Free The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean Page B

governments,' Jansci! nodded. 'And, of course, the national press that always conditions the thinking of a people. But primarily the governments.'

'We in the west have bad governments, often very bad governments,' Reynolds said slowly. 'They stumble, they miscalculate, they make foolish decisions, they even have their quota of opportunists, careerists and plain downright power-seekers. But all these things are only because they are human. They mean well, they try hard for the good and not even a child fears them.' He looked speculatively at the older man. 'You yourself said recently that the Russian leaders have sent literally millions in the past few years to imprisonment and slavery and death. If, as you say, the peoples are the same, why are the governments so utterly different? Communism is the only answer.'

Jansci shook his head. 'Communism is gone, and gone for ever. today it remains only as a myth, an empty lip-service catchword in the name of which the cynical, ruthless realists of the Kremlin find sufficient excuse and justification for whatever barbarities their policies demand. A few of the old guard still in power may cherish the dream of world communism, but just a few: only a global war could now achieve their aims, and these same hard-headed realists in the Kremlin can see no point or sense or future in pursuing a policy that carries with it the seed of their own destruction. They are essentially businessmen, Mr. Reynolds, and letting off a time-bomb under your own factory is no way to run a business.'

'Their barbarities, their enslavement's and their massacres don't stem from world conquest?" The fractional lift of Reynolds' eyebrows was its own sceptical comment. 'You tell me that?'

'I do.'

'Then from what in the world -- ?'

'From fear, Mr. Reynolds,' Jansci interrupted. 'From an almost terror-stricken fear that has no parallel among governments of modern times.

'They are afraid because the ground lost in leadership is almost irrecoverable: Malenkov's concessions of 1953, Kruschev's famous de-Stalinisation speech of 1956 and his forced decentralisation of all industry were contrary to all the cherished ideas of Communist infallibility and centralised control, but they had to be done, in the interest of efficiency and production -- and the people have smelled Freedom. And they are afraid because their Secret Police has slipped and slipped badly: Beria is dead, the NKVD in Russia are not nearly so feared as the AVO in this country, so the belief in the power of authority, of the inevitability of punishment, has slipped also.

'These fears are of their own people. But these fears are nothing compared to their fears of the outside world. Just before he died, Stalin said, "What will happen without me? You are blind, as young kittens are blind, and Russia will be destroyed because you do not know how to recognise her enemies". Even Stalin couldn't have known how true his words would prove to be. They cannot recognise enemies, and they can only be safe, only feel safe, if all the peoples of the outside world are regarded as enemies. Especially the west. They fear the west and, from their own point of view, they fear with every reason.

'They are afraid of a western world that, they think, is unfriendly and hostile and just waiting its chance. How terrified would you be, Mr. Reynolds if you were ringed, as Russia is ringed, with nuclear bomb bases in England and Europe and North Africa and the Middle East and Japan? How much more terrified would you be if, every time the world tensions increase, fleets of foreign bombers appear mysteriously on the far edge of your long-distance radar screens, if you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that whenever such tensions arise there are, at • any given moment of the day or night anywhere between 500 and 1,000 bombers of the American Strategic Air Command each with its hydrogen bomb, cruising high in the stratosphere, just waiting the signal to converge on Russia and