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The Anaconda Project, Episode Two

Written by Eric Flint

Chapter 2

“You look tired, Melissa,” said Judith Roth sympathetically. She gestured to a luxurious divan in the great salon of the Roth mansion. “Please, have a seat.”

Melissa Mailey went over to the divan, hobbling a little from the effects of the ten-day journey from Grantville, and plopped herself down. Her companion James Nichols remained standing, after giving the couch no more than a quick glance. Instead, his hands on his hips, he swiveled slowly and considered the entire room.

Then, whistled admiringly. “Well, you’ve certainly come up in the world, folks.”

Judith smiled. Her husband Morris looked somewhat embarrassed. “Hey, look,” he said, “it wasn’t really my idea.”

“That’s it,” scoffed his wife. “Blame the woman.”

The defensive expression on Morris’ face deepened. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just . . .”

The gesture that accompanied the last two words was about as feeble as the words themselves.

“The situation,” he concluded lamely.

Nichols grinned at him. “Jeez, Morris, relax. I understand the realities. What with you being not only one of the King of Bohemia’s closest advisers but also what amounts to the informal secular prince of Prague’s Jewry. Half the Jews in eastern Europe, actually, from what Balthazar Abrabanel told us.”

Looking a bit less exhausted, Melissa finally took the time to appraise the room herself. And some more time, appraising Morris’ very fancy-looking seventeenth-century apparel.

Then, she whistled herself.

“Et tu, Brutus?” Morris grumbled.

“Quit complaining,” Melissa said. “That is why you asked us to come here, isn’t it? With ‘Urgent!’ and ‘Desp’rate Need!’ oozing from every line of your letter.”

“Asked you,” qualified Nichols. “Me, he just wanted to come here to give some advice to his fledgling medical faculty at his fancy new university. I’m just a country doctor.”

“From Chicago,” Melissa jeered. “South side, to boot—which has about as much open land as Manhattan.”

James grinned again. “Oh, you’d be surprised how much open land there is in Chicago’s south side. Vacant lots, I’ll grant you. Nary a crop to be seen anywhere except the stuff handed out by drug dealers, none of which was actually grown there. My point remains. I’m here in Prague as a modest medical adviser. I’m not the one who just landed a prestigious position at Jena University as their new—and only—‘professor of political science.’ I’m not the one Morris asked to come here to explain to him how to haul eastern Europe kicking and screaming into the modern world, which is one hell of neat trick seeing as how that half of the continent didn’t manage to do it in our old timeline.”

“They got there eventually,” Judith pointed out mildly.

Melissa’s expression got very severe. “Yup, sure did. In most places, because Stalin forced them to, after World War II.”

James looked surprised. “Since when did you become a Stalin fan?”

“Not hardly,” said Melissa. “He was a monster. But I’m not blind to historical realities.”

She leaned forward a little. “Poland’s the center of the problem—and the opportunities—here just as it was in the world we came from. A brilliant nation, in lots of ways, but one that was completely crippled by three factors.”

Now she began counting off on fingers that looked far too elegant for a former sixties radical. “First, they were dominated by the szlachta, a huge class of noblemen that, for my money, ranks as the sorriest and most worthless aristocracy in the historical record. They paralyzed Poland politically for centuries with their petty self-interest, greed and pretensions. In the real world, their so-called ‘Golden Freedom’—which some people even have the nerve to claim was a form of democracy which it only was in the same sense that South African apartheid was ‘democratic’ provided you belonged to the master race—”

James and Morris were frowning, trying to follow the convoluted presentation, but Melissa continued blithely onward. “—simply made them patsies for every nation surrounding them. All a Russian tsar or Prussian king or Austrian emperor had to do was keep a few szlachta on the payroll to guarantee that their absolute right of individual veto meant that Poland couldn’t do anything effective politically. Secondly, and largely as a result, Poland was locked into a form of serfdom that was every bit as bad as anything that ever existed in western Europe in medieval times. In the sixteenth century—less than a hundred years ago, in the here and now—Poland was one of the centers of the Renaissance. Two centuries later, it was one of the few countries in Europe that managed to wind up poorer and with fewer and smaller cities that it had when it entered the so-called ‘early modern era.’ And with its industries in decline, to boot. That’s because the nobility, especially the great magnates, locked the whole nation’s fortunes to the Vistula grain trade. They believed in ‘King Grain’ just as vehemently as the slaveowners in the American south believed in ‘King Cotton’—or those stupid rich bastards in Argentina believed in ‘King Beef.’”

