Back through the corridors, back to the courtyard. No need to pull rank on a driver; he was part of a gaggle of jog-trotting emissaries, it turned out, military and civil, all clutching their piece of folded paper, all piling together into the two Chaikas nearest the gate, all sitting in sweaty silence together on the ride back through the strangely ordinary streets; all piling out in the cross-street and scattering on their errands.
*
Volodya panted up the procuracy stairs, crowd noise growing, and came out under the unprotected sky with his head ducked. The sun was the same, the smell was the same. The noise, in fact, was remarkably much the same. He gave the note to the monk-faced man, who was leaning on the parapet and smoking as if he had all the time in the world, and gingerly looked over himself. He had expected a riot, or something like it; but whatever was going on at the police station, the square only held a mass of people in the same state of calm wrath that he had seen before. Some were chanting and shouting at the empty balcony of the gorkom building: ‘Send out Mikoyan!’ ‘Give us Mikoyan!’ Many had sat down on the grass of the public garden, as if on a foodless picnic. The upturned faces shone like grains of rice.
‘Someone’s got their balls back, I see,’ said the civilian. ‘Here we go, then, lads. Not long now. You know the drill.’ The soldiers picked up their gear and started to line up along the parapet.
‘Cigarette?’ he said to Volodya.
‘I don’t,’ Volodya said. ‘It’s bad for the chest.’
‘No shit,’ said monk-face. He had a metal eye-tooth which showed when he grinned.
On rooftops all around the square, Volodya could see similar movement. A few people down below looked up and pointed, presumably seeing armed silhouettes appear against the rooflines. But most of the attention was reserved for the double line of soldiers filing in at the gorkom end of the square, to take up position on the steps. They had an officer with them, carrying a loudhailer.
‘All soldiers out of the crowd,’ he squawked. ‘All Komsomol out of the crowd. All militia out of the crowd. All comrades from the organs of security, out of the crowd.’ Trickles of faces started to work their way out of the mass, rice grains in motion, and shook themselves free at the square’s edges, walking away in the different greens of the Red Army and the police, in shirtsleeves and leather jackets and overalls. Some were carrying cameras and notebooks. The officer waited till they were clear. Then he lifted the bullhorn again.
‘This is an illegal demonstration. You are ordered to disperse immediately. Your grievances will be addressed.’
‘Calm down, general,’ someone shouted, and there was laughter.
‘Disperse immediately,’ said the officer.
‘Not till they speak to us,’ shouted another voice, and a roar of approval echoed off the buildings, dwindling into separate hubbubs, then into many different cries. ‘C’mon, you’re not going to shoot us!’ ‘You disperse!’ ‘Who are you to give orders?’ ‘Stand with the workers!’ ‘Send us Mikoyan!’ ‘Meat and milk and a pay rise!’
‘Go home,’ said the officer. Some new element in his voice made part of the crowd laugh again, but another part shifted nervously. ‘I will count to three,’ he said, ‘and if you do not begin to disperse, I will have no alternative and I will order my men to fire. One.’
The front rank of the soldiers on the gorkom stairs dropped to one knee and lifted their rifles till they pointed, not at the crowd, but at the sky overhead, like an honour guard at a very rowdy funeral. At this the collective voice of the crowd did change pitch; it dropped to an alarmed bass murmur, and those who were sitting on the grass scrambled to their feet. The edge of the crowd nearest the gorkom even fell back a few metres, shrinking away from the line of guns.
‘Two,’ shouted the officer. ‘For God’s sake, go home!’
The crowd wavered, but then someone cried out, ‘They won’t shoot at the people,’ and forward surged the strikers again, the people at the front less enthusiastic but borne on by the press from behind.
‘Three,’ bellowed the officer, into sudden silence. The crowd stood. The soldiers waited. The officer helplessly pulled out his pistol and fired it into the air over his head, a tinny little crack; at the signal the kneeling troopers let off a rolling volley, much louder, and puffs of gun-smoke rose up from the gorkom steps. Cries of fear, backwards stumbling in the square, then confused realisation that no one was hurt. Calls to and fro, shouts front to back in the crowd, like the telegraph of voices that had broadcast Kurochkin’s offence yesterday morning; and the calls turning, unbelievably, nightmarishly, to reassurance. ‘Stand firm!’ ‘They won’t shoot the people!’ ‘It’s only blanks!’ Volodya heard one woman directly below crying, ‘They’re shooting, they’ll kill us,’ but immediately a male voice answered, ‘Are you out of your mind? In our time?’ And the crowd, which had looked as if it might shiver apart, solidified again.
