2 And, more secretly still, an M-40 exists, and an M-50 too: for Lebedev’s computers for the Soviet missile-defence project, and the imaginary Moscow in the Kazakh desert, see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 101–3. For ‘military cybernetics’ in general, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
3 ‘We can shoot down a fly in outer space, you know’: Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 103
4 Remembering the story his rival Izaak Bruk told him: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 70, which does not however specify the codename flower the vacuum tube buyer had to mention. As well as supplying tulips, my rendition of the story has also simplified the bureaucratic level at which the polite people opposite the knitwear shop (real) operated. They actually told the student, ‘We only act at the level of raikom third secretary.’
5 The BESM. A picture of what? Of potatoes: the potato-optimising programme for the Moscow Regional Planning Agency was absolutely real, but was not written until 1966, and therefore probably ran on a BESM-6 or an M-20 rather than a BESM-2. It belongs, truthfully, to the period of slightly chastened moderate-sized implementations of ‘optimal planning’, rather than to the early period of grand expectations. I have cheated, and brought it forward in time, in order to give the optimism of 1961 some definite narrative substance. Altogether, in fact, this fairytale version of the history of mathematical economics needs to confess to tidying and foreshortening the movement from hope to despair it chronicles. The numbers of delivering and consuming organisations are authentic, and the variables and constraints; the dwindling kilometre-numbers are made up from thin air. For this and other 1960s experiments in mathematical planning, see Michael Ellman, Soviet Planning Today: Proposals for an Optimally Functioning Economic System (Cambridge: CUP, 1971), and Planning Problems in the USSR. Other sources, without Ellman’s bite and analytical clarity, are John Pearce Hardt, ed., Mathematics and Computers in Soviet Economic Planning (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1967), and Martin Cave, Computers and Economic Planning: The and perience (Cambridge: CUP, 1980).
6 The recording clerks sally out from the Ministry of Trade’s little booths: among other things, as an information-gathering exercise, to collect a set of market-clearing prices which could then be used to help establish the price level for the bulk of food trade, in state stores. The state price was always cheaper, guaranteeing that food at the state price would always be in shortage relative to the money available to pay for it, but how much cheaper it was varied, depending both on the irregular jumps of the official prices and the more continuous adjustment of the market prices. See Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928 ; as Chapman points out, the premium that could be charged at the kolkhoz market gives a measure of how difficult food was to find at the state price. In relatively good times for official Soviet agriculture, the prices ran relatively close together; in bad times, they diverged wildly. According to the Narkhoz statistical almanac for 1968, between 1960 and 1968 kolkhoz market prices rose 28%: see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
7 No wonder that Oskar Lange over in Warsaw gleefully calls the marketplace a ‘primitive pre-electronic calculator’: not in print he didn’t, in fact, until 1967. See Oskar Lange, ‘The Computer and the Market’ in C. Feinstein, ed., Capitalism, Socialism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge: CUP, 1967), pp. 158–61. But the idea that the computer had conclusively resolved the socialist calculation debate in socialism’s favour was very much a commonplace of the early sixties.
8 ‘Sorcery!’ he said, and winked: see Hally, Electronic Brains.
9 Universally caressed and endorsed, very nearly the official solution to every Soviet problem: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. Cybernetics did appear in the Party Programme: see the complete text of the programme, and commentaries, in Leonard Schapiro, ed., The USSR and the Future: An Analysis of the New Program of the CPSU (New York: Institute for the Study of the USSR/Frederick A. Praeger Inc., 1963). First had come the oppositional stage, during which cybernetics was officially condemned and seemed to scientists to represent a language of de-ideologised honesty. Then came this period of official acceptance, and excited claims for cybernetics’ reforming powers. Later would come a period of decay, in which Soviet cyberspeak became one more variety of officially sanctioned vacuity, as satirised (for example) in Aleksandr Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, translated by Gordon Clough (New York: Random House, 1978).
