8 A beautiful paper at the end of last year had skewered Academician Glushkov’s hypercentralised rival scheme: see Vsevolod Pugachev, ‘Voprosy optimal’nogo planirovaniia narodnogo khoziaistva s pomoshch’iu edinoi gosudarstvennoi seti vychistel’nykh tsentrov’, Voprosy Ekonomiki (1964) no. 7, pp. 93–103. No English translation. According to Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought, Pugachev was a TSEMI economist deployed to Gosplan who had gone over to the planners’ critique of mathematical reform.
9 They had decided he’d better not, for obvious reasons: I have once again exaggerated and coarsened Kantorovich’s unworldliness. He was not a skilled politician, but in this case he served alongside Aganbegyan on the ‘Commission of 18’ tasked by the Academy to prepare its submission on the reform.
10 An optimal plan is by definition a profitable plan: from Kantorovich, The Best Use of Economic Resources.
11 There was a report in January in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta: Emil is referring to Sokolov, Nazarov and Kozlov, ‘The Firm and the Customer’, cited above.
12 We should let a machine take over a job as sensitive as deciding prices?: See the discussion in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR, of which elements were, and were not, usually adopted when an ‘optimal plan’ had been drawn up for some Soviet institution.
13 ‘He liked to smash telephones,’ said Emil: true. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, for the uninhibited management styles of Stalin’s industrial barons like Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze. The Committee on Labour was Lazar Kaganovich’s last major appointment. He was pushed out of the Presidium in disgrace by Khrushchev in 1957 as one of the ‘anti-Party group’, and sent to run the Urals Potash Works in Solikamsk, Perm Province. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 369.
14 I specialise more in, uh, organisation, and, uh, psychology: an anecdote taken from Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, pp. 213– 14. Apparently Brezhnev made little rotary hand movements in the air as he said it.
15 ‘Do you know what my first job was, when I got back from the war?’: the details of the rota, the delivery vans and the incinerator are all invented, but the postwar burning of the bonds is real. See Hachten, Property Relations. The currency reform of 1947, which converted old roubles to new roubles in savings accounts at the rate of 10:1 while keeping prices the same, was another deliberate move to abolish the state’s liabilities. And Khrushchev did it again when, on 8 April 1957, he deferred the repayment of all outstanding bond issues ‘for 20–25 years’, and the 3% interest dn them too, which had been paid out as lottery prizes to bondholders. But in this last case, the gain to citizens’ pay-packets in not having to buy any more new bonds outweighed the theoretical loss of all their previous subscriptions. See James R. Miller, ‘History and Analysis of Soviet Domestic Bond Policy’, Soviet Studies 27 no. 4 (1975), p. 601; and Franklyn D. Holzman, ‘The Soviet Bond Hoax’, Problems of Communism 6, no. 5 (1957), pp. 47–9.
3.
Psychoprophylaxis, 1966
Fyodor’s mother, unfortunately, was still attractive to men. When they got the new flat and she moved in with them, forty-seven years old and skinny as a schoolgirl, with black eyes snapping up what they saw and black arcs of eyebrow pencilled above, along came Ivanov, a foreman from the plant where she worked, though he had a family of his own in a building nearby. They sat at the new kitchen table, the two of them, drinking and laughing and making up to each other as if they were teenagers. Ivanov was forever wiping his mouth with his fingers, and then wiping his fingers on the edge of the tablecloth. Fyodor didn’t mind; he laughed along with them. It was normal to him. When he was growing up she’d always had boyfriends, his father being out of the picture, usually men with some leverage to offer in the thousand skirmishes of communalka life, and since they were all packed in six or seven to a room, there was not much mystery to what Mama got up to under the blanket with her latest beau. The only time he put his foot down was when he needed peace for his Party paperwork, or to do his homework for his law course. He was registered with the All-Union Legal Correspondence Institute, and there was an essay a week for him to write, left hand propping his forehead and tugging at his clean black hair, textbooks spread out round him on the tabletop. This, his mother respected. Fyodor was on the rise; he was going to be a big man someday, a judge or maybe something at the obkom. On the whole she approved of Galina as a trophy of that rise, a fancy wife for a working boy made good, though speaking personally rather than categorically she made it clear enough she thought her soft-headed and impractical. On essay nights she tiptoed round Fyodor, snatching the little plates of nuts or salami Galina had made so that she could be the one to slide them reverently into his peripheral vision.
