6 He had brought it back himself, by train from Berlin: a little later he could, if he were very lucky, have bought it from a popular Moscow showroom for East German goods. Under communism, East Germany continued to manufacture office furniture to 1920s and 1930s designs, some of them rather stylish; and it was unusual too, for an Eastern Bloc country, in having a substantial industry producing plastic homewares, which were held up as a sign of socialist rationality. See Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). An equivalent to Galina in the GDR would not have been so impressed by the little beakers in Sokolniki Park.
7 Chemical-industry input coefficients: a planner’s tool giving standardised proportions of the inputs required to produce a unit of a given output, the idea being that all enterprises could be kept up to a set level of efficiency by supplying them only with the appropriate level of materials. Also known as input norms. For the pitfalls of this system, and the tendency for the norms to proliferate into a mass of exceptions, and rules applying to one factory only, see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
8 ‘That’s how the steel was tempered,’ he said: Mokhov is alluding to the title of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s famous socialist-realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), which had become a common catchphrase. Computer programmers at Akademgorodok shouted it in August 1960 as they fought with the construction workers who kept turning off their power supply. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
9 The balances were kept in a long, library-like room lined with filing cabinets: the individual balances looked as I describe them here, and as a paper system they worked in the way I describe, and they must certainly have been kept in filing cabinets in a room (or rooms) in Gosplan, but this particular room I have invented. The Soviet gorgon with hair the colour of dried blood is a generic gorgon, from Central Casting.
10 A workspace where there was a convenient spare abacus: the most common calculating device throughout the history of Soviet Russia, and slightly different in construction from a Chinese abacus. See Wikipedia for description and photograph.
11 373 folders, each holding work-in-progress on the balance for a commodity: the number of these most strategic commodities, also known as ‘funded commodities’, was diminishing in an attempt to make the system more manageable. There’d been 892 of them in 1957, and 2,390 in 1953 – but the deleted ones were presumably reappearing in the wider category of ‘planned commodities’, which didn’t need their balances signed off by the Council of Ministers but still had to be calculated by Gosplan. When these were included, Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations went up from c.4,000 typescript pages in twenty-two volumes to c.11,500 pages in seventy volumes. Figures all from Gertrude E. Schroeder, ‘The “Reform” of the Supply System in Soviet Industry’, Soviet Studies, vol. 24 no. 1, July 1972, pp. 97–119.
12 A little problem with Solkemfib, the viscose plant at Solovets: Solkemfib is an invented addition to the genuine portfolio of new-generation chemical fibre plants that were opening in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. I’ve picked up details for Solkemfib from Ye. Zhukovskii, ‘Building the Svetlogorsk Artifical Fiber Plant’, Sovetskaya Belorussya, 2 December 1962; translated in USSR Economic Development, No. 58: Soviet Chemical Industry, US Dept of Commerce Joint Publications Research Service report 18,411, 28 March 1963, pp. 17–20. The town of Solovets, on the other hand, is allusive rather than just illusory. There was a real place of that name, an island in the White Sea where some of the nastiest atrocities in the early history of the Gulag took place. The name was borrowed by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the 1965 novel Monday Begins on Saturday, to give a little unacknowledgeable satirical edge to the town off in the northern forests somewhere where the institute for studying magic stands. And I’ve borrowed it in turn, to give my viscose factory a fantastical (and slightly sinister) frame.
13 Really, it was only salt, sulphur and coal in, viscose out: exhaustive descriptions of the viscose production process can be found on Wikipedia. Wood (pine/fir/larch/aspen) is boiled up with sodium bisulphite in digesters to give a special grade of cellulose called ‘dissolving pulp’, which is then steeped in sodium hydroxide (lye), squeezed out, crumbled, and aged in the oxygen of the air, before being churned with the industrial solvent carbon disulphide. This gives you cellulose xanthate, which is chemically viscose, but not yet in usable form; so you dissolve it again in more sodium hydroxide, and squirt it through spinnerets into a ‘spin bath’ of sulphuric acid, where the viscose liquid becomes filaments which can be stretched, wound, washed, bleached, rewashed and dried as viscose yarn. This is the form of viscose that can be woven as ‘rayon’ or ‘art silk’, as in Leonid Vitalevich’s necktie in part II chapter 1. Squirted through different spinnerets, however, the liquid can become viscose tyre cord or even cellophane. Solkemfib is not in the cellophane business. It clearly has one line set up for fabric and the other for cord. Of the three basic inputs Mokhov mentions, you need the salt to make the lye and the sodium bisulphite, the sulphur to make the sodium bisulphite, the carbon disulphide and the sulphuric acid, and the coal to make the carbon disulphide. Simple though these inputs are, they will still have put the Soviet viscose industry in competition for raw materials with soap-making, rubber-vulcanising, glue-manufacturing, ore-processing, petroleum-refining, steel-galvanising, brass-founding, metal-casting and fertiliser-producing. For an outline of the different industries’ interconnecting needs, see Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.