10 Ot zadachi, ‘from the problem’, and ot fotografii, ‘from the photograph’: the distinction is discussed in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR. Both conservative criticism of mathematical economics, for instance from within Gosplan, and criticism by more radically sceptical economists, like Janos Kornai of Hungary, often focused on the obvious weakness involved in working ‘from the photograph’. See Kornai, Anti- Equilibrium (Amsterdam, 1971); for a Gosplan critique of reforming impracticality, twenty years later but directed at much the same target, see Michael Ellman an Volodyamir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). To some extent the distance from the system at which the optimisers were working had to do with their status as un-trusted academic outsiders to the real operation of industry. It also followed from the powerfully abstracting nature of Kantorovich’s models, which could reduce a whole technology to the letter ‘t’ in an equation. But the optimisers of course saw and understood the difficulty: it was one reason for their increasing interest in systems of indirect control which did not require complete information at the centre.
3.
Stormy Applause, 1961
Lucky Sasha Galich. Lucky Sasha, with his cheekbones and his curly hair and his scarf tied loose round his neck like a banner of relaxation. Lucky Sasha, making it look easy, noodling at the keys of the piano in his flat full of antiques near Aeroflotkskaya, writing another hit song; or pecking out more witty dialogue on his neat little typewriter. A trifle grizzled as his forties began, but no less charming. Lucky Sasha, trusted and caressed, with his indulgent wife and his actress girlfriends and his trips to Paris. Foreigners liked him, but he knew his duty. He never crossed a line. He never caused unpleasantness. And so the rewards of talent showered down upon him. Lucky, lucky Sasha Galich.
*
He was early for lunch. He expected to wait, and having risen late with a slight legacy of the night before, was quite looking forward to a little indoor time, parked in the shade of a quiet corridor. But instead Morin’s secretary ushered him straight across the main floor of the newspaper office to a glass-walled cube at the corner of the tower. The view down the boulevard pointed all the way to the Moscow River, and the clouds which had seemed to promise the first snow of autumn an hour ago had been driven back. Suddenly the city was roofed in bright air. Through the thick glass of windows, it looked as if it had been capped in a lens of blue.
Morin was in conference. A line of galley proofs was laid out on a long table, and he was steadying a particular page about two-thirds of the way along with his wide fingers, while a stringy woman in her late thirties bent over it, blue pencil in hand. As she spoke, a young man at Morin’s elbow took rapid notes on a pad. There was another man in the room, much older, head sunk on his chest as he sat, not asleep but expressing inertia in his entire demeanour. This, Galich assumed, must be the paper’s nominal editor, Morin’s nominal boss: a relic, Morin had delicately hinted over the poker table, still grimly in post but reliant on Morin to handle the disconcerting ups and downs of the present. And the woman must be the in-house representative of Glavlit. Galich recognised the tableau from a thousand script meetings: Still Life, with Censor.
‘Sasha!’ said Morin. ‘We’re almost done. D’you want to take a seat for a minute or two? I’m sure no one will mind. Gentlemen, Marfa Timofeyevna, may I introduce Alexander Galich – author of many shows you’ve seen, and many songs I’m sure you whistle.’
Good grief, thought Sasha.
The boy with the pad gave him a quick smile, from a face which close to had a sharp hungriness to it; an orphanage-grown face, maybe, once upon a time. The editor in the corner gave a grunt so neutral it was as if air had been expelled from a hole in the ground. Marfa Timofeyevna, though, smiled shyly, switched the blue pencil to her other hand and held out her right to be shaken, schoolgirl-wise.
‘The Alexander Galich?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Sasha, ‘the only one there is, at any rate.’
‘I loved Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just – so true. So understanding. And such a remarkable play for a man to have written.’
