Time Will Run Back

Chapter 10

WHEREVER he accompanied Bolshekov, Peter detected the same terror in the eyes of the officials and workers, and found the same fawning servility.

For everything that went wrong, Bolshekov demanded an immediate scapegoat. He rarely allowed a day to pass without accusing someone of slackness, sabotage or treason. A few weeks afterwards Peter was always sure to read in the New Truth the same self-abasing “confession.” It was always couched in the same stilted, stereotyped language.

The accused would then disappear.

Bolshekov took Peter through nurseries and schools. The children were taught to repeat endlessly that Stalenin was omniscient, that their parents had no claim on them, that their only loyalty was to the State, that private property was theft, that hell meant capitalism and heaven socialism.

“Do they understand what all these phrases mean?” asked Peter. “They will when they grow up,” answered Bolshekov, “and then they will be incapable of believing anything else.”

At the visits to the government publishing bureau Peter learned how books were written and selected. The bureau was divided into many divisions: political propaganda, economics, engineering, the sciences, art, history, drama, fiction, and so forth. Usually the publishers decided themselves what kind of book was needed, what the correct party line and conclusions should be, and who should be ordered to write it. The principal qualification demanded of a writer was fervor for the existing regime. If he also had the necessary technical knowledge, the government publishers considered themselves fortunate.

Peter thumbed through many volumes. They were all dedicated to Stalenin—who, it appeared, depending on the particular subject matter of the book, was the greatest political genius, economist, engineer, mathematician, chemist, architect, chess player, of them all.

Each writer in every field insisted that his book was written from a completely orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Staleninist point of view. He often contended that his predecessor had been a deviationist. Peter learned that in these cases the predecessor had already been shot for coming to the wrong conclusions.

He tried the fiction, but could not read it. It was always designed to point some moral, such as the precedence of love for the State over that of mere sexual attraction or the accident of family relationship, the need of reporting to the secret police the slightest transgression on the part of one’s closest friend or sexual companion, or the duty of long hours of work.

“Reports are coming in, Peter, of another serious famine in Kansas,” said Stalenin. “I’m sending Bolshekov right out there.” In the first day of Bolshekov’s absence, Peter was promoted to membership in the Protectors.

“I’m turning your education meanwhile over to Adams,” Stalenin said. “He is to teach you everything that an Inner Circle Protector should know.”

Peter had felt drawn to Adams even from his first meeting. He had not known exactly why. Adams was far from handsome or imposing. But a probable reason suddenly occurred to him. Adams’ thin, wizened face, so full of shrewdness and intelligence, strikingly resembled a small bust of Voltaire that had stood, as far back as Peter could remember, in the library of his home in Bermuda. It was this resemblance, he now saw, that had made Adams seem vaguely familiar to him. Peter was constantly reminded afresh of the resemblance by Adams’ strongly anachronistic habit of taking snuff.

Adams was remarkably frank. No doubt this was partly because Peter was now to be treated as part of the “inner circle”; but it seemed to spring, also, from a certain open cynicism in Adams’ nature.

“What are some of the things that have been puzzling you?” Adams asked.

Peter hardly knew where to begin.

“One thing I would like to know is just how much progress Wonworld has made since the beginning.”

“Since the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Yes.”

“There are two answers. One is the answer for the Proletarians—the public answer. The other is the answer for the Central Committee of the Party—what we sometimes call the entre-nous answer. These two answers exist for most questions in Wonworld.”

“But only the second answer, the entre-nous answer, is the truth?”

“We do not ask in Wonworld whether a statement is ‘true’ or not. We only ask: What good will it do? And what good—or harm—a statement does depends on whom you are talking to. It is obviously important, for example, that the Proletarians should believe that Wonworld has made tremendous progress; but it is also important that the Central Committee should know exactly how much progress it has made.”

It is important, thought Peter to himself, that at least the Central Committee should really know the truth. He said aloud: “I should like to know both answers.”

“The only thing it does any good to tell the Proletarians, of course,” said Adams, “is that our technological progress has been so great since capitalism that any comparison would be absurd. ‘How could there have been any progress under capitalism?’ we ask them. ‘Nobody then sought anything but profit; and everybody maximized profits by selling the public shoddier and shoddier goods.’ “

“Is that true?” asked Peter. “I’m sorry; I mean, what is the entre-nous answer?”

“The records kept by the Central Committee for its own guidance, as far as I can interpret them,” said Adams, “indicate that the present state of technological progress in Wonworld is the same as it was from about 100 to 120 A.M.”