14 The original shortfall leaping from commodity to commodity: for the classic analysis of the reasons for inevitable, permanent shortage in ‘unreformed’ planned economies, see Janos Kornai, Economics of Shortage, vol. A (Amsterdam/Oxford/New York, 1980). Kornai points out that, as well as the ‘vegetative process’ by which in such a system evector sensibly overstates their needs, the system’s own insistence on perpetual growth ensures that any given supply of a material is going to be too little for what its users would want to do with it.
15 In theory … you would need to revise all the balances a minimum of six times over, and a maximum of thirteen times: see the very clear exposition of the theory, and the pragmatic Soviet ways around it, in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
16 It was the basis for Emil Shaidullin’s entertaining prediction: really a prediction by Abel Aganbegyan, made in 1964.
18 The PNSh-180-14s continuous-action engine for viscose: a real machine, referred to in ‘Results of the Work of the Chemical Fibres Industry for 1968’, Fibre Chemistry vol. 1 no. 2, March–April 1969, pp. 117–20; translation of Khimicheskie Volokna no. 2, March–April 1969, pp. 1–3. But I have no evidence that it was yet in production in 1963, and the technical upgrade, the figure of 17 for the annual output, the nomination of the Uralmash machine-building combine as its manufacturer, the description of it as a metal porcupine as big as a subway hall and the idea that it had its own balance at Gosplan all, all come straight out of the conjurer’s hat of invention.
18 The page in front of him was simplicity itself: taken from the model of a balance-page illustrated in Levine, ‘The Centralised Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’.
19 He was supposed to get chemical-fibre production up to 400,000 tonnes per annum by 1965: target taken from Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.
2.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1963
The light was fading as the train from Solovets left the forests behind, and snow swept past the window in bluish swathes. Out on the Moscow plain, factory walls rose higgledy-piggledy, first a few and then more and more, unstoppably, as if a sorcerer’s apprentice had been let loose to build industry and had just kept going, a coking plant here and a fractionating tower there, reduction gears here and solvents there, tractors and rifles, lathes and electro-plate, steel and brass and zinc and cement, da da da da-da-da dadada, the countermanding spell never uttered, until the same sig
hts repeated all the way along the railroad; the same dark clustered silhouettes of chimneys, the same girdered rooflines, the same gridded windows, the same branching tracks of rusty wagons, the same blocks of workers’ flats, with the snow rushing through and between, thick and soft, smoothing to blankness the churned mud and ice from which so many pipes, stakes, poles, reinforcing rods protruded, on which so many sacks, pallets, drums, bundles were piled. The snow rushed through, the train whirled by. Arkhipov pulled the curtains closed and turned back to the compartment.
‘Well,’ he said, slapping his knees, ‘who wants another drink?’
The flasks were out, and a chunk of sweating ham wrapped in newspaper, and a whole sausage, to be carved with a penknife. Arkhipov, Kosoy and Mitrenko; they were all getting pleasantly steamed, there in the prickly heat of the soft-class car. Mitrenko, Arkhipov and Kosoy; three big men, tightly filling their skins, all in high good humour. The tekhpromfinplan was in Arkhipov’s briefcase, up in the luggage rack, and they were off to the fleshpots together for the annual jamboree. Mitrenko’s wife and Kosoy’s had given their men shopping lists, detailed plans of campaign calling for raids on GUM and Gastronom No. 1 and Moda. Arkhipov’s lady was a little too high-minded, or absent-minded, to manage that kind of thing; but he had already resolved that when they boarded the train home he would be wrestling a new top-of-the-line radiogram up the steps for her, with an armful of discs to play. They might shop on their own account too, when the meetings and the hand-shaking were done. Late at night, in the bar of the Ukraina, you could meet obliging professional girls, offering the kind of entertainment in such short, such lamentably short supply in Solovets, where everyone knew everyone, and the hotel Icebound Sea faced across the town square in dismal competition with a closed ice-cream kiosk, the household goods store and a teashop run by the fisheries trust. Oh, the sorrows of provincial life! But, till next Thursday, they were out of it, and they grinned at each other, Kosoy and Mitrenko and Arkhipov, their moods buoyed up, as if by thousands of little bubbles, with the knowledge of boldness rewarded.