How wonderful, thought Sasha, the censor likes my work, the censor thinks I’m truthful. But immediately he found himself constructing lives for her, her with her carefully-chosen cardigan and her unfortunately large nose. Lives with her mother, gallery- goer, takes along a miniature score to concerts. Never married. No: married once, but only for a year, and to a melancholic. And automatically he gazed at her with warm eyes, and kept her hand in his for a moment longer than she was expecting.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Of course, I mostly notice the imperfections in what I do. My women friends keep me on the straight and narrow; I find that simply listening to what they say is an enormous advantage for a writer who wants to create plausible female voices.’ Skinny shanks, and probably hips like the bleached bones of a camel left in the desert to die. ‘But look,’ he went on, ‘I mustn’t keep you from your work.’ He could see over their shoulders that the galleys bore a speech on them, a very long speech continuing in column after column of newsprint, and therefore probably the address that Khrushchev was due to give to the Party Congress today. Here and there the unspooling paragraphs were punctuated by italicised rapture. Simple ‘(Applause)’ over and over; Khrushchev being Khrushchev an occasional outbreak of ‘(Laughter)’; but as the speech gathered pace, ‘(Prolonged applause)’, and for the real peaks of excitement, the accolade a Soviet audience was never known to withhold, ‘(Stormy applause)’. The speech might be being printed before Mr K. actually gave it, but Galich felt certain that the orchestration indicated by the galleys could be relied on. Those were certainly the moments when the two thousand delegates under the great Kremlin dome would boom out their approval. Would that a theatre crowd was so easy.
‘Please,’ he repeated, ‘don’t mind me.’
‘That’s right,’ said Morin smoothly. ‘We had better just let Marfa Timofeyevna finish keeping us on the straight and narrow.’
Somehow his tone as he said this managed to suggest both that censorship was silly, and that it was silly to mind it. Galich conceded Morin a small internal round of (Applause), his headache whispering in his temples. He was highly accomplished himself at finding pleasure-giving, urbane descriptions of what couldn’t be helped, but Morin, moreover, had hit the precise note of the moment, liberally-minded yet unchallenging, ironic yet inoffensive.
The three bent back to their task. Morin smacked his lips together, as they worked, in a series of cheerful little musical pops. It was the same sound he had made two nights before, contemplating the cards in his hand, and surprisingly effective at concealing how good they were. Galich dumped his satchel at the end of a long, deep, editorial sofa, and sat down, ready to make conversation if required with the discarded grey monolith in the corner: but the editor-in-name-only continued to stare dourly into space. His age put him in the right generation to have inherited the paper sometime in the late thirties, the Morin of his time perhaps, perfectly fluent in the brutish language of that moment and so ready to rise when all the intellectual types with funny-sounding surnames were shaken out of the Soviet newspaper business. Galich had been, what, twenty, riding the metro daily to his classes at the Stanislavsky Studio. Playing the guitar in the park. Falling in love. Getting laid. Getting elated. Getting his own first, all too successful sense of how to speak the dialect of the age, and how to bend it towards happy laughter.
Back issues of the paper were arranged in a rack. He pulled one out at random and shook it open like a screen in front of his face.
Letters; letters from readers across the whole double-page spread. This was an issue from a few weeks ago, he saw, during the famous consultation with the public over the Draft Programme. Like all the others, Morin’s paper had been crammed. Rank by rank, column by column, eager citizens had written in with their tuppenyworth. Morin’s paper being a metropolitan, enlightened affair, with an educated readership, a lot of the correspondence dwelt approvingly on the Draft’s proposals to open up local Party elections to multiple candidates, and to impose term limits for officials. A Corresponding Member of the Academy, no less, had suggested that the Party should commit itself to ‘protecting in every way the rights of Soviet citizens’. But there were suggestions on an incredible scattering of subjects. In the abundant future, there should be more planting of peas, please; more atheism; more tea-rooms; more television parlours in boarding-houses for single people; more labour-saving devices; more help for inventors; more defence lawyers; more deputies in the Supreme Soviet; more taxis. And all of the suggestions, on every subject, were enthusiastic. Galich had no idea how spontaneous the letters could possibly be. Some were clearly generated by local Party meetings obediently feeding back the chosen themes of the moment. But the effect was not quite the usual one of seeing the citizenry of the Soviet Union claim that their every happiness was already embodied in some policy or other. Here, people seemed to be trying to add their own wishes to the giant tower of wishes reared up by the Draft Programme. They were sticking their wishes to the surfaces, they were poking their wishes into the crannies of Mr K.’s promise to make them the richest people in the world. People were dreaming the dream along with him; they were worrying, worrying helpfully, over its details. Take the man who wanted more taxis. He’d noticed that the Draft guaranteed an automobile for every family, and not just any automobile either but one which, like all material blessings of full communism, would be ‘of considerably higher quality than the best products of capitalism’. All well and good; but where would they be parked, these Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame, these Ladas purring more quietly than any Rolls-Royce, these Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that reduced Mercedes-Benz to impotent envy? Had the Party considered the number of garages that would be required? The ‘deleterious effect on the hygienic conditions of city life’? The extra roadworks? The – Galich shut his eyes behind the newspaper, and let the traffic problems of the radiant future deliquesce into a field of orange and scarlet, criss-crossed with shadows.
