourists about their trip and their next destination, Ginny mentioned that Lithuania had been conquered by the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. A translator rushed over to contradict her with shrill indignation: “Mrs. Heinlein was lying!—that Lithuania had always been part of the Soviet Union.”

  The most ironical—and the most chilling—aspect of this incident was that she was sincere. She was certain that she was speaking the truth—and that Mrs. Heinlein was a liar, a capitalist aggressor liar, intentionally spreading false stories about her beloved country.26

  Ginny shrugged, told her she was wrong, and turned her back on her.

  Vilno was not particularly interesting, but they were there on Sunday May 15 when they encountered a group of Red Army Cadets boisterously celebrating the manned launch of a Russian astronaut!

  One cadet asked if I had heard of their new spaceship? I had not, so he told me about it: it had lifted off that morning; he gave me the gross weight in kilos, the lift-off time, the period, the apogee and perigee—“And even now,” he said, making a sweeping circle with his hands, “a Russian cosmonaut is circling the globe!”

  I congratulated them with a glassy smile, [and] hurried back to my hotel …27

  But
suddenly, official silence fell on the subject. By evening the launch had become unmanned—the Vostok capsule being tested had carried dummies only. Reaching his hotel, Heinlein tried to get a fuller account from the Soviet Union’s main newspaper, Pravda.

  No Pravda—

  No Pravda anywhere that day. I tried to listen to the Voice of America that evening; it was thoroughly jammed. I did listen to the Voice of Moscow, which reported a shot in exactly the same terms the Red Army cadet had used—but made no mention of the shot being manned.

  Later that day my InTourist guide looked me up and carefully told me that the cadet had been mistaken.28

  Reports a few days later said one of the retro-rockets had fired in the wrong attitude, and the ship could not be retrieved: It was outward bound from Earth—possibly carrying a dead cosmonaut to the stars.

  They were approached in a corridor that day by a frightened man who identified himself as a dissident, wanting their help. This was fantastically dangerous for all of them, but they both memorized the message he wanted to get out, and the address, and then Robert burned the paper it was written on. Ginny then spontaneously embraced the man, told him soberly that he had nothing to fear from them. Robert embraced him also. And then he hurried away into the night, and they never learned anything more about the man or what happened to him.

  There was nothing they could do but go on to Riga (Latvia), where they saw a church service that overflowed the chapel, with people kneeling in prayer on the sidewalks, and were entertained by the Soviet Writer’s Union. Robert’s request to unblock royalties for pirated stories published in Russian had never borne any fruit: His name was not even carried on the credit lists the Russians kept of their international piracies, under either of the two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet used to transliterate the initial sound of the name Heinlein (a factor that plagued them almost daily, as they could never be sure of finding their names or reservation on InTourist lists, whether as gainlain or chaynlain), but he was treated here as an honored fellow professional, at a borrowed Czarist palace rather than the union’s headquarters building—a marathon, five-hour drinking bout traditional for such affairs.

  One of the party acted as official toastmaker; others could amend the toasts, and then the entire group would toss back their cognac (rather than the more usual vodka)—just a largish thimbleful per toast, but there were a lot of toasts. Ginny quit early on, but Robert kept up with them, to uphold the honor of the profession in the United States. He kept up his end of the bargain, walking out unassisted.

  Their next stop was Leningrad, and they arrived on May 16, 1960—the very day the Paris summit between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev started. The first thing on the Heinleins’ agenda was the Hermitage Museum—the collection of art assembled by Empress Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. But it was closed that day, to wax the floors. Instead, they had a picnic lunch packed for a car trip to Zagorsk (sandwiches were, apparently, not in the repertoire of Russian chefs, but they could get bread and traditional appetizers—Zakuski—consisting of sliced meats and various pickled vegetables, so they made do). That night they were able to get tickets for another ballet performance—which impressed Ginny as mediocre. She had assumed that the standards of the Bolshoi were maintained everywhere in the Soviet Union and was disappointed to learn there was as much variation in performance standards there as in the United States.

  They were lunching with some other Americans on their second day in Leningrad when a newcomer arrived with the news, still officially suppressed inside the USSR, that the Paris summit had collapsed: On the first day, while the Heinleins were still in Riga, Khrushchev had demanded an official apology from President Eisenhower for the U-2 overflight two weeks earlier. The president refused to offer an apology—the Soviets had as much or more spy activity in the United States as the United States had over the Soviet Union—and Khrushchev walked out, taking the whole Soviet delegation with him. There would be no summit.

  Robert and Ginny looked at each other for a second and then, without discussion, stood up simultaneously, abandoning their lunch in mid-course. They went directly to the InTourist office and demanded the first flight out of Leningrad and out of the USSR. They would pay extra for it—whatever was needed.