This time last year, how dismal they had been. Solkemfib, the three of them had understood by then, was a career-killer. For a while they had been able to kid themselves that there was something else to try, but now the truth had sunk in. Ahead of them lay the ignominious destiny of the failed executive. First would come the reprimands and the censures, then the newspaper article in that special voice of wide-eyed sarcasm. ‘Why has Director Arkhipov failed to fulfill his socialist pledges? His attitude can hardly be termed commendable. We asked Chief Accountant Kosoy to enlighten us, but he proved tongue-tied. Chief-of-Planning Mitrenko was no more helpful …’ Doors would slam shut whenever they needed the slightest favour, suppliers would sneer and shit on them with impunity, making things so humiliating and disagreeable that it would almost be a mercy when the final blow fell, and they were banished to run fertiliser sales in Buttfuckistan.
Maddening, that was the word for it; maddening that the path to career death was separated by only a few percentage points of plan fulfilment from the other one, the upward path, the road to glory and local fame, where the press printed photos of you looking resolute, and the regional secretary pinned the Red Banner to your lapel while the hall applauded, and the bonuses swelled. That was the incentive, of course; that was why the bonuses were highly geared, so that the difference to a manager between hitting 99% of the plan target and hitting 103% was not an extra 4% on the salary, but more like 40%. They wanted your whole attention on pushing the plant to do that little bit more that made the difference between failure and success. Hence the utter importance of plan bargaining; hence the necessity, in normal times, of low-balling your first production estimate, so that the sovnarkhoz’s reflexive upward correction would put the target back in the band you had privately calculated was achievable. The sovnarkhoz, needless to say, knew what you were doing, knew the first estimate was always going to be deceptive. The trick was to make the deception seem transparent, thus gently flattering them in their sense that they knew what was really going on. It should seem to be offering them a hint about where u thought the true figure ought to lie. Then they’d go a couple of points up on your implicit suggestion, and feel like winners if you went along with it; which you would, after a certain amount of nominal shrieking and groaning, because you’d been low-balling the implied suggestion too. The gameplay varied, depending on who, exactly, you were facing off with this year. You might have to get subtler, or get cruder; you might have to do something unexpected, if you found things had settled into a rut which made your moves too easy to predict. But the game went on, within bounds roughly agreed between the players. With good luck, you’d have a comfortable year, with bad luck you’d have an uncomfortable one. You ought not to have an impossible year.
But what if you found yourself stuck – fixed – nailed to the fucking floor – on the wrong side of the hair-thin line between glory and ignominy? What if your private knowledge of your plant’s true capacity told you that you had a problem beyond the scope of the game? Solkemfib was new, but it was not that new; by now, its managers were intimately clear about what they could and could not expect from the lovely new machinery. The viscose yarn line worked fine, the tyre cord line … did not. Or rather, it worked, and the wormlike filaments of viscose were stretched and strengthened as required as they were drawn out of the acid baths, and led away to be washed and dried and coiled onto wall-high racks of humming bobbins: but too slowly, altogether too slowly for Solkemfib’s PNSh-180-14S to satisfy any plan for tyre cord they might be able to bargain out of the sovnarkhoz. The sovnarkhoz would base its reasoning on the paper rating for the machine’s capacity, and the paper rating was simply too high, by an amount that added up to several hundred tonnes of tyre cord over a year. It might be that there was some kind of defect in their particular machine, though the mechanical engineer Ponomarev had climbed all over it looking, ingenious little goblin that he was, and not found anything; or it might be that the whole class of machines had been optimistically misrated by Uralmash. There was no way of knowing. For obvious reasons, it wasn’t possible to contact another viscose plant and compare notes. That would have revealed the disastrous weakness of their hand, at a point where one of their few advantages was their ability to keep things dark.
