Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [64]
Except that the State said that there were no gods.
Men, then—and women. Everyone knew about the Sparrow School, about which the men often spoke with twisty grins and winking eyes. Ah, to be an instructor or, better still, a quality-assurance officer there! they dreamed. And to be paid for it. As his Irina often noted, all men were pigs. But, Zaitzev mused, it could be fun to be a pig.
Kill the Pope—why? He was no threat to this country. Stalin himself had once joked, How many divisions does the Pope have? So why kill the man? Even the rezident warned against it. Goderenko feared the political repercussions. Stalin had ordered Trotsky killed, and had dispatched a KGB officer to do it, knowing that he'd suffer long-term imprisonment for the task. But he'd done it, faithful to the Will of the Party, in a professional gesture that they talked about in the academy training classes—along with the more casual advice that we really don't do that sort of thing anymore. It was not, the instructors didn't add, kulturniy. And so, yes, KGB was drifting away from that sort of behavior.
Until now. Until today. And even our senior rezident is advising against it. Why? Because he doesn't want himself and his agency—and his country!—to be so nekulturniy?
Or because to do so would be worse than foolish? It would be wrong…? "Wrong" was a concept foreign to citizens in the Soviet Union. At least, what people perceived as things that were morally wrong. Morality in his country had been replaced by what was politically correct or incorrect. Whatever served the interests of his country's political system was worthy of praise. That which did not was worthy of… death?
And who decided such things?
Men did.
Men did because there was no morality, as the world understood the term. There was no God to pronounce what was good and what was evil.
And yet…
And yet, in the heart of every man was an inborn knowledge of right and wrong. To kill another man was wrong. To take a man's life you had to have a just cause. But it was also men who decided what constituted such cause. The right men in the right place with the right authority had the ability and the right to kill because—why?
Because Marx and Lenin said so.
That was what the government of his country had long since decided.
Zaitzev buttered his last piece of bread and dipped it in the remaining gravy in his bowl before eating it. He knew he was thinking overly deep, even dangerous, thoughts. His parent society did not encourage or even permit independent thinking. You were not supposed to question the Party and its wisdom. Certainly not here. In the KGB cafeteria, you never, ever, not even once heard someone wonder aloud if the Party and the Motherland it served and protected were even capable of doing an incorrect act. Oh, maybe once in a while, people speculated on tactics, but even then the talk was within limits that were taller and stronger than the Kremlin's own brick walls.
His country's morality, he mused, had been predetermined by a German Jew living in London, and the son of a czarist bureaucrat who simply hadn't liked the czar much and whose overly adventurous brother had been executed for taking direct action. That man had found shelter in that most capitalistic of nations, Switzerland, then had been dispatched back to Mother Russia by the Germans in the hope that he could upset the czar's government, allowing Germany then to defeat the other Western nations on the Western Front of the First World War. All in all, it didn't sound like something ordained by any deity for some great plan for human advancement,