The Image and the Likeness

by John Scott Campbell

The trip across the Urals and the plains of European Russia retains a nightmare quality in my mind, comparable only with that first night on Yat. Even Baker, who plotted the course, can remember it little better. Now and again we caught glimpses of the dim lights in farms, and once we saw the old moon reflected in the Volga. Much of the low country was covered with ground fog, which reached to Kazu's waist; this, combined with the blackout which had been ordered in every town, made observation by us or the Russians either way difficult. A few people saw Kazu, and their reports reflect a surrealist madness; those who had the horrifying experience of suddenly meeting Buddha in the early morning mists were universally incapable of making any coherent report to the authorities.

And then, just as the ghostly false dawn turned the night into a misty gray, we saw ahead the towers of Moscow. Now Kazu increased his speed. Concealment was no longer possible; he must reach the Kremlin ahead of the warning.

At 500 miles per hour Buddha descended upon Moscow. His plunging feet reduced block after block of stores and apartment houses to dust, and the sky behind us was lighted more brightly by the fires he started than by the dull red of the still unrisen sun. Now at last I heard the tardy wail of a siren and saw armored cars darting through the streets. On the roof of an apartment house I glimpsed a crew trying to unlimber an antiaircraft gun, but Kazu saw it also, and smashed the building to rubble with a passing kick.

And then we were at the Red Square. St. Basil's at one end, the fifty foot stone walls of the Kremlin along one side and Lenin's Tomb like a pile of red children's blocks. Kazu stood for a moment surveying this famous scene, his feet sunk to the ankle in a collapsed subway. It was my first view of the Red Square, and somehow I knew that it would be the last, for anyone. Then Kazu slowly walked to the Kremlin and looked down into it. I remember how suddenly absurd it all seemed. The Kremlin walls, the very symbol of the iron curtain, were scarcely six inches high! The whole thing was only a child's playpen.

But now Kazu had found what he wanted. Without bothering to lift his feet, he crushed through the walls, reached down and pulled the roof from one of the buildings. He uncovered a brightly lighted ant-hill. Like a dollhouse exposed, he revealed rooms and corridors along which men were running. Kazu dropped to his knees and held our box up so that we might also see.

"Are these the men?" he asked. Baker replied in the negative.

Kazu abruptly pressed his hand into the building, crushing masonry and timbers and humans all into a heap of dust, and turned to a larger building. As he did, something about it seemed familiar to me. Yes, I had seen it before, in newsreels. It was—

But again Kazu's fingers were at work. Lifting at the eaves, he carefully took off the whole roof. Through a window we saw figures hurrying toward a covered bridge connecting this building with another. At Baker's warning, Kazu demolished the bridge, and then gently began picking the structure to pieces. In a moment we saw what we were after. A wall was pulled down, exposing a great room with oil paintings of Lenin and Stalin on the wall and a long conference table in the center. And clustered between the table and the far wall were a score of men. Anyone would have recognized them, for their faces had gone round the world in posters, magazines and newsreels. They were the men of the Politbureau. They were Red Russia's rulers.

There was an instant of silent mutual recognition, and then Kazu spoke to them. As befitting a god, he spoke in their own tongue. Exactly what he said I do not know, but after a little hesitation they came around the table to the precarious edge of the room where the outer wall had been. Kazu gave further directions and held up our steel box. Fearfully they came forward and jumped the gap into our door. One by one they made the leap, some dressed in the bemedalled uniforms of marshals, others in the semi-military tunics affected by civilian ministers. The last was the man who had succeeded Stalin on his death, and who had taken for himself the same name, as though it were a title.

As he entered our room, we saw that he even looked like the first Stalin, clipped hair, moustache and all. He was a brilliant man, we knew. Brilliant and ruthless. He had grown up through the purges, in a world which knew no mercy, where only the fittest, by communist standards, survived. He had survived, because he was merciless and efficient and because he hated the free west with a hatred that was deadly and implacable.