Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“A distinct point,” Sholudenko admitted. Without a backwards glance at the U-2, he started north across the fields.

Ludmila glumly tramped after him. She asked, “Do you have access to a radio yourself? Can you transmit the information that way?”

“Some, at need. Not all.” He patted the pack on his back. “The rest is photographs.” He paused, the first sign of uncertainty he’d shown. Wondering whether to tell me anything, Ludmila realized. At length he said, “Does the name Stepan Bandera mean anything to you?”

“The Ukrainian collaborator and nationalist? Yes, but nothing good.” During the throes of the Soviet Revolution, the Ukraine had briefly been independent of Moscow and Leningrad. Bandera wanted to bring back those days. He was one of the Ukrainians who’d greeted the Nazis with open arms, only to have them throw him in jail a few months later. No one loves a traitor, Ludmila thought. You may use him if that proves convenient, but no one loves him.

“I know of nothing good to hear,” Sholudenko said. “When the Lizards came, the Nazis set him free to promote solidarity between the workers and peasants of the occupied Ukraine and their German masters. He paid them back for their treatment of him, but not in a way to gladden our hearts?”

Ludmila needed a few seconds to work through the implications of that. “He is collaborating with the Lizards?”

“He and most of the Banderists.” Sholudenko spat on the ground to show what he thought of that. “They have a Committee of Ukrainian Liberation that has given our patriotic partisan bands a good deal of grief lately.”

“What is the rodina, the motherland, coming to?” Ludmila said plaintively. “First we had to deal with those who would sooner have seen the Germans enslave our people than live under our Soviet government, and now the Banderists prefer the imperialist aliens to the Soviet Union and the Germans. Something must be dreadfully wrong, to make the people hate government so.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she wished she had them back again. She did not know this Nikifor Sholudenko from a hole in the ground. Yes, he dressed like a peasant, but for all she knew, he might be NKVD. In fact, he probably was NKVD, if he had pictures of Banderists in his knapsack. And she’d just criticized the Soviet government in front of him.

Had she been so foolish in 1937, she’d likely have disappeared off the face of the earth. Even in the best of times, she’d have worried about a show trial (or no trial) and a stretch of years in the gulag. She suspected the Soviet prison camp system still functioned at undiminished efficiency; most of it was in the far north, where Lizard control did not reach.

Sholudenko murmured, “You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?”

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 ?”