Grant and I were once walking by a group of children when a small boy pointed at us and remarked, “Ah, there go some of the dying race.” To them all Amerikanski were capitalists.
The Marxian ideology had been applied to every phase of life. H.G., accompanied by Gyp, his biologist son, had flown over from London. Since he wanted an opportunity to go around alone, he rather resented being so closely guarded and courteously guided. After talking with Stalin he had come to the conclusion that the Dictator had no understanding of economics. He was somewhat annoyed at the constant interpretation of everything in terms of politics, and of having Marx stuffed down his throat at every turn.
At the schools you might ask what kind of mathematics they taught.
“Marx.”
“And what system of engineering?”
“Marx.”
No matter what the question, the answer was Marx.
The Anti-Religious Museum, once a cathedral, was directly across from the Astoria. Each half-hour little girls, who seemed hardly more than ten or twelve, their sleeves hanging down over their finger tips, with great dignity conducted excursions of peasants through. Their lecture started with the fundamental principle that the earth was round. A bas-relief of the world was underneath the huge pendulum which hung from the dome. If you stood there long enough you saw it swing from one point to a further one. They were trying to show that it was within man’s power to make his own heaven.
Here were kept the relics of the churches, the icons laden with silver and gold wrung from the poor peasants in the past. Actual concrete things were reduced to their simplest terms on large poster-type murals which depicted stories, a necessary practice since the muzhiks were so generally illiterate. In one a kulak was coming to the priest with a sick child in his arms, asking for prayers to cure its illness. The priest, fat and clad in rich robes, shook his head, saying, “You must bring money for the saint. The saint will not cure your child unless her arms are covered with silver.” But the kulak had only his farm. “Mortgage it and get the money,” the priest ordered. Soon the kulak returned with silver, and the mural showed how now the saint’s arm was almost hidden. But still the child remained sick. “The saint’s halo is bare,” said the priest. At last the whole figure was silvered, but the baby died just the same.
Opposite this mural was pictured the Soviet way. The father carried the baby to the hospital, where nurses with gauze across their mouths took it preciously, bathed it carefully, laid it in bed. The entire sterilizing process was illustrated—the doctor in white gown and cap, scrubbing and washing each hand five minutes as marked by a clock. Finally you saw the child, healthy and well, jumping into its mother’s arms.