by Jane Hawking
9
Chekhovian Footfalls
If the impressions I carried from Poland were confusing, Moscow was perversely reassuring in that there was no room for doubt among its citizens about their own political identity or about ours. We knew – and everyone else knew – that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian police state and that there was little to be gained by hankering after a liberal democracy. The Muscovites politely recognized that we came from a privileged society without holding that against us. On the flight between Warsaw and Moscow, Kip warned us to behave as though our hotel room were bugged, not just for our own safety, but for all the colleagues we would be meeting. Stephen had visited Moscow once before, as a student, with a group of Baptists – strange company for one of such forceful atheistic opinions. Even stranger was the fact that he had helped them to smuggle Bibles into Russia in his shoes.
Such reminiscences were hardly appropriate on the present occasion, which had acquired the importance of a high-level official exchange, with all the concomitant VIP treatment. On arrival at the Hotel Rossiya, a massive square block between Red Square and the Moskva River, we glanced round our suite, equipped with samovar and fridge, half-expecting to uncover a microphone strategically placed to record our private thoughts. We did not however resort to the lengths of the diplomat in a joke then circulating: he was said to have pulled up the carpet and snipped at the wires he found beneath it. A loud crash and a horrified shout came from the room below where the chandelier had fallen to the ground.
We had already noticed that the lift bypassed the first floor of the hotel; this was out of bounds and was said to be reserved on all four sides of the hotel, each a quarter of a mile long, for “administration”, for which we read “listening devices”. Moreover, many of the Russians who had come to meet us at the airport, bearing welcoming bouquets of roses and carnations, were reluctant to enter the hotel beyond the lobby. Significantly in the light of their reticence, Dr Ivanenko, an elderly scientist of modest reputation, was only too pleased to sit in Kip’s room for hours at a time, precisely enunciating, as if to hidden ears, all that he had achieved for Soviet science. It was Ivanenko who always accompanied groups of younger Russian astrophysicists to conferences in the West. We generally supposed that he was their minder, especially because they were forever inventing schemes for evading him. His own behaviour could be mysteriously unpredictable. In 1970, while we were at the conference centre at Gwatt in Switzerland, he had disappeared during the course of a boat trip along the shores of Lake Thun, not to be seen again until he turned up sometime later in Moscow.
The purpose of Stephen’s visit to Moscow was twofold. Primarily a theoretician, he had begun to dabble in the practical question of black-hole detection. In this he was following the example of an American physicist, Joseph Weber, who had been conducting a solitary struggle to build a machine for catching the minuscule vibrations of the gravitational waves which were predicted to come from stars as they collapsed into black holes. We had spent several afternoons scouring rubbish tips in Cambridge for disused vacuum chambers which might be fitted up, in somewhat Heath-Robinson fashion, with detector bars immersed in liquid nitrogen, to complement Weber’s work in Europe. This aspect of black-hole research had also been taken up in Moscow, at the university, by Vladimir Braginsky, an experimental physicist who showed us his laboratory and cheerfully gave me the remnants of a stick of synthetic ruby which he had used in his experiment. He was blessed with an extrovert nature which concealed the extent of his scientific foresight and revealed itself in his penchant for risqué political jokes, even in a semi-public setting. It was Braginsky who at dinner one night kept the company captivated with a torrent of jokes, interspersed with a succession of toasts in vodka and Georgian champagne. Not all his jokes were hysterically funny. Most had a political edge, as for example the joke about transport: an American, an Englishman and a Russian were comparing methods of transport. The American said, “Well of course, we need three cars, one for me, one for my wife and a motorhome for holidays.” The Englishman said modestly, “Well, we have a runabout for town-driving and a family car for holidays.” The Russian said, “Well, the public transport is very good in Moscow so we don’t need a car in town and, when we go on holiday, we go in tanks…”
Stephen had also come to Moscow for conversations with those Russians, many of them Jewish, whose freedom to travel had been severely curtailed. Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich, a fiery, impetuous character, had been in the forefront of the development of the Soviet atom bomb in the Forties and Fifties. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, like his American counterpart, John Wheeler, he turned his attention to astrophysics, where the conditions inside an imploding star mirrored those of the hydrogen bomb. In consequence Zel’dovich became a foremost authority in black-hole research. However, because of the secrecy surrounding his earlier work, he never expected to be able to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain and come to the West to share fully the international excitement aroused by black holes. The seminal research in imploding stars which his group generated was broadcast to the outside world on his behalf by a rather shy and rather tense younger colleague, Igor Novikov, with whom Stephen developed a strong working relationship.