‘Tsk, tsk,’ said monk-face. ‘Much too brave.’
Volodya craned forward, looking for the reinforcements who must surely now pour out of the side streets to shove the strikers back by main force, to beat them back with batons maybe, but a hammer-blow of sound fell on his right ear, dazing him. The world rang; then rang again, monstrously loud, and dulling as the hammerblows came over and over, on top of one another. Someone else was shooting. Not the soldiers on the gorkom steps: they were reeling too, looking wildly around from side to side, trying to work out where the new gunfire was coming from. It was the crew on Volodya’s rooftop who were doing it, and the crews on the other rooftops, kneeling up at the parapets and firing down, spent cartridge cases spinning out of their rifles in slow fountains of brass. And these bullets were not disappearing into the blue, they were being drilled deliberately into the flesh of the crowd – which shook, which fissured, which fell apart and revealed that it was made only of the single bodies of men and women and children. A man of sixtysomething, grey beard, drinker’s cheeks, was turning baffled on the spot just where Volodya was looking, everyone around him lurching into motion. Just where one of his neighbours with the guns was looking too, evidently: the near side of the old man’s head caved in, the far side blew out in a geyser of red and grey. A woman holding a baby got the spray in her face and began to scream, but no sound reached Volodya at all. He screamed himself; he turned around and waved his arms in the face of the monk-faced man, and shouted ‘Stop! Stop! What are you doing?’
The monk-faced man reached out big, soft, well-cared-for hands and seized Volodya’s wrists; pulled him close so that he could speak into Volodya’s ear.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit down, son, and shut up. Be grateful you’re up here, and not down there.’
Volodya folded up against the parapet, but he could still see through the gap between the plaster pillars. He could see people trying to run, now, but moving with dream slowness, with mouths working to push out syllables of fear one by one, while the bullets tore along, perfectly brisk; tore along, and through. He saw a man stumble and fall because his leg now hinged in a new place, at a crater halfway up his thigh. He saw blood running from ears. He saw blood with teeth in it. He saw a face pulped. He saw a knee burst. It made no sense. Was the mind supposed to attack the body? Did the head reach down and start chewing at the fibres of the arm? It made no sense! Volodya had wondered – you always wondered, if you were in the lucky generation born later – how he would have done in the war; and always suspected that he might be a usefully cold fish in battle, able to choose not to care much about suffering, if it wasn’t his own, since what he felt for other people was so much more often annoyance than anything stronger. But he’d been wrong. There was no choosing in it. He saw, and something dreadful built in his face, sorrow or fear (was there any difference) pumping all the tissues round his eyes up to a pressure that tears didn’t relieve. They ran down his face, but they would have had to break out of him as hard and fast as the rounds from the rifles to make any difference. Windows were breaking now, at the corners
of the square with Moscow Street and Podtelkov Street, as the guns chased the crowd in the direction it had come. The plate glass of the hairdressing salon shattered. A middle-aged hairdresser blew across the room and ceased to be. The shooting went on, and on, and on. And Volodya wrapped his arms around his head, and was, indeed, grateful.
When the shooting stopped, the square was empty, except for the bodies, some moving, some not. Two new smells ruled in it now: the burnt smell of cordite and a fresh hot reek like a butcher’s shop just after the stock van arrives. Volodya dragged back to the stairway in the wake of the descending soldiers, his feet jingling on spent brass. At the first landing he was abruptly sick. The monk-faced man companionably waited for him, and lit another cigarette.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said.
No, I won’t, vowed Volodya. No I won’t.
Notes – III.2 The Price of Meat, 1962
1 Volodya stood by the parapet at the edge of the flat roof of the city procuracy: although Volodya himself is invented, along with Basov the regional first secretary, and the situation that Volodya finds himself in with his seniors disgraced, the Novocherkassk massacre of 3 June 1962 was all too real. My main source was Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk 1962 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 3, 1918–1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation V–VII, translated by H. T.Willetts (London: Collins/Harvill, 1978), pp. 506– 14, contains a passionate and horrified account of the massacre, but it was compiled in the rumour-chamber of samizdat, and is not reliable in detail. For an eye-witness account, drawn on by Baron, see Piotr Siuda, ‘The Novocherkassk Tragedy, June 1–3 1962’, Russian Lur Review 2, 1993.
