The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

‘Being an editor in the East sector is very different from in the West. Perhaps you can’t imagine it. You do not print the news; you follow policy, and all the news has to be made over to fit the policy. You are told that the party is monolithic, and so is the policy; it is a most impressive word, but, alas, when you come to watch the proceedings you discover that what exists is one clique fighting another clique for power. Whichever side is out is watching eagerly to catch the other in some action or some phraseology that isn’t “monolithic”. It is hard for me because I am naturally an outspoken person, and I have never belonged to any clique’.

  ‘Why don’t you come over to the West and stay’? inquired Lanny.

  ‘I don’t know whether they would have me; and anyhow it’s rather hard for me to make up my mind. I have a great many friends among the officer corps—the German officers who have gone over to the Soviets. You must understand, I am deputy president of the Bund Deutscher Offiziere, and we think we are important, and I hate to hurt their feelings. It is a strange life that I’ve lived. I was brought up as a German officer and was taught that my first duty was to defend the Fatherland. I despised democracy precisely because I had seen the German people vote Hitler into power; that was why it was possible for me to go over to the Soviets. If I should change again I wouldn’t know quite what to make of myself; it would be too much for anybody to believe. You must realise, I have lived six years among the Russians, and they have taught me most of what I know—or think I know’.

  ‘I can understand easily’, Lanny said.

  V

  He didn’t want to put pressure on the man or to seem to, so he chatted for a while about old times. He told of buying paintings that had once been in Karinhall. ‘Did you ever meet Hermann Göring?’ he asked.

  ‘Never, thank God’! exclaimed Einsiedel. He called his air commander ‘a vain, overstuffed peacock’ and added, ‘He knew as much about air strategy as an ox knows about skiing’.

  ‘I visited his Luftwaffe headquarters once’, Lanny said. ‘I helped him with his art collection—not those paintings he stole but some he bought’.

  ‘I have been through the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, and that is all I know about painting. You must understand that for a good part of those six years I was a prisoner of war. They gave me their propaganda to study, and I studied it, and when they saw that I was a diligent student they sent me to an antifaschule—you know how they make up words—that is, an anti-Fascist school. There they trained German officers to be Communists, and I learned the whole ritual and Bible. It seemed to me quite wonderful, you know; they are going to end poverty and war, the proletariat has arisen and is going to build a new state, and when it is all done the state will wither away and every man will be free. I took it all just as I had taken the Bible from my mother and Mein Kampf from Hitler. Each time there was a complete programme of salvation and a ritual that you had to go through if you wanted to be saved’.

  ‘I know all about it’, Lanny said. ‘I never was a Communist myself, but some of my friends were, including a sister. What you have to learn is that revolutions may degenerate. The state doesn’t wither away; on the contrary, it becomes the prey of power-loving men, and they hold on to it and proceed to murder everybody who might by any possibility disagree with them and try to get rid of them. The utopian state turns into a police state, and differences of opinion become the occasion for secret arrests, tortures, and other horrors. The basis of American social thinking is the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but in the Soviet Union the individual is nothing and the regime is everything’.

  ‘The theory, Herr Budd, is that the regime is delivering the individual from exploitation’.

  ‘It is a plausible theory and has seduced many minds. But after watching it for thirty years I have concluded that the regime is a small group of individuals protecting their own power and exploiting everybody else. To me the Stalinist regime is as evil and treacherous as those of ancient Rome in the days of its decline and fall. Did you by any chance see the picture that Sergei Eisenstein made about the life of Ivan the Terrible’?

  The other had seen it, and Lanny went on, ‘Ivan was a perfect monster of cruelty, syphilitic and a veritable maniac, yet he represents success to the Soviets. He survived, he put down his enemies and expanded his empire, so they glorified him, they spent millions of roubles, even in the midst of their poverty, and set their creative genius to making a magnificent film about him. I can assure you that such a thing would be inconceivable in America. In the first place we have no such figures in our history. Our folk heroes are men like Columbus, who sailed out in three little ships and discovered a new world; Daniel Boone, who went out into the wilderness and survived so many hardships; Paul Revere, who rode out to rouse the farmers of the countryside when the British soldiers were coming; Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; John Brown, who tried to awaken the slaves; and Abraham Lincoln, who actually did emancipate them. Someday we shall add Franklin Roosevelt, a crippled man in the White House who broke the power of Wall Street and forced it to come to Washington for its orders. From such things you can know the soul of our people; and you will see how different it is from a land of blood and terror, building up military might by the labour of millions of starvelings in concentration camps’.

  ‘I am very ignorant, Herr Budd’, said the great-grandson of Prinz von Bismarck. ‘I have never even heard many of these names you mention’.

  VI

  So Lanny set to work to complete the education of this young Prussian aristocrat, whom he liked because he had a keen intelligence and a genial smile. He had been buffeted by fate but had taken it in a mood of gaiety. The Americans had locked him up, but they had no way of knowing about him, so he couldn’t blame them very much. Speaking as an aviator, he said that when you were up in the air and the winds pushed you this way and that you didn’t blame them, you learned to ride them.

