The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny agreed. ‘But I don’t like to say the Soviets either’, he added, ‘because there are no more Soviets; they have become a farce’.

  ‘Say the Stalinists or the Communists or the Reds’, replied Shub. ‘There are perhaps five million of these in Russia, and there are a hundred and seventy-five million of the common people. Say that we are the friends of those common people and are trying to help them. Nothing frightens the Reds so much or makes them so angry; they are sitting on a volcano, and they know it’.

  Very certainly they were not winning the Germans; the free world was winning them! They came day and night from the East sector to visit R.I.A.S. and thank its staff; they telephoned or wrote—a hundred letters a day. Out of that came a spy service which could not have been equalled for a million dollars. People would tell what was going on in the departments of which they had knowledge. They would expose the plans of the self-appointed cold-war enemy; and so the gleeful announcers of R.I.A.S. would be able to warn their public in advance, ‘Be careful if you are travelling on the express from Dresden. The trains are being thoroughly searched, and all passengers must have the proper papers’. Or they would say, ‘There are three spies working for the Communists in the Brehn Chemical Works. We will give their names, listen carefully now’, and they would give the names. This had become a regular department, known as the Spitzeldienst, the spy service.

  X

  So Herr Fröhlich gave his first broadcast along that line. He said that he was speaking for the American people to the people of Germany and to those of Russia as well. He had been travelling back and forth among these people and those of France and England all his life, and he could testify that none of them wanted war, and few of them ever had, even while being forced to live through and fight the two most terrible wars of history. He told of his visits to Germany as a boy, how he had danced in the Dalcroze School at Hellerau, and had visited in a castle in Upper Silesia, and had met kind people, happy people, who wanted only peace.

  To be sure, the German workers had wanted social changes, but they were prepared to bring these about by democratic means, and they were on the verge of winning an election and carrying out their programme in an orderly way. But the Kaiser, the War Lord, had not been willing for these changes to come, and it was he who had sounded the war drums and led Germany into an attack upon her neighbours. Always it was the dictators, the men of violence, the men who could not let other people be free but were determined to force them to live their way, to take their orders, to give up their territories and their freedoms—these were the people who made the wars.

  And then had come Hitler, the man of fanatical nationalism, who had taught a whole generation of German youth to hate and fear other peoples and to find their glory in forcing other peoples to submit to his will. First he had seized a part of Czechoslovakia, and then he had made a deal with Stalin to divide up Poland, and so had come another world war. And before that had been going on very long Hitler had turned upon his ally and proceeded to conquer and seize the Russian land.

  ‘Did the German people want to conquer the Russian people?’ asked Herr Fröhlich. ‘Or did the Russian people want to conquer the Germans? Of course not; they were bewildered by the events, they were as helpless as people caught in a whirlwind. These dictators led them, they told them lies about the other peoples and filled them with fear. In a few months the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour, and so the Americans were in the war. I can testify because I was there: the American people do not want war and did not want to be in that war; they were forced into it because they were attacked. Hitler had made some kind of deal with Japan, and so when Japan attacked us he declared war upon us also.

  ‘It happened that during that war I was flown into Russia and spent some time in Kuibyshev and Moscow. I had a chance to meet and know hundreds of Russians. They became my friends. They were warm-hearted people, generous and kind. They did not hate me, they did not fear me. We were Allies and we were friends—spontaneous, natural friends. But now six years have passed, and see what has happened! A dictator has changed his mind again. He got eleven billion dollars’ worth of help from America and together we put down Hitler. We were still willing to give him help; we offered him Marshall Plan aid, we offered it to Czechoslovakia and the other conquered states which he holds; but the dictator says no, we are enemies now, and he shuts down the iron curtain between us and declares cold war upon us’.

