Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  6 More of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else: far more, for instance, than Britain, France or the United States in the most frenzied stages in the history of their industrial revolutions, or India and China now. In this highly specialised and fetishised sense, the USSR had indeed overtaken and surpassed. See Nove, Economic History of the USSR.

  7 The control system for industry grew more and more erratic: for the ever wilder game-playing by management, and ever more drastic surprise moves by planners, see Kuznetsov, ‘Learning in Networks’.

  8 One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value: see Hodgson, Economics and Utopia. His example is the men’s shirt so unwearably hideous that ‘even Soviet citizens’ would not touch it, woven from cotton that could have been sold on the world market for actual money.

  9 Indeed an emigré journal reported the rumour: see Dora Sturman, ‘Chernenko and Andropov: Ideological Perspectives’, Survey 1 (1984), pp. 1–21.

  10 Brezhnev-era Soviet joke-telling: for many, many real examples, see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’. The Brezhnev joke had a characteristic tone of near-endearment about it, as if the stupidity of what was being mocked was ultimately comfortable. For instance: the General Secretary is entering the third hour of his speech to the Party Congress when the comrades from the organs of security suddenly swoop and arrest a group of American spies in the audience. ‘Brilliant work!’ says Brezhnev. ‘But how did you pick them out?’ ‘Well,’ say the KGB men modestly, ‘as you yourself have observed, Comrade General Secretary, the enemy never sleeps …’

  11 Science … was to be ‘administered’ not ‘supported’: a deliberate change of vocabulary after 1965 by Brezhnev’s new Central Committee Secretary for Science, Trapeznikov. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.

  12 The discreet little unmarked offices of the security service’s Fifth Department: see Churchward, Soviet Intelligentsia.

  13 A minute fraction of the intelligentsia gave up on the Soviet system altogether: Churchward’s taxonomy of Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s classes 75% of them as ‘Careerist Professionals’, with most of the remainder accounted for by the various wings of the ‘Humanist Intelligentsia’ of the arts establishment. Everyone in the Akademgorodok sections of this book with the exception of Zoya Vaynshteyn and Mo would fall into the ‘Loyal Oppositionist’ subgroup of Churchward’s Careerists.

  14 Several times in the late 1960s and 1970s there were strikes: see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.

  15 Ty-mne, ya-tebe, ‘you to me and I to you’: the Russian proverb equivalent to ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’, but with particular blat associations. For this and other phrases of the blat vocabulary of the 1960s–1980s, see Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours.

  16 The vast majority of the Soviet population were, indeed, basically contented: for the lack of pressure from below for change, and the origin instead within the Party of the system’s collapse in the late 1980s, see Kotkin, Armageddon Averted. On the face of it, one of the great historical mysteries of the twentieth century should be the question of why the Soviet reformers of the 1980s didn’t even consider following the pragmatic Chinese path, and dismantling the economic structure of state socialism while keeping its political framework intact. Instead, the Soviet government dismantled the Leninist political structure while trying with increasing desperation to make the planned economy work. But the mystery resolves rather easily if it is posited that Gorbachev and the intellectuals around him, all children of the 1930s and young adults under Khrushchev, might strange to say have been really and truly socialists, guarding a loyal glimmer of belief right through the Brezhnevite ‘years of stagnation’, and seizing the chance after two decades of delay to return to their generational project of making a socialism that was prosperous, humane, and intelligent. With disastrous results. This whole book is, in fact, a prehistory of perestroika.

  17 The environment was increasingly toxic: ours

  18 Time for KVN, Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh: for the influence of humourous Soviet TV, see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’.

  19 Brezhnev himself, for example, was very taken with denim jackets: the story of the General Secretary’s one-off jean jacket is in his tailor’s memoir. See Aleksandr Igmand with Anastasia Yushkova, Ya Odeval Brezhneva (‘I Dressed Brezhnev’) (Moscow: NLO, 2008). I found it, however, in an English-language review of the book: Anna Malpas, ‘Suits You, Ilyich’, Moscow Times, 14 November 2008.

  After a long time or a short time – for speedily a tale is spun, with much less speed a deed is done –

  1.