“Under the old calendar,” Peter figured quickly, “that would have been in what the bourgeoisie called the years from 1918 to 1938?”

“Yes. In some things—in airplanes, say, and in most direct war weapons, we are probably a little ahead of that period, and in other things a little behind.”

“But how could that have happened? After all, the bourgeois world was not finally annihilated until—”

“You are about to say,” Adams cut in, “that the bourgeois world continued for several decades even beyond 1938?”

“Yes.”

“And may have made technological progress in that period?”

“Yes. And if it did—”

“And if it did—Why did the world’s knowledge and technological state actually go backward after that? Well,” continued Adams, “what with civil wars, physical destruction, the necessary burning of books saturated with capitalistic thinking, the suppression of some kinds of knowledge in order to prevent dangerous insurrections, and so on, a good deal of theoretical knowledge was lost. Though people were able to make some things simply by copying the old ones, we lost some secrets. It is probably just as well that we did, for some of these were terribly destructive.”

“But hasn’t there been any progress in more than a century of Wonworld?”

“Entre-nous, practically none.”

“Why not?”

“That, Comrade Uldanov, is a question I have never been able to answer.”

One of Peter’s first visits with Adams was to the offices of the New Truth. There were two newspapers published in Moscow—the New Truth, in the morning, and the Evening Revelation in the afternoon. The Revelation contained almost nothing but cartoons and comic strips. Its existence was necessary, Adams explained, to interest the Proletarians, who almost never bought the New Truth.

Though nominally only the morning newspaper of Moscow, the New Truth was in fact the master newspaper of Wonworld. While other cities had a morning and an evening newspaper of their own, each with its own title, every newspaper in Wonworld carried the same editorials every day, all telegraphed out from the offices of the New Truth. This applied also to about two-thirds of the news items. The other news items referred to local events. Peter found even here, however, by making comparisons of his own in the files, that the identical story would be repeated in, say, the Moscow New Truth, the Berlin Tageblatt, the London Times, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune under local date lines. (Most of these names and newspapers had originally been bourgeois in origin; the Wonworld government had simply expropriated and continued them as communist publications.) The names and addresses of the persons involved would be changed, as well as the locale, but the story otherwise would be exactly the same.

Peter asked about this, and Adams referred the answer to Orlov. Orlov was a round-faced, bland little man. In addition to being editor of the New Truth, he was a member of the Politburo and head of the entire Wonworld Press Department.

“Naturally,” said Orlov, “readers are most interested in what is happening to people in their own localities.”

“But precisely the same thing,” protested Peter, “couldn’t have happened on the same day to different people with different names in different places.”

Orlov and Adams laughed.

“Are these stories deliberately invented?” asked Peter.

“If you stop to think, Comrade Uldanov,” said Orlov, “you will see that, for propaganda purposes, invented stories have every advantage over real ones. There is no objection to basing a story on a real incident, but even in that case it will almost always be found to require processing. It will have to be changed from the real event to make it more dramatic, or to point a clearer moral. Suppose nothing real happens on a given day, for example, to point a good communist moral? What would you do then, comrade, if you were editor?”

“But what about these stories of workers whose output is five or ten times as great as that of the average worker?” asked Peter. “These are true, aren’t they? You show their pictures, and I have even heard some of them make speeches about their work, and urge their fellow workers on.”

Orlov and Adams laughed again.

“Stop and think a minute, comrade,” said Orlov. “Do you really think it would be possible for a bricklayer, say, to lay ten times as many bricks in a day as the average bricklayer?”

“But why—?” Peter began.

“To point out that some worker laid 35 per cent more bricks than the average would be interesting,” Orlov went on, “but hardly inspiring. Our idea is to make the workers thoroughly ashamed of their present production rate. This is precisely what our system of creating special prodigies does. Stakhanovite heroes, worker giants, we call them. And we also accomplish another purpose. Workers are not likely to think they have a right to express any dissatisfaction with their lot when you make them feel that they are turning out only 10 or 20 per cent of their potential output.”

“But what about B-42? You made a motion picture of him laying bricks. I saw that. It was amazing.”

“B-42 is a professional motion picture actor,” Orlov said. “He never laid a brick in his life.”

“An actor?”

“Of course,” said Orlov. “You don’t suppose that we could get a bricklayer to make as eloquent a production speech as that!”

“But he seemed to know what he was talking about—”

“The whole dialogue was written by professional writers.”

“But I actually saw him laying bricks.”