Like Zel’dovich, Evgeny Lifshitz, also a Jewish physicist in the group, suffered travel restrictions, as did the many gifted students who knew that they would have to wait years before receiving the coveted first travel permit, itself a passport to the rubber-stamping of further permits. Some were voci-ferous and intense, others reserved and pensive. However extrovert some of their personalities might appear to be, it was obvious that they lived under extreme tension in an undercurrent of fear. All were seriously concerned at the restrictions placed on their creativity by incompetent officialdom, and all were afraid of the power of the KGB if they tried to improve their situation.
Kip had many conversations on this theme with his Russian friends, while Stephen and I provided a useful front of social activity. One evening this previously successful ploy backfired. Throughout our stay, our hosts showered us with tickets for the Bolshoi: for the opera, Boris Godunov, Prince Igor, and for the ballet, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. Though Stephen was eager to attend the opera, he was very reluctant about the ballet. Indeed, on the only previous occasion when we had been to the ballet together, to a production of Giselle at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, he complained of a headache in the first act and I had to take him home in the interval, only to find that he made an immediate and miraculous recovery. In Moscow we were consistently in our seats in good time for the opera, but when we arrived at the Bolshoi for The Nutcracker the doors were already closing. We were hurriedly ushered into a side aisle and the doors closed smartly behind us. Kip, who had been intending to use the cover of the ballet to escape with a colleague, Vladimir Belinsky, into the streets of Moscow for surreptitious discussions on matters political as well as scientific, found himself trapped. He had come into the theatre to help us settle in, and when the doors closed, he had no option but to sit patiently through the first act of The Nutcracker till the interval, while Belinsky waited for him outside in the foyer. At least Stephen had a companion in adversity.
Although we were well aware of these cloak-and-dagger operations lurking in the background, we began to realize that Stephen’s scientific colleagues enjoyed in a limited fashion a freedom denied to the rest of the people, the freedom of thought. In its ignorance, Communist officialdom was unable to measure the significance of abstruse scientific research. Consequently it tended to leave scientists in peace as long as they behaved with caution and towed the party line – unless, that is, like Andrei Sakharov, they spoke out openly against the regime on overtly political grounds. Indeed, in his book Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne refers to the unnecessary fear he felt for the Russians, Lifshitz and Khalatnikov, when they courageously wanted to acknowledge the error of their claim that a star cannot create a singularity when it implodes to form a black hole:
For a theoretical physicist it is more than embarrassing to admit a major error in a published result. It is ego-shattering… Though errors can be shattering for an American or European physicist, in the Soviet Union they were far worse. One’s position in the pecking order of scientists was particularly important in the Soviet Union; it determined such things as possibilities for travel abroad and election to the Academy of Sciences, which in turn brought privileges such as near doubling of one’s salary and a chauffeured limousine at one’s beck and call…
Lifshitz’s freedom to travel had already been long curtailed when, to his immense credit and with the greatest urgency, he had persuaded Kip on an earlier visit to Moscow in 1969 to smuggle out a paper retracting the claim and admitting the mistake. The paper was published in the West. As Kip thankfully remarks, “The Soviet authorities never noticed.”
