I began to listen for that knock on the door, the one you read about in Darkness at Noon, the knock that means your next address may be Vorkuta or Karaganda. The address doesn't matter. You are never, never going to receive mail.
My fears were not groundless. I'd read Philip Wylie's The Innocent Ambassadors and I knew what had happened to his brother. I vividly recalled Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom.
The knock never came because the political climate engendered by the new Pravda was "more - in - sorrow than - in - anger." The next morning, May 6, we were again ordered to report to the Director's office. We had decided to brazen it out. We refused to go. Presently, we were allowed to catch a plane for Tashkent.
Pravda lasted 12 days, until K. shattered the Summit and revealed a new Pravda.
We arrived in Leningrad just as the news reached there that the Summit had failed and that President Eisenhower had cancelled his proposed trip to the USSR and that Khrushchev was returning to Moscow via East Berlin.
The climate suddenly turned very chilly.
A month earlier, in Moscow, we had been picked up by two Russians the very first time we went out on the street. One was a technical translator; the other, a lady, was a museum curator. They were very friendly and stayed with us almost three hours, asking questions about the U.S. and inviting questions about the Soviet Union. This happened to us daily thereafter; we were always making casual acquaintance with Soviet citizens, on the Street, in parks, in restaurants, during intermissions at the theatre, everywhere. They were always curious about America, very friendly and extremely polite. This attitude on the part of individual Soviet citizens toward individual Americans continued throughout the first Pravda, ending May 6. It lessened slightly during the "more - in - sorrow" second Pravda.
K's Paris news conference set up a new Pravda. From the time we reached Leningrad until we left for Helsinki, Finland, not one Soviet citizen other than Intourist employees - who had to deal with us professionally - spoke to us under any circumstances. Not one.
In dealing with Intourist it is always difficult to tell whether one's frustrations arise from horrendous red tape or from intentional obstructionism. In Leningrad it at once became clear that Intourist now just did not want to give service. Even the porter who took up our bags made trouble.
Our first afternoon we were scheduled to visit the Hermitage, one of the world's great art museums. The tour had been set with Intourist for that particular afternoon before we left the States.
At the appointed time our guide (you have to have one) had not arranged for a car. After awhile it whisked up and the guide said, "Now we will visit the stadium."
We said that we wanted to visit the Hermitage, as scheduled. The guide told us that the Hermitage was closed. We asked to be taken to another museum (Leningrad has many). We explained that we were not interested in seeing another stadium.
We visited the stadium.
That is all Intourist permitted us to see that afternoon.
When we got back to the hotel we found someone in our room, as always in Leningrad. Since maid service in Intourist hotels varies from non - existent to very ubiquitous we did not at once conclude that we were being intentionally inconvenienced. But one afternoon we found six men in our room, busy tearing out all the pipes and the question of intent became academic. A hotel room with its plumbing torn up and its floor littered with pipes and bits of wood and plaster is only slightly better than no hotel room at all.
We went to the ballet once in Leningrad. Intermissions are very long in Soviet theatres, about half an hour, and on earlier occasions these had been our most fruitful opportunity for meeting Russians.
Not now, not after K's Paris Pravda. No one spoke to us. No Russian would even meet our eyes as we strolled past. The only personal attention we received that evening at the ballet was an unmistakably intentional elbow jab in the ribs from a Russian major in uniform. Be - Kind - To - Americans Week had adjourned, sine die.
How can the attitudes of 200 million people be switched on and off like a light bulb? How can one set of facts be made to produce three widely differing Pravda’s? By complete control of all communications from the cradle to the grave.
Almost all Soviet women work. Their babies are placed in kindergartens at an average age of 57 days, so we were told, and what we saw supported the allegation. We visited several kindergartens, on collective farms and in factories. By the posted schedules, these babies spend 131/2 hours each day in kindergarten - they are with their mothers for perhaps an hour before bedtime.
At the Forty - Years - Of - October Collective Farm outside Alma Ata some of the older children in one of the kindergartens put on a little show for us. One little girl recited a poem. A little boy gave a prose recitation. The entire group sang. The children were clean and neat, healthy and happy. Our guide translated nothing so, superficially, it was the sort of beguiling performance one sees any day in any American kindergarten.
However, my wife understands Russian:
The poem recounted the life of Lenin.
The prose recitation concerned the Seven - Year Plan.
The group singing was about how "we must protect our Revolution."
These tots were no older than six.
That is how it is done. Starting at the cradle, never let them hear anything but the official version. Thus "Pravda" becomes "truth" to the Russian children.
What does this sort of training mean to a person when he is old enough, presumably, to think for himself? We were waiting in the Kiev airport, May 14. The weather was foul, planes were late and some 30 foreigners were in the Intourist waiting room. One of them asked where we were going and my wife answered that we were flying to Vilno.
Vilno? Where is that? My wife answered that it was the capital of Lithuania, one of the formerly independent Baltic republics which the USSR took over 20 years ago - a simple historic truth, as indisputable as the fact of the Invasion of Normandy or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But the truth is not Pravda.
A young Intourist guide present understood English, and she immediately interrupted my wife, flatly contradicted her and asserted that Lithuania had always been part of the Soviet Union.
The only result was noise and anger. There was no possibility of changing this young woman's belief. She was telling the Pravda the way she had been taught it in school and that was that. She had probably been about three when this international rape occurred. She had no personal memory of the period. She had never been to Vilno, although it is less than 400 miles from Kiev. (Soviet people do not travel much. With few exceptions the roads are terrible and the railroads are scarce. Russians are required to use internal passports, secure internal visas for each city they visit and travel by Intourist, just like a foreigner. Thus, traveling for pleasure, other than to designated vacation spots on the Black Sea, is almost unheard of.)
In disputing the official Pravda we were simply malicious liars and she made it clear that she so considered us.
About noon on Sunday, May 15, we were walking downhill through the park surrounding the castle that dominates Vilno. We encountered a group of six or eight Red Army cadets. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Vilno. Almost no tourists go there. So they stopped and we chatted, myself through our guide and my wife directly, in Russian.
Shortly one of the cadets asked us what we thought of their new manned rocket. We answered that we had had no news lately - what was it and when did it happen? He told us, with the other cadets listening and agreeing, that the rocket had gone up that very day, and at that very moment a Russian astronaut was in orbit around the earth - and what did we think of that?