“Are you sure? When the bricks were actually being laid all you saw was a picture of a man up to the chest. Those pictures were taken of a professional bricklayer dressed up exactly the same. They alternated with pictures of the actor from the chest up. As his voice was going on all the time you thought it must be he laying the bricks.”

“But the bricks were certainly being laid fast.”

“Of course they were. Do you know how long you actually saw bricks being laid in that picture? In three separated takes of less than one minute each. No bricklayer on earth could keep up that speed for more than a few minutes. You don’t really think that he could keep it up for the full ten-hour day?”

“The final thing you ought to tell him,” Adams added, “is that the bricklaying camera shots were taken in fast motion.”

“That picture has had a tremendous effect,” said Orlov solemnly. “Tremendous!”

He explained in detail to Peter how the editorials and news items in the New Truth were printed simultaneously in hundreds of cities and towns throughout Wonworld.

“It is a wonderful and inspiring thing,” he said, “when one thinks that everybody in the world is simultaneously reading the same editorial, imbibing the same views, reaching precisely the same conclusions. What harmony!”

“But why is there, in effect,” Peter asked, “only one newspaper in Wonworld?”

“If there were any other newspaper,” explained Orlov patiently, “and it agreed with the New Truth, it would be unnecessary and superfluous, while if it disagreed, it would be pernicious. Under capitalism, as I understand, there were many competing newspapers. What was the result? Wherever they said substantially the same thing, they were hiring many reporters or editors where they only needed one. That illustrates the enormous wastefulness of competition. Socialism has achieved enormous overhead newspaper economies under unification and mass production.”

“But suppose,” said Peter, “that the old capitalist newspapers reported different things from each other, or expressed different views of them?”

“When they did,” Orlov replied, “the results were even worse. The public became confused and ended by believing none of them.”

Peter was troubled by this logic but could not put his finger on the flaw. “I think we should impress upon Comrade Uldanov,” said Adams, “the vital co-ordinating function of the New Truth.”

“Yes,” said Orlov, “the New Truth is the mouthpiece of Won-world. It is here that the Party members, the Protectors and the people everywhere learn each day what to do and what to think. Of course the major policies are laid down by the Politburo as a whole; I merely carry them out. It is for the Politburo to decide, for example, whether we shall say that the production record is very bad, in order to exhort and sting everyone to greater output; or whether we shall say that it is very good, in order to show how well the regime is doing and to emphasize the blessings of living under it.”

“These decisions are sometimes very difficult,” Adams put in. “We often find that a zigzag course is best. For example, if goods are shoddy and fall apart, or if too many size nine shoes are made and not enough size eight, or if people cannot get enough to eat, there may be grumbling and complaints—or silent dissatisfaction. We must make sure that this unrest does not turn against the regime itself.”

“Therefore,” said Orlov, “we must lead the complaints. We must ourselves pick scapegoats to denounce and punish.”

“This is known,” added Adams, “as communist self-criticism.’*

“It is in the columns of the New Truth Orlov resumed, “that everyone learns what to think of every new book or play.”

“One thing I do not understand, Your Highness,” said Peter. “The government publishes all the books, and would not publish any book that it did not approve. And it puts on all the plays. Yet I sometimes see a very unfavorable review of a book or a play.”

“That might happen for all sorts of reasons,” Orlov explained. “Most high officials do not see a play, for example, until after it has been put on. They may then find it unamusing, or even deviationist. And if the public does not go to see it, we must decide whether we shall denounce the play or denounce the public. And with books, again, the party line may have changed between the time the book was ordered and the day of publication. Or a reviewer—provided he outranks the author or the publisher’s reader who passed on the book—may detect some deviation that escaped the publisher’s eye. All of which,” Orlov concluded, smiling, “explains why we have to change the head of our publishing house so often.”

“Publishing is the most hazardous occupation in Wonworld,”

Adams explained.

“Another important function of the New Truth,” continued Orlov, “is to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains. There must be heroes to inspire the people to greater achievement, greater conformity to the party line, and greater relentlessness in tracking down deviationists; and there must be villains as scapegoats and as examples to be shunned. We on the newspaper decide who they are.”

“But when you decide, for example,” asked Peter, “whether to say that the production of shoes, say, is very good or very bad, or who is responsible for it, why don’t you just find out the real facts and say whatever happens to be the truth?”

Orlov looked bewildered.

Adams came to the rescue. “Comrade Uldanov,” he explained, “has still not yet learned to make the neo-Marxian logic an integral part of his thinking. As I have already pointed out to you”—he turned to Peter—“the truth is whatever belief works successfully; it is whatever statement has the best results. The truth is whatever is good for communism.”