Time Will Run Back Read Free Page A

principle of their system, but because it would mean the restoration of individual liberty and the end of their despotic power. So I confess that the hope that some day an idealistic Peter Uldanov, miraculously finding himself at the pinnacle of power, will voluntarily restore the right of property, is a dream likely to be fulfilled only in fiction. But it is certainly not altogether idle to hope that, with a growth of economic understanding among their own people, the hands of the Communist dictators may some day be forced, more violently than Lenin’s were when the mutiny at Kronstadt, though suppressed, forced him to adopt the New Economic Policy.
    Yet any attempt to decentralize planning while retaining centralized ownership or control is doomed to failure. As a recent writer 4 explains it:
    “If the state owns or controls the major resources of the economy, to allow for local autonomy in their utilization invites utter chaos. The Soviet planners, then, are caught on the horns of a serious dilemma. They find that their economy is becoming too complex and diverse to control minutely from above; yet they cannot really achieve the tremendous productiveness of a decentralized economy without relinquishing complete ownership or control of the nation’s resources.”
    Henry Hazlitt
    March, 1966.

PART ONE: LOST
Chapter 1
    PETER ULDANOV had been waiting half an hour. He walked to the window and looked down to the streets thirty stories below, and then his glance wandered higher to the drab buildings opposite, and out over the city, until everything melted into a misty horizon.
    It was a picture of unrelieved shabbiness.
    So this was Moscow! This was the capital of Won world!
    This building itself was new, towering and shiny black. He had caught a moment’s outside glimpse of it when he had entered from the taxi. But from his present point of outlook he could see nothing with the slightest charm or interest, nothing even clean and fresh-looking.
    It was Peter’s first day in Moscow since early childhood.
    Since the age of eight he had spent his years, isolated with his mother and a handful of servants and instructors, on a small island in the Bermudas. A vivid picture of the white house with its white roof, and of the incredibly blue sea just beyond his garden, now came between him and the sordid actuality below.
    Why had his father sent for him? He had not seen him since childhood. He remembered only a dark, towering man from whom he had shrunk in terror.
    His father was Dictator of Wonworld, ruler of all the peoples of the earth. The fact would have given Peter himself a tremendous distinction if it had ever been a matter of common knowledge. He took a secret pride in it, overlaid by the hatred and fear which he had caught from his mother. It was a fact, also, that threatened the chief desire of his life—to be let alone, and to work in peace at his music.
    What could his father want of him now, after ten long years of silence?
    He turned and looked idly at the room in which he stood waiting. The single object on the wall was a large day calendar. Leninsday, April 30, 282 A.M.
    A.M : After Marx. Marx was born, under the old, bourgeois calendar, in 1818. If no change had been made in the calendar it would now be the bourgeois year 2100. It had never occurred to Peter to make the calculation. No one was interested in the old, poisonous capitalist world that had been wiped out more than a century ago.
    Stalenin’s private secretary, Sergei, entered at last: “His Supremacy will see you now.” Peter followed through an office which he assumed to be the private secretary’s own, and then into an immense paneled room.
    Behind a great desk in the far left-hand corner sat Stalenin, Dictator of Wonworld. It now occurred only as a second thought to Peter that this was his father.
    The secretary bowed himself out.
    The Dictator stood up, and came forward. He was grayer and more tired-looking than in his pictures, which had not