  Impossible! they were told: They must continue with their scheduled tourist activities until the planned conclusion a few days later. The two international flights out of Leningrad each week were booked solid for weeks in advance.

  They talked the InTourist official into applying to the Moscow headquarters for permission for them to leave by train to Helsinki, in Finland.

  The next day they were allowed to board the train at the old Finland Station (an irony that could not have been lost on them): They were reversing Lenin’s route from exile in Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917.29 The train was almost empty, except for one young Russian naval officer who conveniently spoke English and chatted amiably with them for the entire, rough trip. Ginny was morally certain he was keeping an eye on them for the Politburo.30

  Russian trains operate on a different gauge than train tracks in Europe. They had to stop and literally change the wheels on the cars before proceeding into Finland. When that happened, Robert and Ginny finally felt the release of not having to watch themselves, anticipate problems, rein in their tempers. “[W]e heaved a sigh of relief, and felt human again.”31

  When they pulled into Helsinki, they stopped by the Hotel Carlton and soaked up wonderful double martinis. While Ginny called to advance their reservations at the Hotel Torni, Robert went to a newsstand and bought up every free-world newspaper he could find—French, American, British, German—and surrounded himself with them, browsing and luxuriating in uncontrolled facts.32 They called Kristina, a friend in Helsinki, and she greeted them with flowers.33

  They had both fallen in love with the northern countries on their earlier trips, but Finland (which does not consider itself to be “Scandinavian”) was special even among them, with a national character of fierce resoluteness—sisu—that precisely suited their mood on this occasion. The Suomic “do what must be done” was the only attitude that a free people could possibly take, living next door to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—did not have it, and they had been eaten up by the USSR.

  Robert itched to tell about his experiences. All the typewriters Ginny could find had a Swedish keyboard, but he found one in the hotel Torni without the extra accents and, while Ginny finalized their local travel arrangements for a month-long bus tour north of the Arctic Circle, wrote a serious 9,000-word discussion of the Soviets’ somewhat “flexible” attitude toward facts, “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’”:

  .… the simple truth is a tactic not contemplated under Marxism-Leninism doctrines. Here we have the essential distinction between truth and pravda.

  Truth, to the West, consists of all the facts without distortion.

  Pravda is that which serves the World Communist Revolution. Pravda can be a mixture of fact and falsehood, or a flat-footed, brassbound, outright lie.34

  When the draft was finished, they began by traveling north from Helsinki to Lahti to see the high school graduation of a foreign exchange student they had met in Palo Alto—one of Rex’s contacts—Marjatta Lievonen. Lahti is best known for its winter sports, but while they were there, Robert and Ginny visited one of its many parks and sculpture gardens, a memorial to the dead of Finland’s most recent war with Russia. A group of Russian tourists happened to come along at the same time. Ginny Heinlein remembered the occasion:

  Robert became incensed at their presence, and muttered something about a dog returning to its vomit, and he propelled me out of the park and down the street to a florist shop, where he made a purchase of flowers. We carried them back to the little park and elbowing our way through the Russians, laid them at the feet of the statue.35

  From Finland they went to Norway, taking a steamer to the Lofoten Islands and a tiny boa
t through the Göta Canal. In Sweden, where his niece Lynnie was finishing up her year as a foreign exchange student, they stayed on a family farm north of Stockholm—a stopover long enough to sketch out another article, funny-ish, in a gruesome sort of way, an ironic how-to deal with InTourist. The first draft of “Inside InTourist” (subtitled “How to Break Even (or Almost) in the Soviet Union”) was 2,400 scathing words (“The proper mood for the Soviet Union is that of the man who hit himself on the head with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped … You can avoid the worst shocks to your nervous system by knowing in advance that you are not going to get what you have paid for,” and so on).36 Heinlein put it away and they continued with a motor tour through Denmark. They managed the side trip to Wiesbaden they had had to put off when the Russian leg of the trip was advanced by ten days, and visited their friend Fred Smith, Commander for the European Theater. General Smith took the Heinleins to Intelligence, and they were questioned minutely about what they had seen and heard: Firsthand reports of the interior of the Soviet Union were very hard to come by. Apparently the transcript of their debriefing circulated through the entire U.S. intelligence community: Even the Soviets must have had a copy before they got back to Colorado Springs.37

  Nearly three weeks later, their agapomene with the North—all of it!—came to an end, and they flew over the North Pole to Anchorage, Alaska, where Robert stayed close to the hotel nursing his cold and Ginny judged the Miss Alaska contest, with cartoonist Shel Silverstein as a co-judge. And then they were debriefed again at Elmendorf Air Force Base (adjacent to Anchorage), leaving a little time for touring, visiting Point Barrow, the northernmost inhabited place in the United States—a tiny village with few permanent buildings in it. Chained dogs (for sleds) were in front of each building.