‘All right, son?’
‘Thanks, ma.’
But the noise she made when she and Ivanov were at it in the bedroom! It came right through the thin walls. Galina could hardly bear to meet any of their eyes in the mornings, when they all packed round the stove to slurp black tea and jam before work, as if Fyodor and his mother and Ivanov belonged to some slightly different species which by nature clustered close, at ease in the straw, pushing into the envelope of heat and noise and smell made by each other’s bodies. Galina had not spent her childhood nights in the shared sweat of a communalka. She had slept in clean sheets in her own room in the manager’s little house by the railroad line, with a doll dressed in a embroidered gown leaning against the mirror and her Pioneer uniform hanging neatly from a hook in the wall. The coal trains had clanked out mineral lullabies. When she tried to raise the matter, in a delicate and tactful way, her mother-in-law only said, ‘D’you think we can’t hear the two of you?’
They probablyld. She did not think about it when it was not happening, but in bed Fyodor made her tremble and shake and break loose from herself in a way she had no idea how to fit together with the person she was in daylight. It had been true right from the beginning, from the first time she saw him again, six months after the disaster at the American exhibition. Fyodor’s report had got her into the trouble that had lost her Volodya; then it had got her out of trouble again, or at least limited the trouble so that the way she had behaved could be put down as nothing more damaging than a character flaw. The word ‘hysterical’ appeared several times. She was a hysteric rather than a security risk, forever on file now as somebody too panicky for the kind of joint Party career she and Volodya had imagined, but still quite acceptable as, for example, a Party wife for someone starting a little lower down. Fyodor was good at pressing exactly the right buttons, it seemed, when he saw something he wanted. And what he wanted, it turned out, was her. ‘Give us a kiss then,’ he said, when she stammered her thanks. They were on the river embankment, a place where kisses were unremarkable, so she stepped forward to give him a dry-mouthed peck of gratitude and he ran a finger down her spine while she was doing it. A quite new and disturbing ripple of feeling followed his finger; she shivered and choked, because her mouth was suddenly wet. ‘Oh,’ said Fyodor, grinning at her, squinting at her from close up; ‘Oho,’ he said, as if his suspicion had been confirmed. And he pulled off her beret and put it in his jacket pocket.
So they were married; so she had a life in Moscow, after all. It just didn’t quite seem to be hers. She worked as a nutritionist at the office supervising workplace meals for the north-western sector of the city, and at the end of the day she walked back to the flat from the new metro station, across the gouged earth of the micro-region, carrying a string bag of food, some bought, some taken as her share from the model kitchen in the office where recipes were tested. Fyodor brought home luxuries, thanks to his contacts: a washing machine, a telephone along with a man to install it. ‘D’you want a piano?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a line on one.’ She shrugged; she had never really cared one way or the other about music. But he got the piano anyway, for everyone knew that it was part of the good life to have a piano, and there it sat unplayed in its dust cover, brown and gold.
Fyodor was as ambitious as Volo
dya had been, but in a very different vein; not with the placid determination to better something he already had, but scrambling up, pushing himself up the slope before him with his elbows out and his legs kicking and his hands grabbing at whatever seemed to offer a purchase. There was something untidy about his energy; careless, even. He never seemed to have to compose himself, as she and her university friends had done, to say the things that would make the right impression. He said the right things copiously, effortlessly, it having apparently never occured to him that you could care enough about the content of politics to say anything except what you were supposed to say. There was nothing to be careful about, as far as he was concerned. The world was what it was. That was that.