‘Done,’ said Morin cheerfully. ‘Where are we going, then, maestro?’
Galich rose renewed, face adjusted, from the foam of Soviet newsprin
‘I thought the Writers’ Union? Not too far for you, and I’ve got to head out of town this afternoon.’
‘Very good, very good,’ said Morin, rubbing his hands in a pantomime of greed. ‘I ate there last month, and it was dee-licious. Im-peccable. A real treat.’
Morin pulled on a raincoat and led him back through the newsroom, greeting, flirting, finger-pointing as he went, surprisingly light on his feet for a big man. Outside, the day had brightened one notch more; the snow cloud had retreated to the north-east corner of the heavens and was staying there, a knot of white held back by some invisible counter-attack of high pressure. The rest of the sky had the clean richness of high summer, only without heat or dazzle. It had become one of those days when everything looks its best. The walls of Moscow were dusted with light. New concrete, bricks and stucco, old plaster tinted in the edible palate of ice cream, mosaic on the merchants’ mansions, ruddy statues of the gods and goddesses of Soviet plenty – all of a sudden, everything glowed.
‘You seem to be on good terms with your Miss Marfa,’ said Galich in the taxi.
‘Not as good as you, my friend. I’ve been working with her for two years, b
ut thirty seconds of your acquaintance, and whoosh, the air was turning to steam …’
They laughed.
‘Not my type,’ said Galich.
‘Seriously,’ Morin went on, ‘I do think it’s worth trying for as much, ah, mutual respect as possible. We all know how it can chafe at times. But you know the usual way things go, with the Glavlit rep as the perpetual outsider, always resented, always glanced at, always the bad guy who stops the writers doing what they want to do; and always knowing it too. In my experience, if you treat someone that way, they live up to it, or rather down to it. They’ll say no out of spite. But this way, you show a little respect, you build up a little trust, and it’s … money in the bank. Glavlit aren’t unreasonable, if you approach them the right way. They have their responsibilities, of course, who doesn’t, but there’s always a certain amount of room for manoeuvre, if you’ve shown yourself trustworthy. And Marfa Timofeyevna is a woman with some sensibility, you saw that. I don’t know if you saw the Yevtushenko poem we were able to run, last month? It was very good; very strong.’
‘No, I must have missed that.’
‘Ah well, the point is that when it mattered, when there was something I really needed to get through, I could. I could look after my writers: that’s extremely important to me.’
Galich nodded sagely. Ah, that kind of lunch. But what if, he didn’t say, the censor’s spite was not just their own? What if the spite was shared and obdurate, and offered no room for manoeuvre, could be eased by no amount of charm? A couple of years back, judging that the spasm of hate stirred up by Stalin would have died away, and normal service been resumed, he’d dusted down an old play of his, about a typical Soviet family, by chance a Jewish one, and their struggles in the Patriotic War. In the stalls, at the rehearsal mounted for her, the censor turned to him and said, ‘Oh, so the Jews won the war for us now, did they?’ Nod and smile, nod and smile; back away from the misstep, Mr Sasha Ginzburg-working-as-Galich, before the contamination could spread. For a moment there, just a minute ago, he had thought that Morin meant to point out how convenient it was, always having the censor take the blame; and that would have been interesting, that might have been the seed from which more than a professional friendship could grow; but really, uncomfortable thoughts didn’t seem to be in Morin’s style.
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