14. The Workers’ Paradise

    1. RAH, letter to Nancy and Temple Fielding, 04/24/64.

    2. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.

    3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

    4. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.

    5. Aside from the comments found in “Inside InTourist” and “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth,’” Robert Heinlein rarely commented in detail about their experiences inside the Soviet Union. Nor did either Robert or Virginia Heinlein write contemporaneous letters to friends about the trip. Perhaps they both were overexposed and tired of the topic due to the public speaking done after their return to the United States. However, in a series of letters to the author late in 1999 and into 2000, Virginia Heinlein poured out her recollections. This correspondence, together with some comments to friends over the years, provides most of the available detail about the trip inside the USSR.

    6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 02/28/79.

    7. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79. The expression Mrs. Heinlein used, sedmoi etadz, is not a general Russian term and was probably a localism for sedmoi etazh, meaning seventh floor—apparently the Hotel Ukraine placed English-speaking tourists on its seventh floor.

    8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

    9. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.

  10. Noted in Virginia Heinlein, letter to Mr. Pazan, 09/27/80.

  11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99. Dozens of StereoRealist slides of the May Day 1961 parade are preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  12. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

  13. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

  14. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 6, Side A (March 1? 2000).

  15. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97, at 190.

  16. Powers (1929–77) was tried in a Soviet court in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for espionage. A digital file of his final plea in the trial is available online at www.history.com/speeches/powers-makes-final-plea-before-moscow-court#francis-gary-powers-released-by-soviets (accessed 03/04/2014). Eighteen months later (February 10, 1962), he and an American student were exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge between East and West Berlin for Soviet spy KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher (Rudolf Abel). Although criticized for his handling of the matter, Powers was later absolved of any wrongdoing. He cowrote a book about the incident, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident, published in 1970. While working as a traffic helicopter pilot for a local news station in Los Angeles, he died in a helicopter crash in 1977, age fifty-eight.

  17. David Hartwell recalled from a conversation with the Heinleins that took place “at some point in the 1970s” that they said they were sitting alone in a restaurant when the announcement about the U-2 incident—stressing that the United States was spying on the USSR—was piped in over the music system: “I recall Robert saying that they looked at each other and both stood up and sang the National Anthem. And then left. ‘What else could we have done but that?’ was the way he ended the anecdote.” David Hartwell, e-mail to the author, 06/27/12. Perhaps the Heinleins were summoned to the InTourist office from their meal—or perhaps Heinlein has conflated this with the later incident at which they received the news that the Paris summit had collapsed, infra.

  18. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (9/8/01) Tape B, Side A.

  19. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

  20. Except as otherwise noted, information in this and the following paragraph from RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.

  21. Virginia Heinlein’s expression. Vorkuta, a coal-mining town north of the Arctic Circle, in the Siberian region of Russia, was founded around one of the most “public” of the Gulag installations (Gulag is a Russian acroynm for the phrase “Main Administration of Correction-through-Labor Camps”). Here Mrs. Heinlein means Vorkuta as synecdoche for the entire Gulag system.

  22. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

  23. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.

  24. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.

  25. Virginia Heinlein, letter to “Mr. Pazan,” 09/27/80.

  26. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” in Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97 at 189.

  27. Portion stricken from Heinlein’s original draft of “Appointment in Space,” significantly cut and published in Popular Mechanics Magazine as “All Aboard the Gemini,” September 2, 1962.

  28. Portion stricken from Heinlein’s original draft of “Appointment in Space,” significantly cut and published in Popular Mechanics Magazine as “All Aboard the Gemini,” September 2, 1962.

  29. Lenin had been exiled from Siberia to Switzerland in 1900.

  30. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.

  31. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.

  32. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” in Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97 at 190.

  33. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.

  34. RAH, “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth,’” The American Mercury (October 1960); Expanded Universe (1980). The Virginia Edition vol. xxxi, 375, 377.

  35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 05/27/00.

  36. “Inside InTourist” Heinlein expanded to 8,800 words when he got back to Colorado Springs, but the article never found a commercial publisher. In 1979, Heinlein cut the piece to about 5,000 words for inclusion with “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’” in Expanded Universe. Although in most instances the fullest version of articles were used for the Virginia Edition, Expanded Universe was taken into the series as vol. xxxi, without any changes, as it was found impossible to edit the book or break out its contents because of the surrounding commentary Heinlein wrote. Consequently, the original 8,800-word version has never been published anywhere.

  37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/05/89.

  38. The exact date of the visit to Point Barrow was not recorded, but a newspaper article, Fairbanks Daily News clipping written by Jay K. Kennedy, “Author of Science Fiction Visits Pt. Barrow Region,” Fairbanks Daily News (07/27/60), says simply “returned last week from Scandinavian countries with Wine Alaska Airlines.”

  39. RAH, “A U.S. Citizen Thinks About Canada,” Canada and the World (April 1975).

  40. The exact date of Heinlein’s return to Colorado Springs is not recorded; however, a letter written by Virginia Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame does not mention Heinlein’s presence on August 9, 1960, and Heinlein’s own next letter, also to Lurton Blassingame, is dated August 16, 1960.

  41. RAH, letter to E. E. “Doc” Smith, 08/15/60.

  42. Blassingame was an exception to the general rule, as Heinlein told Walter Minton at a time when Minton, too, was moving into the status of intimate (after a somewhat rocky start to their relationship):

Lurton Blassingame is a special case; he and I are the same age near enough not to matter and we have been partners so very long that we are twin brothers in many ways. I was speaking of where I must look to find new friends to replace, in part, the older mentors I can never replace in full. (RAH, letter to Walter Minton, 12/31/73.)