‘Shit …’
‘Yes indeed, shit. Close enough to hear the whisper of the axe, as you might say.’
‘Which chairman –?’
‘Voznesensky, before he got the chop from Stalin in ’49.’
Emil stubbed out his cigarette, and absently lit another straight away, thinking about the great silence that had fallen in Soviet economics, and about the number of scholars who had been winnowed out of the subject without ever having done anything as obtrusive or spectacular as petitioning Stalin on behalf of a heretical book; who had softly and silently departed for short lives chipping at the permafrost in Norilsk or the Kolyma, despite having done everything in their power to avoid risk. It was not a comfortable train of thought, and this was clearly the moment to make his excuses and walk away. Nemchinov was waiting for him to do just that, if he wanted to. Emil’s laughter was well quenched already. But something persisted, perhaps: a reckless ghost of the hilarity he had been feeling as the conversation began, a faint and uncalculating wish for the sensation of extra thinking room not to disappear as quickly as it had come. His thoughts skittered about.
‘Why isn’t he dead?’ he said eventually.
‘That is a good question. After all, meaning well hasn’t been a completely adequate shield in this century of ours. I don’t know. Maybe blind luck. Maybe because he did, let’s say, a little work with Academician Sobolev when there was mathematical heavy lifting needed for this.” Nemchinov clasped his elderly fingers together, popped them out into a fist-sized mushroom cloud. Bouf, his lips formed. ‘Which brings a little gratitude with it, and consequently a little latitude. Ah, here he comes.’
Leonid Vitalevich had stepped out of the triple-glass main door, proof against Moscow blizzards, and was detaching himself from a group in animated conversation. Emil and Nemchinov watched him walk towards them along the colonnade of bowed stone titans.
‘In my opinion,’ said Nemchinov calmly, but with a clear sense of the closing distance, ‘if you care for the ideas we discussed today, if you care about bringing a semblance of rationality back to our economics, thenscure obliged to feel a duty to Leonid Vitalevich. He’s cut out to be the citizen of a much more sensible world, and he needs the help of those of us who are better adapted to this one. Friendship with him is a trust. If you follow me.’
‘I do,’ said Emil.
‘Good. Lyonya, well done, well done! I thought that went very well. I don’t think you’ve met Emil, have you?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Leonid Vitalevich, putting down his briefcase. ‘I know your work, of course, and … could I have seen you at the Institute of Electronic Control Machines?’
‘Probably with a stack of punched cards in my hand,’ Emil agreed, ‘waiting my turn to feed the M-2. Yes, I do a bit of work there from time to time; we’re trying to get a fuller picture of labour expenses into the model of the inter-branch balance. But you know how it is. You wait months for the processing time, you finally get assigned a slot and it’s at 2.15 a.m., and then some valve or other blows and the system goes down.’
‘Emil is resisting the temptations of the scholar’s life, at the moment,’ said Nemchinov. ‘Probably because of experiences like that.’
‘Actually,’ Emil said, ‘it’s a temptation I’ve tried to give in to. I put in for a transfer to full-time research, but it was blocked; the old guys at the Committee for Labour won’t let me go. “Come on, boy, science is two days’ work and five days’ holidays! What sort of life is that for a young man?” Nothing counts but epic toil among the paper clips.’
‘Have you thought about going east?’ said Leonid Vitalevich.
‘East?’ For an instant Emil thought that Leonid Vitalevich had somehow guessed the subject of the previous conversation, picked up a molecule of fear hanging about in the gusty air.
‘To Novosibirsk,’ explained Nemchinov. ‘The Academy’s new science city? Leonid Vitalevich is moving there later this year with a group of his graduate students, to set up a lab.’
‘Yes; and the Academy’s managed to get a special decree authorising release from any job – any job at all, I believe – if you’re someone the Siberian Division wants to employ. Might be worth looking into, if you’re really interested.’
‘Quite a nice package, id="filepos285509"> said Nemchinov. ‘Mimeo reports to be circulated without pre-approval; new journals if you want to start one; decent company to work in. Economics, maths, biology, geology, automation research, physics. A cyclotron or two for the physicists to play with; a computer centre for everyone else. Machine time on demand, apparently. Apartments half a hectare wide, to compensate for life on the banks of the Ob. No, ah, nationality issues. And political backing for useful results. We’re expecting to see quite a piece of what we need come out of there.’