Now, Judith was looking a little cross-eyed. “How does Argentina figure into this?”

Melissa flashed her a smile. “History’s a comparative science, insofar as it’s a ‘science’ at all. It’s like a lot of biological study, or even some aspects of astronomy. You can hardly do ‘controlled experiments’ on history, anymore than you can on the evolution of dinosaurs and trilobites—or stars on the main sequence. Right? So, what you do instead is study the material by comparing it with similar phenomena.”

She shrugged. “Of course, that’s a lot easier to do with astronomy and even biology than it is with history. Stars are simple things, compared to human societies, and there are trillions of them to compare to each other and against a vastly longer time frame. Still, the principle’s the same.”

Again, she flashed that quick smile. “So, that’s what Poland and the antebellum South and Argentina have in common. In all three cases, societies that started out with lots and lots of potential got crippled by the greed of their elite, and their fixation on a single crop. Most people don’t realize it—Americans, anyway—because they think of Argentina as a ‘third world’ country. But in the late nineteenth century, it wasn’t. Measured by almost any important social or economic indices, Argentina was more advanced than most countries in southern Europe. Then, especially during World War I when the price of beef went through the roof, Argentina’s upper crust locked the country into monoculture—just like the Poles did with grain in this century and the American slaveowners would do with cotton in the nineteenth. The specifics varied a lot, naturally, but they all resulted in stagnation—and a political structure where an elite of not more than ten percent of the population lorded it over everybody else.”

She leaned back in the couch. “So that’s it. In our timeline, Poland was hamstrung for centuries, and since it’s the center of gravity in eastern Europe it more or less pulled half the continent down with it. Not without lots of help from the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, of course, who were no prizes themselves.”

Morris had never stopped frowning. “I’d think Russia was more in the way of eastern Europe’s ‘center of gravity.’”

“Actually, no. Not yet, I should say. There’s a misconception among Americans, mostly because of the Cold War, that Russia was always the aggressor against Poland. But here in the early seventeenth century—and for at least two centuries earlier—it’s actually the Poles and Lithuanians who’ve been seizing their neighbors’ lands. Besides, it’s something of a moot point anyway. I don’t see where there’s much you or me or anyone could do in October of 1634 to start turning around that mess called ‘Russia.’”

Morris grimaced. “Well, thank God for small favors. I’ve got enough to deal with as it is. Especially since you seem bound and determined to plop Poland into my lap too, right after Wallenstein and Pappenheim dropped everything south of there.”

“Sorry, Morris, but there’s no way around it. In the long run, nothing you accomplish here or in the Ruthenian lands will be stable if you—or somebody—doesn’t transform Poland. Poland and Lithuania, I should say.”

Morris finally took a seat himself, looking very tired. “Talk about the labors of Hercules,” he muttered.

Melissa started to say something, but Judith interrupted. “You said there were three factors. What’s the third one?”

“Huh? Oh. It’s implicit in what I just said. Their protestations of always being the victim of history notwithstanding, the fact is that in this time period it’s usually the Poles who are aggressing against their neighbors. So, on top of their existing problems, they added the third one that so-called ‘Poland’ was never coterminous with where Poles actually lived—until Stalin came along. To get back to the monster I started with.”

Again, she started counting off her fingers. “First, he destroyed the szlachta. They’d officially been abolished after World War II, but they still had a lot of power. He destroyed them literally, in some cases. A big percentage of the fifteen thousand Polish officers he had massacred in Katyn Forest were noblemen. Mostly, though, he simply destroyed them as a class by expropriating their property. Secondly, he ended serfdom. Brutally, of course, the way he did everything. And stupidly too, in the long run. But, say whatever else you will about his forced collectivization of agriculture, one of the products was the elimination of serfdom. And, finally, for the first time in centuries, he made Poland’s boundaries coincide with the actual lands of the Poles. The Poland we knew in the post-World War II period was something like ninety-seven percent ethnically homogenous, which it had certainly never been prior to that. That’s the reason that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody actually proposed to change any of the national boundaries Stalin created. Not Poland’s, anyway.”

Morris wiped his face. “Wonderful. Stalin as my role model.”

“Oh, cut it out, Morris,” said Melissa impatiently. “I was simply pointing to what Stalin did, not how he did it. Creating a modern Poland—forestalling its decline, I should say, which has only started—can be done by other means, too. It certainly should be. But the prerequisite is that you stop thinking of ‘role models’ in the first place.”

“Meaning . ...