  Lanny tried again that eloquence which he had wasted upon his sister during the years since she had come back from the Soviet Union. He answered those arguments Einsiedel had been taught in the antifaschule. Yes, there had been lynchings of Negroes in America; there might still be as many as one in the course of a year. But the millions of Negroes who had been slaves a century ago were getting education, they were earning money and putting it by, they were gaining their rights in one court decision after another. They were on their way up in America, and for that reason the Communists were not able to make much headway among them.

  And again, yes, there had been oppression of labour. Unions had been fought and sometimes broken up, and working men had been beaten and shot in riots during strikes. Such conditions had been portrayed in books—books written thirty or forty years ago and now circulated in Stalinist Russia with nothing said about the dates. The Russian masses were being taught that these conditions prevailed in America today; but that was not so. In America today there were some twenty million workers organised into unions that were wealthy and powerful and that were accustomed to negotiate with bosses upon equal terms; they were free to strike and did so—something they would never dare to do in Stalin’s empire. During the past sixteen years of the New Deal these unions had had their full say in the affairs of government and had helped to bring about numerous social reforms. In England this was called Fabian socialism and in America its enemies called it ‘creeping socialism’; but bad words hadn’t stopped it. It had all been brought about by the democratic process; very few persons had been killed, very few had been sent to jail, and while many lies had been told, the lovers of truth had been left free to refute them.

  VII

  In short, Lanny conducted an anti-Commie school, all in one session. The pupil was apt and attentive, and at the end of the session Lanny waited to hear him say that he would stay in the American sector if permitted. But no, he said he couldn’t do that; in the first place it would look cowardly; the Americans would think he had done it in order to ge
t out of jail, and they would never really respect him or trust him. He would wait until they turned him out, which they would surely have to do, because they could prove nothing against him. Then he wished to go back to his job on the Tagliche. He had his friends to whom he owed loyalty, and he wanted to tell them what new thoughts he had got into his head.

  Lanny warned him that this was a dangerous thing to do. ‘You do not look to me as if you’d be a very successful intriguer. What you’re thinking shows in your face’.

  Said he, ‘I believe I have a few friends I can trust, Herr Budd’.

  Lanny warned him, ‘It is difficult to have friends in a police state. The moment you change your mind fear begins, and suspicion. You wonder who will be the Judas to betray you with a kiss. It is to every man’s advantage to betray you and to no man’s advantage to keep your secret. You will never have a moment’s peace of mind, for you have to remember that the slightest suspicion is enough to bring about your ruin. In the free world we would rather let a hundred guilty men go free than kill one innocent man; but in Stalin’s realm it is just the other way: he would rather kill a hundred innocent men than have one guilty man survive—because that guilty one might bring about the end of Stalin. That is the way with despotism; it automatically breeds fear and suspicion; it thrives upon it and cannot survive without it. In the free world a human being is a soul and his rights are sacred; but in Stalin’s realm human beings are beetles and bugs; if they bite, or even look as if they might bite, they are exterminated’.

  The young Prussian chuckled. ‘Tell your friends who have got this beetle in a box that if they turn him loose he will not bite, and he will not tell any lies about them. He will go back and tell his friends what he is thinking. Perhaps he will have another change of mind; but he is making no promises and giving no pledges. He is very much confused in his mind and troubled in his conscience just now’.

  Lanny went out and made that report to the anxious officers of C.I.C. in Frankfurt. Evidently they had arrested Einsiedel because they suspected he was a spy and hoped to get the evidence; apparently they hadn’t been able to. Lanny said he didn’t think the man was a spy, but of course he couldn’t guarantee it. He took the man to be a proof of the cunning and efficiency of Stalin’s propaganda machine. They had taken a young German prisoner, miseducated by Hitler and very naïve about the world. Always they had the advantage that so long as he didn’t agree with them he remained a prisoner, but when he did agree with them he became a favoured pupil and then an honoured collaborator. Naturally Lanny couldn’t undertake to counteract the work of six years in a couple of hours’ conversation; but he felt sure that Einsiedel was thinking new thoughts, and it was to his credit that he wasn’t willing to change his mind suddenly in order to get out of jail.

  ‘Why don’t you give him books to read’? demanded Lanny, and it turned out that the officers didn’t know what books to give him. They didn’t know anything about propaganda; it hadn’t been taught in West Point or in the Army training camps. It was a new idea to Americans, and uncomfortable, because up to then propaganda had been left to newspapers and magazines and radio—in short, to private enterprise. The average American officer didn’t very well understand the difference between communism and socialism—if he had been reading the Hearst newspapers he was quite sure they were the same. Lanny had to admit that it was confusing, because Hitler had called himself a National Socialist, with the idea of fooling the Germans and taking over the Socialist vote; now in the same way Stalin announced that he was building socialism, when in fact he was expanding the old-style Tsarist empire and making it more efficient and deadly. The Americans were building socialism actually, but they didn’t want it and wouldn’t admit it; they insisted upon walking into the future backwards and not knowing where they were going. The Democrats called it the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and only the Republicans had discovered what it really was!