‘We might get somewhere at last,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘Without all the nonsense.’
‘Without all the people like Boyarskii,’ said Emil. ‘All the economists who know the value of everything, and the price of nothing.’
‘Oh – oh that’s very good,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘Forgive me, could I have one of your cigarettes?’
‘Wyonya,’ said Nemchinov, ‘you don’t smoke.’
‘So I don’t,’ said Leonid Vitalevich.
He fished the filter-tip inexpertly out of the packet and leant forward to Emil’s lighter, his hands cupped around the flame to block the wind. Emil, finding the wide tired eyes glistening so close to his own, also found that he did not agree with Nemchinov, entirely. Leonid Vitalevich did not exactly look innocent; he looked like a man who knew the depths of the abysses beneath him, but whose nature compelled him always to be stepping ingenuously forward onto the wobbling plank bridges that spanned them. His fingers were trembling.
Notes – II.1 Shadow Prices, 1960
1 ‘Is this heresy?’ said Leonid Vitalevich: the speech I have given him here is a patchwork of elements, heavily edited and simplified, from his real speeches to the conference on mathematics and economics really held by the Russian Academy of Sciences in April 1960. Texts from Kantorovich, Kutateladze and Fet, eds, L.V.Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii, pp. 117–26. For coverage of the conference, see P. Zhelezniak, ‘Scientific Conference on the Application of Mathematical Methods in Economic Studies and Planning’, Problems of Economics (translated digest of articles from Soviet economic journals, International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 3 no. 7, November 1960, pp. 3–6; originally in Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 5, 1960.
2 Thought Academician Nemchinov, watching from the back of the seminar room: Vasily Sergeyevich Nemchinov (1894–1964), geneticist turned economist, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Economic, Philosophical and Legal Sciences in the Academy of Sciences, patron and institutional godfather of the mathematical revival of Soviet economics. I have slightly exaggerated the extent to which the conference was his idea: it actually originated with an initiative by Kantorovich himself. For a sample of his adroit political footwork during the transition to a mathematical economics, see V. S. Nemchinov, ‘Value and Price Under Socialism’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 3, July 1961, pp. 3–17; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 12, 1960. For a gathering of the scientists to whom he acted as co-ordinator, see V.S.Nemchinov, ed., The Use of Mathematics in Economics, edited in English by Alec Nove (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964). One of the most important names to be found there is completely missing in this narrative: V. V. Novozhilov, Leningrad economist and close intellectual ally of Leonid Kantorovich, whose work on the relative efficiency of investments found a more-or-less politically acceptable way of reintroducing the idea of capital’s productivity, and who provided a vital connection to the pre-revolutionary tradition of Russian economics. He is missing here for storytelling reasons. But see V.V.Novozhilov, ‘On Choosing Between Investment Projects’, translated by B. Ward, International Economic Papers 6 (1956), pp. 66–87, and V.V.Novozhilov, ‘Calculatio
n of Outlays in a Socialist Economy’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 8, December 1961, pp. 18–28; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 2, 1961; and V.V.Novozhilov, Problems of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Optimal Planning, translated by H. McQuiston (White Plains NY, 1970). For a contemporary Western appraisal of what the alliance of Kantorovich and Novozhilov might mean, see R. Campbell, ‘Marx, Kantorovih and Novozhilov: Stoimost’ versus Reality’, Slavic Review 40 (October 1961), pp. 402–18.
3 Telling when the party line in their subject was about to change: for discussions of academic politics in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, see Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), and Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. For a fictional reflection, see the experiences of the particle physicist Viktor Shtrum in Vasily Grossman’s moral monument of a novel, Life and Fate, translated by Robert R. Chandler (London: Harvill, 1995).
4 A letter of terrifying frankness to the most powerful person he could think of: according to his daughter, in conversation with the author in St Petersburg in 2004, he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov.