  Herr Fröhlich went on to discuss this strange modern invention. The Kremlin master ordered all his propaganda machinery to tell lies about the Americans, to make the Russian people hate them. Here in the British sector he had the great Radio Berlin, and from it, day and night, he poured out a stream of falsehoods about Americans and what they were doing at home and here in Germany.

  ‘It seems like a tale out of a madhouse, but it is a true tale. We have had to set up our own radio station to tell both the German people and the Russian people that we are not lackeys of Wall Street and warmongers, but believers in democracy and defenders of the right of all the peoples of the earth to have their own ideas and their own way of life, to be free to think their own thoughts and teach their own ideas, political, economic, and religious, and govern themselves according to the will of the majority, and not to be invaded—so long as they do not invade their neighbours but help to keep the peace of the world.

  ‘The free peoples of the world have set up the United Nations and pledged themselves to come to it and settle their problems democratically and co-operatively. The big nations and the little nations, the rich nations and the poor nations, all are equal in the sight of the law. But the Soviets come to the meetings of the United Nations only to make their false propaganda and to obstruct the proceedings. By the power of the veto they are able to forbid anything the other nations want to do, and so far they have used that veto some twenty-five times. We Americans would like nothing better than to see a united and democratic Germany a member of that international parliament and forum; but you who hear me know that the Soviets will never permit that, for they are determined to make a slave Germany under their system of dictatorship, and if they cannot make a completely united Germany of that sort, then they will make a half-Germany of that sort, and will proceed to blockade and starve the other half into submission if they can’.

  Such was the substance of Lanny’s talk, and when he finished a male quartet sang ‘Lili Marlene’, the favourite song of the German troops in the recent war. It was a song of love and longing, and the British had taken it up; before the war was over it had become the favourite of all the armies. It meant to them all that they were tired of war and wanted to get back home to their girls.

  XI

  Two evenings later the Soviet station, Radio Berlin, presented an answer, by none other than the great propagandist of the Soviet Union, Ilya Ehrenburg. For years he had fought Hitler with fury, and now he was fighting Truman and all Truman’s agents.

  ‘Who is this crocodile?’ he demanded. ‘This crocodile who pours his tears over the German people and spits his venom in the direction of our Soviet Fatherland! I will tell you exactly who he is. His name is Lanny Budd, and he is the son of one of the greatest merchants of death in capitalistic America. Before and during the First World War this Robert Budd was the European representative of Budd Gunmakers, and he sold tens of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of guns and cannons to Germany and Britain and France, all with perfect impartiality. During the Second World War he was the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft, and he made and sold I know not how many billions of dollars’ worth of murderous aeroplanes to the American government. Before the war he sold them to the German and the Japanese governments. His hands are stained impartially with the blood of Europeans and Asiatics. To this international slaughterer all human cattle look alike.

  ‘And now comes the son of this capitalistic exploiter, this Wall Street cannibal. The son was born with a gold spoon in his mouth and the t
aste of blood. During the war he came to Russia, and he admits that he was received with hospitality. He came posing as a friend and an ally—and how does he treat his host? A rich American woman left him a million dollars to be spent in the cause of establishing and maintaining world peace. He has set up a radio station near New York, and by cunning dissimulation, by pretence of genuine love of humanity, he wins a large audience—and then what does he do to that audience? He does the same thing that he is doing to the German and the Russian people. He is the Judas goat who leads the helpless sheep into the slaughter pen. He reveals himself as the true son of his father, doing everything in his power to bring on a third world war in order that his father may be able to gather in more millions of filthy dollars. He comes here to Berlin, and the bloodthirsty warmonger of R.I.A.S. spread his insolent provocations over all Germany’.