He laughed a lot, and he hung out with other men who laughed easily too; beefy men a little older than him, mostly; back-slappers, drink-standers, middle-rankers, who looked out for chances to do each other some good. Sometimes he needed her to come along when he and his cronies went junketing, and she’d dance with Fyodor on the darkened little dancefloor of a restaurant, feeling inside the stir of helpless reaction to him as they boogied about, and on her skin the eyes of the other men appraising her as they circled by holding their wives, solid ladies e wascounting or Procurement with beehive hairdos and party frocks in orange or lime-green orlon. Galina was the youngest one. Then back to the table for saucers of pineapple chunks and interminable toasts in sticky liqueur. Fyodor didn’t seem to mind the way the gazes ate her up. She turned round one time in a restaurant, coming back from the buffet, and found him and one of the friends staring at her thighs together, with their heads tilted at exactly the same angle and identical appreciative smirks on their faces, as if her flesh were something good on TV. She didn’t see her own friends any more. Her parents came to visit once, and she watched Fyodor working like a safecracker on her gruff father, who had expected better for her, till he too grinned and guffawed and started to say what a good fellow she’d found. Her mother gave her one look of helpless anxiety as they were going. And that was that.
But it bothered Fyodor that laughter didn’t work on her. On a night at the flat when he and his mother and Ivanov were roaring at some comedy show on the television in the corner – that got used, all right – and her face was aching from smiling politely for so long, he chased her into the kitchen as she was clearing a tray of glasses away, and tried to tickle her. The prodding fingers put her in a panic. Far from relaxing she drew back into a crouch; she cowered, covering her head with her hands. Somehow his pulls and grabs to make her come back out grew angrier and angrier, as if he thought she was acting this way to spite him, and then he punched her. It hurt less than she would have guessed a fist would, at first – just a numb jolt to the eyesocket. He backed away staring. Then he made a gesture as if he were throwing a disgusted double handful of air at her, and went back to the hilarity next door. Not knowing what else to do, she went to bed. The sounds from the living room seemed no different from usual, and he didn’t come to bed until after she was asleep.
‘About last night,’ he said in the hall next morning, not meeting her eye. ‘That’s not how I want things to be. It won’t happen again. But it would help if you didn’t needle me when I’m plastered. Have a bit of sense, eh?’ She nodded, though she didn’t remember needling him.
‘You missed a bit,’ said a woman at the office she’d never liked, and drew her into the toilet to dab powder onto her cheekbone where the bruise-purple was showing through. ‘There.’
Sometimes she had the urge to run. She thought about just going to the station and buying a ticket home; letting Moscow dwindle to a departing view from the window of the long green train east, folding itself up, tucking itself back to nothing, like a paper sculpture being put away; just an idea that hadn’t worked out. But then what would she have to show for any of it? So she stayed, and she stayed. And now it was too late. The baby was coming. Everyone knew that youth ended with the first child, and she had waited as long as she dared – two more abortions – but Fyodor said the time was right to start a family. They had the space, and his degree would be done with in just a few more months, and then he’d be out of the electric plant for ever. She felt the orange orlon descending towards her like a shroud.
‘Listen to this,’ said Fyodor one Sunday morning in November. He was reading the court reports in the newspaper. ‘This is great. A nice little puzzle.’
‘What?’ she said, turning from the sink and crossing her wet hands over her belly.
‘Apparently, the deputy director of a pig farm’s on trial for speculation under Article 154, because he used farm funds to buy load of timber that the quarry next door was going to burn off. He said he needed the wood to build sties or the pigs would all snuff it this winter. Quote, “When arrested he claimed he had been acting in the interests of the state.” What d’you think the story was there, then?’
‘You mean, why he really did it?’ she offered.
‘No,’ said Fyodor impatiently. ‘It’s obvious why he did it. He’d’ve been in the shit if the pigs had died. Not as much shit as he’s in now, but he didn’t know that. Anyone would have done it. It stands to reason. The question is –’
‘Why it’s in the news?’