5 A hand had gone up: though this confrontation is a device to dramatise the ideological conflict over Kantorovich’s ‘heresy’, the conference really was marked by sharp antagonism between him and Boyarskii, who had published a very hostile review of his Best Use of Economic Resources in the journal Planovoe Khozyaistvo (‘Planned Economy’) the year before. The intervention I have given Boyarskii here, however, is based on an equally hostile article of his from 1961. See A. Boyarskii, ‘On the Application of Mathematics in Economics’, Problems of Economics (translated digest of articles from Soviet economic journals, International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 9, January 1962, pp. 12–24; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 2, 1961. Whatever form the real exchange between Kantorovich and Boyarskii took, it is clear that Kantorovich won it. ‘This is not the first such review on Comrade Boyarskii’s conscience but following my reply and judging by the audience’s reaction and that of Boyarskii himself, I have a feeling he won’t be writing any more reviews of this sort in future’: Kantorovich, in his speech to the Presidium of the Academy, 20 May 1960, in Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii, vol. 1. Or, for another hostile commentary on the book, see A. Kats, ‘Concerning a Fallacious Concept of Economic Calculation’, Problems of Economics vol. 3 no. 7, November 1960, pp. 42–52; originally published in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 5, 1960.
6 Shadow prices: the multipliers on which Kantorovich’s solution to optimisation problems depended. Essentially, they were opportunity costs: they represented the cost of choosing one particular arrangement of production in terms of the amount of production forgone by choosing it. Their ideological significance lay in the way that, without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.
7 Any increase in the requirements of some article: see L. V. Kantorovich, The Best Use of Economic Resources, translated by P. F. Knightsfield (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1965).
8 ‘For example! Do you see my tie?’: the parable of the necktie is completely invented. Kantorovich’s habit of seeming to wander off during lectures, however, is genuine. A witness in Akademgorodok in 2006 described to me the disconnected fragments he would appear to be uttering, and the perfect sense they would turn out to make when you studied your notes afterwards.
9 ‘It’s true that there is a formal resemblance’, said Leonid Vitalevich: his next point is, again, a slightly modified quotation from The Best Use of Economic Resources. It is worth noting that there is no way at all of telling how sincere the real Kantorovich was being when he asserted that his shadow prices had a ‘meaning’ completely different from market prices. As was pointed out to me in conversation in Akademgorodok, he was notable for the care with which he confined himself in writing to the practical and mathematical aspects of his work, and never even hinted at what he considered to be its social or ideological implications. The same witness gave as his opinion that Kantorovich, as a brilliantly intelligent man, must have been wholly sceptical from the beginning about Soviet socialism – but there seemed to me to be a danger of anachronism in the judgement, and Kantorovich’s tenacity as a system-builder argued for the rather different interpretation of him which I have made here.
10 ‘Coat, winter, men’s, part-silk lining, wool worsted tricot, cloth group 29–32’: there was a Ministry of Trade retail handbook, and it will have had a listing for better-quality men’s overcoats very like this, but my source – Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928 – happens to track the prices only of better-quality’s women’s overcoats among its basket of consumer goods, so I have confabulated the men’s coat’s entry from that.
11 Granite giants holding up the Academy’s facade: so far as I know, there are no muscle-bound stone Atlantids straining to support the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Those are all in Leningrad/St Petersburg. But the symbolism is too good to miss; and if a fairytale would be improved by giants, it gets giants.
12 And his manuscript goes up and down in the world, round and round: the story of the manuscript’s alarming adventures at Gosplan can be found in Abel Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain. It should be noted that it was the head of Gosplan’s prices department himself, when he later became Aganbegyan’s doctoral supervisor, who told him the story, which suggests that the reaction to the book at Gosplan (at least in the prices department) was, though just as uncomprehending, significantly less thuggish in reality than in this burlesqued version.
13 Popped them out into a fist-sized mushroom cloud: Kantorovich was part of the mathematical team under Academician Sobolev on the Soviet A-bomb project.
14 ‘Quite a nice package,’ said Nemchinov: see Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
2.
From the Photograph, 1961
Electrons have no point of view. They form no opinions, make no judgements, commit no errors. Down at their scale, there are no opinions, judgements, or errors; only matter and energy, in a few configurations from which the whole lavish cosmos jigsaws itself together. Electrons move when forces act on their speck of negative electrical charge or on their infinitesimal pinpricks of mass. They do not choose to move; they do not behave, except in metaphor. Yet the metaphors creep in.