  So it was that the cold war was waged. It made Lanny sad, and he thought it over and learned several things from it. One was the futility of calling names; he decided that when he came to answer Comrade Ehrenburg he would be calm and would deal with facts. The Germans had had the very foundation of their thinking blasted from under them; they didn’t know what had been going on in the world during the years of Hitlerism and war, and they had a hard time finding out what was going on now. Lanny went to the Information office of A.M.G. and got the figures as to the number of troops the American Army had had in Germany at the close of the war and the number they had sent home when it ended. That showed whether or not America wanted another war in Europe. Would Mr. Ehrenburg give the same figures with regard to the disbandment of Russian armies? Of course Mr. Ehrenburg couldn’t and wouldn’t; he would have been shot if he had tried.

  And then those twenty-five vetoes in the Security Council of the United Nations. They had all been vetoes of proposals made or approved by the government of the United States. And what were the proposals? They were for real disarmament, guaranteed by international inspection; they were for free elections and the democratic process in one small nation after another; and in each case Mr. Gromyko or Mr. Malik or Mr. Molotov or Mr. Vishinsky had ridiculed and refused the proposal. With the Reds it was rule or ruin—everywhere, all over the world.

  That was the way to answer the Red propagandists—with facts, facts, facts!

  24 MAN’S UNCONQUERABLE MIND

  I

  While lanny was busy with these matters there came the Kasenkina case in New York. Oksana Kasenkina was a teacher in the school maintained for the children of officials in the Soviet Consulate-General. This school was housed in a brownstone mansion in one of the fashionable residential districts. The teacher couldn’t very well be kept indoors all the time, so she went out and walked on the streets and observed the sights of a great capitalist city. She discovered that she could buy for a few dollars a pair of shoes which would have taken a Russian worker a month’s labour to earn. She saw many things that pleased her, but she could not come back to the Consulate and chat about them with anybody—that is unless she said the opposite of what she thought.

  The school was a miniature Soviet—which is to say, it was a petty despotism ruled by a dictator, with frightened people spying upon one another and full of malice and suspicion. Oksana had lost track of her husband and her son and was a pitiful neurotic person. Outside the school she met an elderly, white-haired Russian named Zenzinov, who had been one of the old-time fighters against Tsardom. He had belonged to the Social Revolutionary party and had been exiled three times to Siberia; three times he had escaped, once by way of Japan.

  Each time he came back to his native land, and he was one of those who made the revolution. They made Russia free—but only for a few months. The Bolsheviks seized power, put down the revolution, made themselves the masters—and Russia was in servitude again. Zenzinov fled once more and wandered first over Europe and then over America. He was one of those men to whom revolution had become a basic instinct; he lived in one furnished room in New York, and whenever he could earn enough money he printed a few copies of a little paper which he called For Freedom.

  This old man explained to the teacher in the Soviet Consulate how the revolution had been betrayed and destroyed. But she had to hide this secret in her heart and go on telling the children that their country was free and that Stalin was the great hero and emancipator. Soon she could not endure it any more, and she accepted Zenzinov’s suggestion to seek refuge on a farm up the Hudson River near Nyack, which belonged to a daughter of the great Leo Tolstoy and sheltered a group called the Tolstoy Foundation. Alexandra Tolstoy had been the count’s favourite daughter; she had stood by him through all his tribulations and now was trying to preserve and promote his Christian-pacifist ideas.

  The news of this flight to freedom was at once cabled to Moscow, and Foreign Minister Molotov, that iron-faced man who apparently never had an emotion, suddenly lost his head and handed to the American ambassador for transmission to Washington a note in which he charged that Kasenkina had been ‘kidnapped by the White Guard Zenzinov and taken to a farm which belongs to a White Guard gangster organisation masquerading under the name of the Tolstoy Foundation’. The gangsters on this farm had ‘attempted by force to prevent Kasenkina from leaving’. Molotov went on to demand her immediate return to the Consulate-General in New York, ‘as well as the punishment of all persons who have taken part in the kidnapping of Soviet citizens.’

  Kasenkina, alas, wasn’t happy in the new home. A hundred refugees, lonely and idle, were not the best of company, and she was tormented by the idea that her husband and son might still be living and would be punished for her desertion. She wrote to the Consulate, begging forgiveness, and the consul drove up in haste; he promised her forgiveness for the mistake she had made. Finally she yielded and let him take her back to the Consulate.