‘No. Shut up a minute, can’t you? The question is, why he got caught. Now, if I were on the panel for a case like this, I’d be looking at the guy, and I’d be thinking: dimwit, blabbermouth or pain in the ass? Because this is simple stuff, this is just your most basic supply swap. So either this guy is too stupid to pull it off – and I’d say that the money was a point in favour of this theory, because he could have paid in bacon, for heaven’s sake – or else he’s incredibly indiscreet, and he’s been talking about his dear old pigs freezing to death so loud and so long in the wrong kind of places that someone virtually had to look into it. Or, option three, he’s annoyed somebody, he’s just the kind of fellow who pisses people off, and now the word has come down, make a bit of an example of someone in your district this quarter, so that the thievery doesn’t get out of hand, everyone thinks, who deserves to be in the shit, who’s been making a nuisance of himself. So, I’d be looking at him for the little signs –’
And Fyodor was off, his hands on the tabletop in quick motion, his face full of the pleasure of attending to his own clear grasp of the world; and Galina found it easy to picture him in a few years’ time, sitting on the bench with two other judges, blank and dignified of expression then of course, yet still alert, interested, inclining his head to detect the traces of the crime the court had really gathered to punish. Culpable lack of smarts, is it? Or culpable excess of speech; or culpable failure to be likeable. He was going to look good in a robe.
‘So which d’you think?’ Fyodor was saying. ‘Hello?’
‘Oh,’ said Galina, painfully certain of being disappointing. ‘I –’ But she was saved from having to answer by a gush of liquid pattering on the floor around her feet.
‘What’s that?’ said Fyodor.
‘I think my waters have broken,’ she said. And then a sensation assailed her that she had never felt before; quite faint, but definite, a tightening, gripping motion of muscles deep inside her that had never, in her whole life, sent her a signal before, but which now wished to announce that they were present, and would be squeezing when they felt like it, irrespective of the softness of what they squeezed.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Oh shit,’ said Fyodor. ‘Ma!’
His mother sat with her while he rang to call for the ambulance, and while he ran downstairs to wait for it at the front door of the block.
‘Don’t worry, Princess,’ she said. ‘You won’t remember it afterwards.’
*
quiet for Sunday afternoon. Fyodor looked nervously at his watch several times, as if they might be late for something; he held her hand but said very little. Neither did the midwife who had come with the neat little white ambulance van, once she had satisfied herself that nothing urgent was happeni
ng. She spent the journey writing something lengthy on many pages of lined paper. Galina assumed it must be medical records the woman was writing up but when she stole a look over her shoulder it turned out to be a letter, a dreary series of complaints about slights she had received from various people. As her pencil moved her head in its white cap like a fabric flowerpot nodded up and down. Galina felt most strange. The contractions only came at long intervals yet even in the spaces between them her body felt indefinably different; or perhaps the world did. Everything that was not her body seemed to have moved further away, into a state of floating inconsequence. She looked out of the ambulance window at low clouds roofing the city in dirty pearl, and she felt a kind of hungriness for the life going quietly on out there, for the putting on of gloves and the greeting of acquaintances, but she had already left it, it had already receded; it was flowing along in a separate stream, distant and unreachable on the other side of the glass.
At the maternity home Fyodor positively jumped out, and bustled around while she was being signed in and changed into a hospital gown. As soon as he had her street clothes bundled up on his arm he darted forward to kiss her cheek and stroke her head – and then he was backing, dwindling, absenting himself from the scene, with an expression of obvious relief on his face. Out through the doors; gone. She didn’t blame him. She would have liked to be able to step away herself, and let the birth happen to someone else.
‘Well, you got a good-looking one,’ said the new midwife who had taken charge of her, a big woman in her fifties with a face beneath the white flowerpot that seemed to disapprove of the world, and to disapprove of it with a perfect right, as if she were everyone’s righteous, put-upon auntie. ‘Two of a kind, I suppose,’ she said, looking at Galina. She didn’t make it sound like a compliment. ‘Right, follow me.’ She led Galina along a corridor, and round a corner into a room with shower stalls and toilets in it, and a pair of examination couches. Everything was white tiles, but not very clean ones, once you got close up to them; there was a speckling of brown mould on the grout, and when Galina had to stop and lean on a wall, her hand came away slightly sticky.
Red Plenty Page 36