Stephen got on well with his Russian colleagues because they shared his intuitive approach to physics. Like him they were concerned only with the crux of any problem; the fine detail did not interest them, and for Stephen, who carried all his theories in his head, fine detail was a hindrance to clarity of thought. Effectively, like him, they discarded all dead wood for a clearer view of the trees. They adapted this approach to whatever subject was under discussion, whether physics or literature. They gave the impression of having stepped out of the past, from the pages of Turgenev, Tolstoy or Chekhov. They talked about art and literature – their own Russian masters and Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes and Lorca as well. Like my student acquaintances in Franco’s Spain, they recited poetry and composed verses for any occasion – including poems in Stephen’s honour. To them, it seemed, one more repressive regime meant little, because their country had always been governed by totalitarian regimes and had no experience of democracy, so, like generations of Russians before them, they found their solace in art, music and literature. In a society dominated by Soviet materialism, culture was their spiritual resource. Through them, I felt I could touch the soul of the country, the mournful soul of Mother Russia, who always draws her exiled children back to her lonely rolling landscapes of rivers and birch forests. Their personalities shone out of the background of their bleak lives like the golden domes of the well-preserved though no longer functioning churches which would suddenly appear from behind the gaunt concrete blocks of modern Moscow, illuminating the grey dreariness with their gleaming brilliance.
These colleagues seemed just as happy to take us on cultural expeditions as to talk about science. Often our days were a combination of the two: scientific discussions would accompany our sightseeing. We wandered through the golden-domed cathedrals of the Kremlin, purged of their religious function by an officious Communism which nevertheless had not managed to eradicate their air of sanctity. We stood enraptured before the altar walls of icons, and we examined floors of semi-precious stone. We ambled through the art galleries, the Tretyakov and the Pushkin, and made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s homely wooden house, with its stuffed bear standing on the creaky landing ready to receive visiting cards, and its little room at the back where the great man applied himself to his other passion, shoemaking. From Tolstoy’s garden I picked up a handful of fallen maple leaves, rich brown, orange and yellow.
I asked to see a functioning church and was taken both to the extravagantly decorative, red, green and white church of St Nicholas in Moscow and to the Novodevichy Monastery on the outskirts. Despite the wailing chants and the mumbling icon-kissing of the elderly devotees, neither place could convey the essence of holiness with the power of the two decommissioned, empty little churches which stood abandoned outside our window, dwarfed by the bulk of the hotel. One was brick-built, topped by a gold cross; the other was little more than a golden dome. It seemed that in banning organized religion, the Communist regime had actually encouraged the growth of an inner spirituality, which was ever present for those who were receptive to it and alien to those who were not.
In the age of space travel, we were drawn back into the past through the lives of the dignified, poetic individuals with whom we were associating. There were few cars on their roads, their material possessions were scarce and their clothing was drab. Health care was available to them free of charge, but what we saw of it suggested that Soviet hospitals and doctors were to be avoided at all costs. During the second week Stephen needed a dose of hydroxocobalamin, the fortifying vitamin injection which, in Cambridge, Sister Chalmers came to give him every fortnight. With some difficulty, his colleagues persuaded a doctor to come to the hotel. At first glance, I thought that it was Miss Meiklejohn, the terrifying, doughty games mistress from St Albans High School, who had walked into our room. She produced her equipment from a black bag: a steel kidney-shaped bowl, a metal syringe and a selection of reusable needles. We both winced. Stoical as ever, Stephen sat quietly while she jabbed the bluntest of her needles into his thin flesh. Squeamish as ever, I turned away.
The endless, grey-raincoated queues in the shops where our friends bought their food brought back childhood memories of post-war London. Whether in GUM, the state department store on Red Square, or in neighbourhood shops, the system seemed expressly designed to discourage its customers from making any purchases whatsoever. First they had to queue to find out whether the desired items were available on the shelves, then they had to queue to pay for them in advance at the cash desk, and finally, clutching their receipts, they had to return to the original queue to claim their purchases. As privileged foreigners we could shop at the tourist shops, the Berioska shops, which were greedy for our pounds and dollars. There, wooden toys, brightly coloured shawls, amber beads and painted trays abounded. I assumed that all the goods were produced in the Soviet Union until I chanced upon a pair of black leather gloves which bore the label “made by the Co-op, Blackburn, Lancs”.
In other Berioska shops, foreign visitors could buy fresh and imported foodstuffs such as grapes, oranges and tomatoes, which for the average Russian were luxuries. If the food produced in the hotel, supposedly a first-class hotel, was any yardstick, the average Russian lived on an erratic subsistence diet of yogurt, ice cream, hard-boiled eggs, black bread and cucumber. Such meat as the hotel managed to provide was usually concealed in minute quantities in floury rissoles, or was so tough and tasteless as to be good only for shoe leather. My smattering of Russian, learnt in an evening class some years previously, was not much help in choosing from the numerous pages of the menu, because once we had made our selection, we would be told that it was “off”.