2 Red flags flying, portraits of Lenin held high: Samuel Baron conjectures that the strikers, having no model for the act of going on strike that was ordinary and moderate and civic, may have found themselves imitating revolutionary behaviour as they had seen it in Soviet film and drama, because it was the only model of mass action that was available to them.
3 The grey pea soup and gristle served in their canteen: all the details of food are authentic.
4 Only to see the visitors from Moscow pouring out of the building: the panicky retreat from the Party office on the square to the barracks is factual, but I have confabulated the convoy of Chaikas.
5 The special forces squad had rescued them at dawn: true, but the idea of the local apparatchiks being carried around as an object-lesson in blame is my invention.
6 Putting in his footsoldier-time at some convenient raikom or gorkom in the Moscow region: a ‘raikom’ was a Party committee for a county, and a ‘gorkom’ was the same thing for a town, while an ‘obkom’, one step further up the ladder, was a committee for a whole region.
7 Even with his spets for the party store: a ‘spets’ was the document that gave you access to a spetsraspredelitel’, a closed distribution system for goods. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, for the 1930s beginning of such arrangements; Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), for their later growth and elaboration.
8 But Kurochkin, to his horror, had followed him: the scene in the conference room is all confabulation, from the humilation of Kurochkin (the real, historical director of the Budenny Electric Locomotive Factory in Novocherkassk) to the means by which Kozlov and Mikoyan reached their decision, though it appears to be true that Kozlov was pushing for the military option and Mikoyan was reluctant.
9 It had been a little after eight o’clock yesterday morning: Volodya’s memory of Kurochkin’s disastrous performance in front of the crowd is faithful to fact, including the ‘let them eat liver pies’ moment. I am not aware that anyone at the time noticed the Marie Antoinette parallel.
10 From the receiver, Volodya could hear the thready murmur of a voice familiar from newsreels: for Khrushchev’s part in events, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 519–23.
11 Shots have been fired at the central police station: I have compressed the timeline, but this was the report that trigged the decision to suppress the strike by force. It is not clear whether a genuine violent attack was underway, or whether this was another piece of naively insurrectionary behaviour by people who were unpractised at protest.
12 ‘And get me some real grub,’ he was saying. ‘This place is such a fucking hole …’: relocated to this moment, but an authentic remark by Kozlov in Novocherkassk. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 522.
13 ‘All soldiers out of the crowd,’ he squawked: the sequence of what the officer on the gorkom steps said to the crowd is genuine, although I have confabulated direct speech out of reports of subject matter. The slogans of the crowd are real, and so is the strikers’ tenacious refusal to believe they could be under real threat.
14 ‘Are you out of your mind? In our time?’: authentic incredulity. Samuel Baron suggests that the main reference in the strikers’ memories for a demonstration that was fired upon will have been ‘Bloody Saturday’ in 1905, when workers loyally carrying pictures of the Tsar were attacked by Cossacks. But that was part of the official iconography of Tsarist iniquity. The speaker here seems to have been taking it for granted that nothing of the sort could happen in the modern, enlightened country where he lived.
15 It was the crew on Volodya’s rooftop who were doing it: at this point, the narrative becomes contentious. It is not clearly established who did the actual shooting at Novocherkassk – the regular soldiers on the gorkom steps, the Interior Ministry troops who had been drafted into the town, or some other group brought in by the security services. Nor is it clear where they were shooting from. Baron’s Bloody Saturday outlines several possible scenarios, and I have chosen one.
16 The far side blew out in a geyser of red and grey: the details of the massacre are mixture of real and imaginary. The grey-bearded drinker shot in the head is imaginary; the nursing mother sprayed with blood and brains is not, and neither is the hairdresser ceasing to be in the salon up the street. Baron has a complete list of the dead.
The old man took the bag in his teeth, and began to climb to heaven. He climbed and climbed – he climbed for a long time. The old woman asked: ‘Is it still far, old man?’ He was about to say ‘Not far’, when the bag dropped out of his teeth. The old woman fell to the ground and was smashed to bits. The old man climbed down from the cabbage stalk and picked up the bag, but in it there were only bones, and even they were broken into little pieces.