  VIII

  Lanny got himself flown to Berlin. In these days you were lucky to get a ride at all; high-ranking officers sat on bucket seats, and others spread a newspaper on a sack of coal or a tin of petrol. The coal had to be wetted down, in order to avoid spontaneous combustion, so you trod carefully in black slime. Every plane was loaded to capacity; there were rings in the wall, and ropes were passed through these to bind the cargo tight; when the air was bumpy this was important and was done with care. There came to Lanny’s mind a scene by Victor Hugo which he had read in his youth, describing the behaviour of a cannon on board a warship; it broke loose during a storm and went hurtling from one end of the deck to the other, smashing everything in its path. Nothing of that sort happened during the Berlin airlift.

  Here at the Frankfurt airfield was a sight to be remembered. Along one side of the field was a row of the C-47s, cargo planes, many of them war-worn and far from elegant, but they could carry two-and-a-half tons a trip. Beside each plane was a truck, and the cargo was being shifted into the planes by a swarm of German workers with wheelbarrows and dollies. The moment a plane was ready and the cargo made fast, the engines were started slowly, and the plane proceeded under its own power across the field; it was a great bird that rolled instead of hopped to its place at the end of the runway. The signals were given from the radio tower, so you heard nothing; suddenly the pilot gunned his engine, the propellers began to roar, and a cloud of dust shot out from behind the plane; it began to roll faster and faster down the runway. When it got near the end you were worried for fear it was overloaded and wouldn’t rise in time; but the men who were handling this operation knew just how much weight the plane could carry and how many feet of runway were required. It always rose at exactly the right instant and passed over the trees and the houses and away.

  Lanny was free to stand and watch the sight as long as he pleased, and to ask questions. He was told that there were a few more than a hundred planes on this run, and they were kept working day and night. Some of the big fellows were coming, the C-54s, which could carry ten tons; they were flying from Hawaii and Alaska. When his curiosity was satisfied Lanny entered one of the planes and took his uncomfortable seat. The distance was less than two hundred miles and the flight took less than an hour. He couldn’t see outside, and had no one to talk to, because the plane carried no crew and no superfluous weight. He had only his thoughts for company, and his thoughts were that every flight of these planes was ringing an alarm bell in the Kremlin, telling the men of the Politburo that the free world was not going to give up without a fight.

  IX

  Lanny had telephoned Monck and a hotel room had been engaged for him. They soon got together and had much to talk about. First, the tragic fate of Kurt. Monck said he was fairly sure who had committed the murder, but he had no evidence. The men had disappeared. Perhaps they were hiding in the forest, which was pleasant enough in the summer time; or perhaps they had changed their names and got away to a foreign land. The Bavarian government was conducting a search, but Monck said it was hard to be sure how genuine their efforts would be. It was impossible to keep any German government from being infiltrated by Nazis; frequently you had to employ ex-Nazis because you could find no one else who was competent. Men of violence who had held power and glory for a dozen years were not going to give up, and Monck was of the opinion that the American occupation would have to continue for a long time.

  ‘But is Stalin going to give us a long time?’ asked Lanny, and Monck said, ‘Ach, leider!’

  This Marxist friend did not bring up the subject of Laurel’s extraordinary psychic experience. Lanny understood that he wasn’t going to ‘change his thinking of a lifetime’. He was a man full of purpose and courage, but he had no theory as to how these qualities had come into existence, or why they seemed so important. So he and his American friend would go on dealing with the world of material things, which included both nazism and communism, the two extremes on the social scale. Now the extremes were meeting.

  The American expressed the opinion that young Einsiedel was
an exceptional man and was seriously thinking of coming over to the Allied side. Monck said that was possible. Great numbers of Germans and Russians were becoming aware of the chasm that had opened between Communist theory and practice. He said, ‘Stalin tries to make converts among them but he has treated them too badly. Nearly half a million German soldiers and officers have died in Russia of exhaustion and hunger-typhus’.

  Monck said that no information had come about Fritz Meissner or Anna Surden, and he doubted if he would hear from either of them again. Lanny told about General Meissner, and Monck said that sturdy old gentleman ought to be brought to Berlin to be heard over R.I.A.S.; he would have influence with the Germans. For the first time since the war had ended Monck was really hopeful of winning the minds of his own people. He said the airlift was producing a tremendous impression; for the first time the Germans realised that the ‘Amis’ meant business. It was a blow to Soviet prestige, and the refugees all agreed that the Reds were in a state of vexation.

  Lanny went to see Boris Shub, who had become the political adviser of R.I.A.S. That genial gentleman welcomed him with outstretched hands. He was in a state of exaltation because a poll just completed showed that R.I.A.S. now had eighty per cent, of the Berlin listeners, whereas the far more powerful Red station had only fifteen per cent. Such had been the effect of the airlift! America was waking up, and the Reds were being told in language they could understand that they were not going to have the world for the taking.

  Shub sat right down with Lanny to decide what he was to say over the air. He was pleased with Lanny’s suggestions and had only one thing to urge: that when the visitor had any fault to find it should not be with the Russians or the Russian people. They were exactly what the Germans had been under Hitler, the helpless victims of despotism; the worst that could be said of them was that they were dupes. We were trying to open the eyes of the Russians and win them to our cause, and we should always distinguish between them and their masters.