For the first few days, we despaired of getting an edible square meal until one evening we discovered a restaurant, secreted away on the top floor of the hotel, looking out over the red stars on the towers of the Kremlin. We found ourselves sitting near a Frenchman and watched in amazement as his meal was served. With the suave confidence of a Parisian dining in one of the best restaurants in his native city, he embarked on his first course, which consisted of a dish of caviar, smoked fish and cold meats, with a small glass of vodka. Then, while we pushed a flattened piece of chicken swimming in grease around our plates, his main course came to the table. Crisp brown slices of roast potato enveloped a steaming, succulent, baked sturgeon. Enviously we watched him eat, savouring the aromas which wafted in our direction. It was not until he leant back in his chair with a Gallic sigh and a gesture of deep satisfaction that it occured to me that here was somebody with whom I could actually communicate. All I had to do was ask him in French where to find sturgeon and caviar on the menu. Obligingly, he indicated items 32 and 54, thus holding out the delectable promise of an acceptable diet for the rest of our stay. It was our bad luck that the very next day, the top-floor restaurant closed down, and items 32 and 54 never featured on the menus of the other less classy restaurants.
Mistrust of the next meal became a constant preoccupation. However, with some anticipation we looked forward optimistically to one of the supposed highlights of our stay, dinner in the Seventh Heaven revolving restaurant of the Osta
nkino Tower, a radio tower on the outskirts of the city. The tower, a space-age status symbol, was closely guarded – supposedly because of its strategic importance – and only special guests were allowed to dine there. Even they were not permitted to approach the tower directly, but were frisked at the perimeter fence some fifty yards away, and then led along an underground tunnel to the lift. Cameras were forbidden, we were told, since during the course of its heavenly revolutions, the restaurant passed by a milk factory. For “milk”, read “armaments”, Kip said. The milk factory came round with disconcerting frequency as we tucked into our first good meal in weeks. Nor was the ride a smooth one – the tower lurched drunkenly halfway through each cycle – which may explain why Stephen and I spent the next twenty-four hours competing for occupation of the bathroom.
It was no surprise to us that our Russian hosts were not at liberty to invite us into their own homes, but there was one notable exception. On our last evening in Moscow we were invited to dinner at the home of Professor Isaac Khalatnikov. Khalatnikov was a beaming, expansive character whom we had first met at the General Relativity Conference in London just before our marriage in 1965. The taxi delivered us to an imposing block of flats, close to the river in the centre of Moscow. We had heard from contemporaries of the difficulties of family life in Moscow. Apartments were scarce. Entitlement to housing depended on one’s standing in the Party. Newly-weds frequently had to live with their parents in two-bedroom flats. Later, families would often take in surviving members of the older generation, particularly the babushka, whose presence was well-nigh essential, even in such cramped conditions, because she would generally run the household and care for the children while her daughter or daughter-in-law was out at work. We were astonished therefore to find that the Khalatnikovs’ apartment was exceptionally large, consisting of several spacious, well-furnished rooms complete with television and hi-fi. Furthermore the food on the table was a veritable banquet which would not have been out of place at a Western dinner party. The servings of caviar, meat, vegetables, salads and fruit were lavish and tastefully presented. Stephen and I were appreciative but mystified. Why, in a society which trumpeted its equality, did this family enjoy such an ostentatiously indulgent lifestyle? As usual Kip provided the answer: it had nothing whatsoever to do with Isaac Khalatnikov’s distinguished scientific status. It was the consequence of his wife’s connections. Valentina Nikolaevna, a rather sturdy blonde lady for whom my gift of delicate costume jewellery was singularly inappropriate, was none other than the daughter of a Hero of the Revolution. In a nation where all were said to be equal, some were more equal than others. By virtue of her birth, Valentina Nikolaevna was entitled to all the prerogatives of the new aristocracy, including preferential housing and the right to buy her food in the Berioska shops.
