ABOUT TIME (via Tom Morin):

Friend Morin writes to inform us that TIME magazine -- whose archives have always been particularly inaccessible -- has opened up the whole history of the magazine back to 1923. This is great news if for no other reason than that you can finally get to the best of Whittaker Chambers, like THE GHOSTS ON THE ROOF (Whittaker Chambers, Mar. 05, 1945, TIME)

With the softness of bats, seven ghosts settled down on the flat roof of the Livadia Palace at Yalta. They found someone else already there: a statuesque female figure, crouching, with her eye glued to one of the holes in the roof (it had been through the Russian revolution, three years of civil war, 21 years of Socialist reconstruction, the German invasion and the Russian reoccupation).

"Madam," said the foremost ghost, an imperious woman with a bullet hole in her head, "what are you doing on our roof?"

Clio, the Muse of History (for it was she), looked up, her finger on her lips. "Shh!" she said, "the Big Three Conference is just ending down there. What with security regulations, censorship and personal secretiveness, the only way I can find out anything these days is by peeping. And who are you?'' she asked, squinting slightly (history is sometimes a little shortsighted). "I've seen you somewhere before."

"Madam," said a male ghost, rising on tiptoe to speak over his wife's shoulder (he also had a bullet hole in his forehead), "I am Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, Siberia and Georgia, Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia and Bialystok,

Lord of Pskov, Riazan, Yaroslavl, Vitebsk and All the Region of the North, Lord. . . ." [...]

"Don't hedge, Nicky," she cried. "He never could come to the point. He's trying to cover up the fact that he wanted to eavesdrop on the Big Three Conference.

He doesn't like to admit it in front of the Tsarevich," she added in a stage whisper, "but His Imperial Majesty is simply fascinated by Stalin--mais tout a fait epris!"

"Stalin! You?" gasped the Muse of History.

"Yes, yes, oh yes," said the Tsar eagerly, elbowing his wife's ghost out of the way.

"What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!"

"It all began," said the Tsarina wearily, "with the German-Russian partition of Poland. . . ."

"I always wanted to take those Poles down a peg," the Tsar broke in, "but something was always tying my hands."

"Until then," the Tsarina went on, "we enjoyed a pleasant, if rather insubstantial, life. We used to haunt the Casino at Monte Carlo. But after the partition of Poland, Nicky insisted on returning to Russia. He began to attend the meetings of the Politburo. The Politburo! Oh, those interminable speeches. . . . Ah, Katorga!"

"Couldn't you stay home?" asked the Muse of History.

"And leave Nicky alone with those sharpers! He never could do anything without me. Besides, I doubt if you know what it's like to be a ghost: le silence éternel de ces espaces in finis m'effraie--The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Pascal said that, you know. Not bad for a man who had never been liquidated. And then," the Tsarina added, "Stalin overran Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania."

"Bessarabia," cried the Tsar, "was recovered from Rumania."

"And Northern Bukovina," cried the Tsarina, "which had never been Russian before."

"Foreign Minister Saracoglu of Turkey was summoned to Moscow," said the Tsar, "and taken over the jumps. For a moment I thought we had the Straits."

"Constantinople," breathed the Tsarina, "the goal of 200 years of Russian diplomacy."

"After that," said the Tsar, "it could not be put off any longer."

"What?" asked the Muse of History.

"Why, my conversion," said the Tsar. "I--I became a Marxist."

"He means a Leninist-Stalinist," said the Tsarina. "By official definition Leninism-Stalinism is the Marxism of this historical period."

"Stalinists!" cried the Muse of History.

"I don't see any reason why you should be so surprised, Madam," said the Tsarina. "After the way you have favored Communism for the last 27 years, you are little better than a fellow traveler yourself!"

"Of course, we could not formally enter the Party," the Tsar explained. "There was the question of our former status as exploiters in Russia. Even worse was our present status as ghosts. It violates a basic tenet of Marxism which, of course, does not recognize the supernatural."

"One might suppose, though," said the Tsarina, "that since the Party was, so to speak, responsible for making us what we are, the Central Control Commission would stretch a point in our case."

"And now," said the Tsar, peering through the chink in the roof, "The greatest statesmen in the world have come to Stalin. Who but he would have had the sense of historical fitness to entertain them in my expropriated palace! There he sits, so small, so sure. He is magnificent. Greater than Rurik, greater than Peter! For Peter conquered only in the name of a limited class. But Stalin embodies the international social revolution. That is the mighty, new device of power politics which he has developed for blowing up other countries from within."

"With it he is conquering Rumania and Bulgaria!" cried the Tsarina.

"Yugoslavia and Hungary!" cried the Tsar.'

"Poland and Finland," cried the Tsarina.'

"His party comrades are high in the Governments of Italy and France."

"A fortnight ago they re-entered the Government of Belgium." "Soon they will control most of Germany."

"They already control a vast region of China."

"When Russia enters the war against Japan, we shall take Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Korea, and settle the old score with Chiang Kai-shek."