PART IV
The same afternoon that twenty-eight people died on the square in Novocherkassk, Khrushchev gave a speech to an audience of Soviet and Cuban teenagers. He was supposed to be talking about something quite different: instead, compulsively, he talked about the price rise. He told the young people what he’d hoped Mikoyan and Kozlov would be able to make the strikers believe, that having more expensive meat and butter would make agriculture ‘rise as if on yeast!’ He turned it and turned it about. ‘What were we supposed to do?’ He said the government had trusted in the good sense of citizens. ‘We decided to tell the people and the party the truth.’ Knowing what we know now, it is hard not to hear a confused anger. The Politburo’s announcement had come as a shock to a population which had been trained to expect prices only ever to fall, but it represented one of the few occasions in Soviet history where the decision-makers genuinely tried to share their reasoning with the public. Khrushchev had taken the advice of experts. He had tried to do the virtuous thing, the anti- Stalinist thing, and it had just made him a mass-murderer again.
The teenagers may have been puzzled by his mood, but no one detected any incongruity, that day or the next day, or for many years after, because, of course, the Soviet people were certainly not told the truth about what had happened at Novocherkassk. Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground, and when stains still remained, the square was repaved overnight with a fresh layer of asphalt. The bodies were distributed to five different cemete
ries, and buried anonymously, in graves already filled with more peaceful bones. Relatives were never told what had become of the dead. It was as if they had suddenly evaporated. Not a word about the massacre appeared in the newspapers, or on the radio or television; and great pressure was applied to the students and workers of the town to doubt the evidence of their senses, or, if they stubbornly insisted on remembering, to do so at least in silence and in private. There had been some unrest, provoked by a handful of troublemakers, now all tried and convicted for their crimes. The authorities had stepped in, calm had been restored, end of story.
Since no one knew different, except in Novocherkassk itself, and later on in samizdat whisperings, the massacre damaged nobody’s reputation. Frol Kozlov continued as Khrushchev’s heir apparent till he had a stroke the following April. Anastas Mikoyan went on being the civilised man of Soviet politics. Far more powerful in their effect were the events played out, unignorably, in public: the missile crisis Khrushchev blundered into in the autumn, which killed nobody but might have killed billions, and the next year’s atrocious wheat crop, which put paid to his predictions of yeast-like success in agriculture. Khrushchev was by this time gleamingly bald, except for a white fuzz above each ear. Contemporary joke: What do you call Khrushchev’s hairdo? ‘Harvest of 1963’. Compared to these, the massacre at Novocherkassk caused nothing to happen. It had no consequences anywhere – except in the thinking of the Politburo.
*
By 1963, almost all the elements seemed to be coming together in Academician Nemchinov’s scheme to reform the Soviet economy mathematically. New cybernetics institutes and departments had sprung up right across the Soviet Union, and were hurrying to complete pieces f the puzzle; or perhaps of several different puzzles. Mathematical models were being built for supply, demand, production, transportation, factory location, short-term planning, long-term planning, sectoral and regional and national and international planning. Automated control systems for factories had been commissioned. A group of Red Army cyberneticians were proposing an all-Union data network that could be used by civilians and the military alike. But Nemchinov himself was no longer in charge. Another casualty of 1963, he was now too ill to go on acting as patron and progress-chaser-in-chief to the proliferating, multiplying discipline he’d helped to guide into existence. When his own base of operations in the Academy expanded into the fully autonomous TSEMI, the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute, with a building out among the muddy new boulevards of the Sparrow Hills and a banner in the hall reading ‘Comrades, Let’s Optimise!’, he could not be its director. The alliances he had created would have to work by themselves. ‘The main task’, he had told a new conference at Akademgorodok, was now ‘the widespread introduction of the results of research’. Others were less sure that the research was ready, or that it all pointed in the same direction. Academician Glushkov’s group down in Kiev favoured the direct cybernetic control of the entire economy, eliminating the need for money altogether. The Akademgorodok crowd called for rational pricing. An economist from Kharkov by the name of Evsei Liberman had made a big splash in Pravda by urging for profit to become the main indicator of industrial success. But the premise of the whole intellectual effort was the practical improvement, very soon, of the Soviet economy; of all its ten thousand enterprises, and of the systems that integrated and co-ordinated them. The countdown to paradise in the Party Programme required the economy to grow, through the 1960s, at the rate it had in the official figures for the 1950s:10.1%. The economists had undertaken to support this by bringing theory swiftly down to the shopfloor. Mines, department stores, chemical plants, fur farms, freight depots: all of it had to be optimised.
Red Plenty Page 24