So they’d been low, this time last year, quiet and morose on the Moscow train, all too aware that their stopgap answer, the best they could do, was no answer at all, really. They’d hit the gross target for the year 1962 dead on, 100% delivered of the 14,100 tonnes of viscose planned, only with the mix of production deliberately skewed towards plain ordinary clothing yarn off Line No. 1. Whoops, so sorry, slight technical difficulties with No. 2, now resolved. In other circumstances you could run for years turning out the wrong assortment mix, but not this way around, when you were pleasing your consumer-facing customers, who had no clout at all, and pissing off the industrial ones, who could shout good and loud when their tyre machines had to power down for lack of cord to mould the rubber to. No doubt it was nice that Mayak and the other Moscow textile outfits were happy with their Solkemfib yarn, woven into rayon scarves and neckties etc. etc.; but Arkhipov, Mitrenko and Kosoy would have cheerfully seen them struggling to sew socks out of spoiled stock if they had been able to keep the auto combines smiling instead. Anything else would have been flat contrary to common sense. As it was, they knew that they had drawn on a very limited supply of indulgence, on the planners’ part; and the plan they had had to agree for this year had committed them to output from No. 2 that they were never going to achieve, no matter how many corners they cut. They could lean on Ponomarev all they liked to oveclock the machines, they could ‘storm’ night after night. Still the chickens were coming home to roost.
And the thing of it was, the most maddening part of the whole clusterfuck was, that a simple technical fix existed. Uralmash now produced, apparently, an upgraded PNSh-180-14S which, even allowing for the righteous scep
ticism recently implanted in the breasts of Kosoy, Mitrenko and Arkhipov, ought to make the fulfilment of present plans a breeze. But Solkemfib had a plant full of shiny, virtually mint equipment. Solkemfib would be so far to the back of the priority line in getting the upgrade that it would probably be two decades before the planners decided it was replacement time for the career-killing piece of shit in Spinning and Stretching Shop No. 2. There seemed to be no way of getting from where they were to where they needed to be; to the solution hovering just out of reach. No way, at any rate, within the terms of the planning game as they were used to playing it, with the usual level of risk and the usual level of fiddling, and the usual understanding between themselves and the sovnarkhoz over what the sovnarkhoz wouldn’t dig too deep into, as long as the viscose kept flowing.
Perhaps having to lie blandly in Moscow, last year, had encouraged creative thought. Maybe there had been something about sitting in the sovnarkhoz offices, and making promises they had no idea how to fulfil, which shook inspiration loose in them. Because it had been after that dismal journey that they began to see what they had to do, what a barefaced defection from the usual understanding was going to be required to sort this one out. What would be needed was a move in the game so outrageous that the planners would not recognise it as a move at all. They found it hard to believe what they were planning, at first. Certainly, they would never even have considered it, in the old days; and even now, they scarcely named it out loud to each other. And yet they understood each other very well.
Which of them first thought of Ponomarev? The mechanical engineer’s name came up, that was all, during one of the nightly card games at Arkhipov’s place, while the three of them were obsessively chewing the situation over, and over and over; and then, when he had been raised to mind, all three of them at the table under the hanging lamp had slowly smiled, all seeing the possibilities, all liking what they saw. Ponomarev was a funny fellow, a grizzled little creature with protruding eyes and skin so pale you could see the forked blue veins in his temples. ‘A real Siberian tan,’ said Mitrenko knowledgeably. He had been useful enough already, as an engineer. It was hard to get qualified staff to relocate to a hole like Solovets, let alone to tolerate the signature stink of the viscose process, now that Mr K. had removed most of the restrictions on workers’ mobility; so it had seemed like straightforward good luck when Arkhipov ran into him at a chemical-fibre conference in Almaty and discovered in him somebody who, for his own particular reasons, was willing, even eager, to endure the northern forest. Not that Ponomarev was attending the conference. He was repairing the hotel’s lift, and he happened to be there when Arkhipov, making a note of something, pulled out his fountain pen and found that it had leaked. ‘I can fix that for you,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the reservoir.’ ‘What, you’re a pen expert?’ said Arkhipov. ‘Any little thing,’ said Ponomarev. And he held out his hand. ‘How do I know you won’t run off with it?’ Arkhipov asked. ‘This is a good pen.’ Ponomarev shrugged. The pen was waiting at the front desk next morning, neatly mended with a little piece of rubber tubing from an eyedropper. When Arkhipov, curious, asked questions, and found that the handyman was more than a handyman, was in fact a trained engineer,nd in the right specialism too, Ponomarev explained his situation in a voice of extraordinary, colourless neutrality. If the Comrade Director wanted him, he would endeavour to justify the Comrade Director’s trust; but the Comrade Director would need to sponsor him for residence in European Russia. He had been imprisoned, but was now released; he had been under sentence of indefinite administrative exile, but was now free to travel, if he were given somewhere to travel to. From where he was standing, lost in the dust of Central Asia, Solovets was virtually on Moscow’s doorstep. It was a step almost all the way home. Arkhipov made enquiries, found no obstacles, and brought Ponomarev back to use his surprisingly illustrious education for Solkemfib’s benefit.
Red Plenty Page 27
