With almost immeasurable relief, Ludmila realized the world wasn’t going to fall in on her, at least not right away. “I guess I do,” she mumbled, and resolved to watch her tongue more closely in the future.
“In the abstract, I could even agree with you,” Sholudenko said. “As things are-” He spread his hands. That meant that, as far as he was concerned, this conversation was not taking place, and that he would deny anything she attributed to him if the matter came to the attention of an interrogator.
“May I speak-abstractly-too?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. “The constitution of 1936 guarantees free expression to all citizens of the Soviet Union, as any schoolgirl knows.” He spoke without apparent irony, yet his hypothetical schoolgirl had to know also that anyone trying to exercise her free speech (or any of the other rights guaranteed-or entombed-in the constitution) would discover she’d picked a short trip into big trouble.
Somehow, though, she did not think Sholudenko, for all his cynicism, would betray her after giving her leave to speak.
Maybe that was naive on her part, but she’d already said enough to let him ruin her if that was what he had in mind, and so she said, “It’s terrible that our own Soviet government has earned the hatred of so many of its people. Any ruling class will have those who work to betray it, but so many?”
“Terrible, yes,” Sholudenko said. “Surprising, no.” He ticked off points on his fingers like an academician or a political commissar. “Consider, Comrade Pilot: a hundred years ago, Russia was entirely mired in the feudal means of production. Even at the time of the October Revolution, capitalism was far less entrenched here than in Germany or England. Is this not so?”
“It is so,” Ludmila said.
“Very well, then. Consider also the significance of that fact. Suddenly the revolution had occurred-in a world that hated it, a world that would crush it if it could. You are too young to remember the British, the Americans, the Japanese who invaded us, but you wilt have learned of them.”
“Yes, but-”
Sholudenko held up a forefinger. “Let me finish, please. Comrade Stalin saw we would be destroyed if we could not match our enemies in the quantity of goods we turn out. Anything and anyone standing in the way of that had to go. Thus the pact with the Hitlerites: not only did it buy us almost two years’ time, but also land from the Finns, on the Baltic, and from the Poles and Rumanians to serve as a shield when the fascist murderers did attack us.”
All that shield had been lost within a few weeks of the Nazi invasion. Most of the people in the lands the Soviet Union had annexed joined the Hitlerites in casting out the Communist Party, which spoke volumes on how much they’d loved falling under Soviet control.
But did that matter? Sholudenko had a point. Without ruthless preparation, the revolution of the workers and peasants would surely have been crushed by reactionary forces, either during the civil war or at German hands.
“Unquestionably, the Soviet state has the right and duty to survive,” Ludmila said. Sholudenko nodded approvingly. But the pilot went on, “But does the state have a right to survive in such a way as to make so many of its people prefer the vicious Germans to its own representatives?”
If she hadn’t still been shaky from flipping her airplane, she wouldn’t have said anything so foolish to a probable NKVD man, even “abstractly.” She looked around the fields through which they were slogging. No one was in sight. If Sholudenko tried to place her under arrest… well, she carried a 9mm Tokarev pistol in a holster on her belt. The comrade might have a tragic accident. If he did, she’d do her best to get his precious pictures back to the proper authorities.
If he contemplated arresting her, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he said, “You are to be congratulated, Comrade Pilot; this is a question most would not think to pose.” It was a question most would not dare to pose, but that was another matter. Sholudenko went on, “The answer is yes. Surely you have been trained in the historical use of the dialectic?”
“Of course,” Ludmila said indignantly. “Historical progress comes through the conflict of two opposing theses and their resulting synthesis, which eventually generates its own antithesis and causes the struggle to recur.”
“Congratulations again-you are well instructed. We stand in the historical process at the step before true communism. Do you doubt that Marx’s ideal will be fulfilled in our children’s time, or our grandchildren’s at the latest?”
“If we survive, I do not doubt it,” Ludmila said.
“There is that,” Sholudenko agreed, dry as usual. “I believe we should have beaten the Hitlerites in the end. The Lizards are another matter; Party dialecticians still labor to put them into proper perspective. Comrade Stalin has yet to speak definitively on the subject. But that is beside the point-you might have asked the same question had the Lizards never come, da?”
“Yes,” Ludmila admitted, wishing she’d never asked the question at all.
Sholudenko said, “If we abandon the hope of our descendants’ living under true communism, the historical synthesis will show that reactionary forces were stronger than those of progress and revolution. Whatever we do to prevent that is justified, no matter how hard it may be for some at present.”
By everything she’d learned in school, his logic was airtight, however much it went against the grain. She knew she ought to shut up; he’d already shown more patience with her than she had any right to expect. But she said, “What if, in seeking to move the balance our way, we are so harsh that we tilt it against us?”
“This, too, is a risk which must be considered,” he said. “Are you a Party member, Comrade Pilot? You argue most astutely.”
“No,” Ludmila answered. Then, having come so far, she took one step further: “And you, Comrade-could you be from the People’s Commissariat for the Interior?”
“Yes, I could be from the NKVD,” Sholudenko answered evenly. “I could be any number of things, but that one will do.” He studied her. “You needed courage, to ask such a question of me.”
That last step had almost been one step too far, he meant. Picking her words with care, Ludmila said, “Everything that’s happened over the past year and a half-it makes one think about true meanings.”
“This I cannot deny,” Sholudenko said. “But-to get back to matters more important than my individual case-the dialectic makes me believe our cause will triumph in the end, even against the Lizards.”
Faith in the future had kept the Soviets fighting even when things looked blackest, when Moscow seemed about to fall late in 1941. But against the Lizards-“We need more than the dialectic,” Ludmila said. “We need more guns and planes and tanks and rockets, and better ones, too.”
“This is also true,” Sholudenko said. “Yet we also need the half of imperialist invaders, whether from Germany or the depths of space. The dialectic predicts that on the whole we shall have their support.”
Instead of answering, Ludmila stooped by the edge of a little pond that lay alongside the field through which she and Sholudenko were walking. She cupped her hands, scooped up water, and scrubbed mud from her face. She pulled up dead grass and did her best to scrape her leather flying suit clean, too, but that was a bigger job. Eventually the mud there would dry and she could knock most of it off. Till then she’d just have to put up with it. Plenty of foot soldiers had gone through worse.
She straightened up, pointed to the pack on Nikifor Sholudenko’s back. “And for those who choose to ignore the teaching of the dialectic-”
“Da, Comrade Pilot. For those folk, we have people like me.” Sholudenko smiled broadly. His teeth were small and white and even. They reminded Ludmila of a wolf’s fangs just the same.
IX
Mutt Daniels crouched in a foxhole on the edge of Randolph, Illinois, hoping and praying the Lizard bombardment would ease up before it smeared him across the small-town landscape.