These electrons, for example, boil and jostle on the surface of their heated filament, as if it were a beach crowded by millions upon millions of sunbathers until the sand itself had vanished from sight. Normally, electrons in the atomic lattice of a piece of metal are free to flow along through the metal, creating a current. They can hop sideways from atom to atom. They can’t jump off the metal altogether, because the positive charge in the nucleus of each atom holds them back. But the filament is glowing red-hot. It’s being pumped up with extra energy in the form of heat, enough to break the bond that ties each electron to the metal, that grips each bather to the beach. They’re scarcely attached to the lattice now. They’re thronging its surface, ready to go if any other force sets them in motion.
And now a force does. Two centimetres away, an electrode flicks on. It’s an anode, positively charged, and it pulls. The electrons surge forward off the filament in their millions: it’s an exodus, it’s a lemming-rush off the beach, it’s an identical horde flinging itself into jabbering mass motion. To ensure that nothing gets in the way, that no electrons are batted off course by collisions with the gaseous soup of particles in air, the electrons fly into vacuum. In vacuum they surge, in vacuum they pour, through three electrified control grids. The grids smooth the motion out, and prevent
any bouncing, or eddying, or unwanted reverse flows. They discipline the horde. Where electrons move there is by definition an electric current. So here, for the whole time the anode is switched on – one ten-thousandth of a second – a strictly one-way current flows to it across the vacuum. There is no build-up, no gentle curve of rising power. The current is either fully on, or it’s fully off. A bulk process, full of statistical fuzz, where millions of particles mill around, has been converted into a completely determinate one, with just two states. Off or on. No voltage or high voltage. False or true. Zero or one.
Already, the flow of electrons is more than just mutely physical. It has been harnessed to the work of meaning, cajoled into making a picture that follows the simplest rule of picture-making imaginable, where there need only be a binary choice between showing a something or showing a nothing. Yet from this simplest yes–no choice, repeated and repeated, can mount up information’s most complex structures, its most subtly shaded pictures, just as the few basic configurations of matter and energy, rightly arranged, can generate neutron stars, ice-cream cones and Politburo members. Here, the choice has been yes. This current, running for one ten-thousandth of a second, says yes. It says: on. It says: one.
We’re inside a device which in American English is called a vacuum tube, and in British English a thermionic valve. To be precise, it’s a pentode, so named because the filament and the anode and the three control grids make five powered components, inside the stumpy, evacuated cylinder of black glass. The pentode is one of forty-seven pentodes socketed into a big black circuit board; the circuit board is one of thirty-nine circuit boards arranged in a vertical rack; the rack is the arithmetical processor of the Bystrodeystvuyushchaya Elektronno-Schyotnaya Mashina-2; and the BESM-2 is installed in the basement of the Institute of Precise Mechanics in Moscow, where it was designed. Midnight is long past. Hardly anyone is around. The night is trundling downwards towards that disconsolate moment of minimum when sheets of newspaper formerly used for wrapping fish blow about the deserted streets of Moscow, and human wishes all seem vain. But the BESM-2 is hard at work; and so is its designer Sergei Alexeievich Lebedev, sitting at his usual worktable and grinding out one after another of the cardboard butts of Kazbek-brand cigarettes. By now the night tastes of nothing but ash. But nicotine substitutes for food, nicotine substitutes for sleep, and there is so little time left for the future, once all the demands of the present are taken care of. Back in the war, when there were only his thoughts and no mechanism yet at all to vest them in, Lebedev sat up all night doing binary arithmetic by hand. How can he stop now, when computers exist – he built the first one in the Soviet Union himself, in 1951 – yet always fall so short of what might be? Every machine takes an age to perfect. Yet every machine leaves this maddening residue of new thoughts not acted on. Helpful toxins from the tobacco fields of Uzbekistan goad the blood in his veins to hurry. The BESM hums. There are more than four thousand vacuum tubes in there, all glowing red-hot behind smoked glass. Someone, somewhere, in the control room of this section of Moscow’s power grid, is watching the BESM drain down as greedy a load as an average night-shift factory, all on its own – but for Lebedev the hum is a kindly womb of sound, provided by a machine of the present so that the machine of the future can come to birth.
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