  Once there, of course, she found that she was a prisoner and was going to be sent back to Russia. It would mean torture; she would be forced to reveal the names of everyone she had met and who had influenced her, and after that they would shoot her in the back of the neck or send her to a worse fate in a slave-labour camp. In her frenzy the woman threw herself out of a third-storey window of the Consulate and crashed upon the concrete area in front of the building. The case had become known to the newspapers, and court proceedings had been started to set the woman free; so there was a crowd in front of the Consulate. When the area gate was opened and servants started to drag the woman inside, the crowd interfered, police and an ambulance were summoned, and the badly injured Oksana was carried to a hospital.

  That, of course, made a tremendous sensation. Most Americans realised by now that the Communists used torture and that people do not throw themselves from third-storey windows for fun. Certainly all newspaper reporters realised it, and the story took the front pages. The consul gave out the statement that the woman was deranged, and he rushed to the hospital to try to interview her, but the hospital authorities would not let him in.

  II

  So here was an international scandal, and it made the front page of important newspapers all over the world. Needless to say, it took the front page of the Neue Zeitung, which A.M.G. was publishing in West Germany, and R.I.A.S. took it up. As it happened, Boris Shub knew Zenzinov, and in West Berlin there were Russian refugees who knew him even better. Molotov called him a ‘White Guard gangster’—the term White Guard being the name for those Army officers who had fought in various parts of Russia against the revolution and on behalf of Tsardom. The Bolsheviks had taken it up as a term of abuse for anyone who opposed them, and so it became as meaningless as when they called Robbie Budd a ‘crocodile’ and Lanny a ‘cannibal’.

  ‘Molotov is seeing ghosts!’ exclaimed one of the refugee Russians. A group of them went to work and overnight produced a dramatic dialogue in which four ‘Voices’ discussed the case and brought out its significant points. So the Germans, and many Russians also, listened to a ‘thriller’ that happened to be exactly true. One of these voices asked the question, �
��When a Soviet citizen in Moscow or anywhere else falls or jumps out of a window, do you suppose that the whole machinery of state from the smallest vice-consul to the protesting Foreign Minister is immediately set in motion?’

  ‘I cannot believe it’, replied the second voice. ‘They are cool materialists with a precise scientific method, deciding everything through clear objective laws’.

  Third voice: ‘And all of a sudden the Kremlin hums like a beehive. What can have impelled the cold Molotov to act so differently? You all know too little of the Russian Revolution. There was once a time when every man in Russia could speak and think as he pleased. The Soviet wasn’t in Bolshevik hands then—that was still in the springtime of the revolution, when every simple worker or sailor could talk to his fellow man. Students, officers, workers, women, stream through the streets of Petrograd, singing the “Marseillaise” in Russian. The headquarters of the Tsarist secret police is in flames! The prison doors spring open, people like Zenzinov and Molotov breathe the air of the Petrograd spring. In these days, Zenzinov and Molotov are elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Both of them sit there, one a Socialist, the other a Bolshevik, together with other revolutionists’.

  Fourth voice: ‘And where are these men today?’

  Third voice: ‘Yes, where are these men today? With the exception of Molotov and Zenzinov, probably all dead. Molotov lives in the Kremlin, Zenzinov in a small room in New York, and behind them lies a past which to this day conceals the martyrdom of honest Socialists who will one day be resurrected—Socialists of the spring of 1917, the only time the Russian people experienced the intoxication of liberation and freedom. All the goals for which revolutions are made seemed to be attained. In those days Lenin himself wrote, “Russia is now the freest country in the world”. Yes, that was the time, from March to November, 1917. And the men in Soviet Russia who remain silent about it are as little able to forget that time as the few abroad who fight that it shall not be forgotten’.