  The Unified System, 1970

  A cell. A lung cell. Tobacco smoke swirls by in the spired and foliated channel the cell faces. Its job is to take in oxygen from breath and keep out everything else, and on the whole it does well filtering the usual impurities in air: but this is not a designed mechanism, put together for a function by conscious plan, it is a dumb iteration of all the features which have proved by trial and error to serve lung cells well in the past. The past did not include deliberately-breathed smoke. We could count an amazing number of different chemicals in the blue-grey vapour snaking through the tissue, altogether too many of which the cell does not know how to exclude. Formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, catechol, isoprene, ethylene oxide, nitric oxide, nitrosamine, the aromatic amines – not to mention the quinones, the semiquinones, the hydroquinones, a whole family of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. We are watching for one of these last. Here it comes now, a drifting, tumbling molecule of benzopyrene. It sails into the cell’s bulging curtain wall of fats and sticks there, like an insect caught in glue; then, worse, is dragged through, because the fat curtain is spiked here and there by receptors, and one of these has the benzopyrene in its grip. The receptor winches the benzopyrene through the curtain, hand over hand, atom over atom, wrapping it as it comes in a fold of the curtain, and then closing the fold behind it, so that when it reaches the inside, a little fatty envelope buds off from the inner wall of the cell with the benzopyrene sealed inside it. And floats free, into the warm liquid workspace where the body builds its proteins.

  But it’s all right. The cell has no specific defence against benzopyrene, but it is not defenceless. It has the powerful standard equipment all mammalian cells deploy when foreign bodies turn up where they’re not supposed to. The package of fat is a flag, a label, an alert. Detecting it, up comes an enzyme to metabolise the contents. The enzyme munchs the benzopyrene into pieces of epoxide which other bits of the cellular machinery can flush safely away.

  This has happened over and over again, every time Sergei Alexeyevich Lebedev lights a cigarette. There are billions of cells in the lungs. Lebedev has smoked sixty unfiltered Kazbek a day for fifty years. So this has happened thousands of billions of times.

  *

  Lebedev is wearing his medals. They jingle on his jacket like a drawerful of cutlery. Hero of Socialist Labour, Order of the Red Banner of Labour, two Orders of Lenin, assorted military and scientific honours. Red enamel, nickel, ribbons. So many of them that they drag down his suit on that side. He’d swear he can feel their weight. He used to have more chest to hang them on. The flesh is coming off him so fast now that he seems to be all teetering superstructure, just bones leaning together. A wobbling tower. A tripod grating in a cold wind.

  The medals are supposed to be a claim for respect. And outside, they work. They get him a pension, rent reductions, lower taxes, a seat on the metro when it’s standing room only. His life has been easier than the overwhelming majority of Soviet lives, because of them. But in here of all places, in this lightless corridor of the Kremlin, they’re a devalued currency. Everyone has some. The General Secretary has so many, he’s on the TV so frequently being awarded the Order of This or That or The Other, that, as the joke says, if a crocodile ate him, the poor creature would be shitting medals for
a fortnight.

  ‘The Minister does know I’m waiting, doesn’t he?’ says Lebedev.

  *

  Another lung cell. The machines that Lebedev has made all build up their complicated behaviours from absolutely predictable little events, from valves and then transistors turning on and off. Definitely on; definitely off. Without any shading of degree. Without any ambiguity. The machine that makes Lebedev is different. The base layer of its behaviour, from which all the rest emerges, is various and multiple and uncertain. There is no binary simplicity. There is the slow bubble of many chemical reactions all happening at once, each continuing until a task is mostly done, probably done, done enough to satisfy a programme which was itself only whittled out of randomness just well enough to get by. The enzyme’s destruction of benzopyrene, for example, only flushes most of it away. A fraction of the epoxides react again with the enzyme and become diol epoxides. That’s what’s happened here; instead of nice, inert, detoxified molecules, we have a version of the same thing which is lacking one electron on one of its atoms, and which consequently yearns to stick to any other molecule which will share an electron with it. The diol epoxides are aggressive gloop. Aggressive? One electron’s worth of electric charge doesn’t tow a molecule very fast through the soupy interior of a cell: it doesn’t send the diol epoxides streaming along at the speed of light like the electrons in a vacuum tube. But it does exert a tiny, persistent pull on them. It draws them along towards molecules they might stick to. It draws them everywhere in the cell, and so it draws some of them towards the cell nucleus, which has another wall of fats around it, but unfortunately is designed to let molecules rather like the diol epoxides in and out on the cell’s ordinary business. The hungry, electron-seeking blob of gloop slips through, and ere in front of it are floating twenty-three pairs of tempting targets: the huge, fat, friendly, electron-rich chromosomes of human DNA.

  No one in the world in 1970 understands in any detail how they work, and the ignorance is particularly bad in the Soviet Union, thanks to Lysenko. But the chromosomes work whether they are understood or not. The gloop drifts in; and at any and every point along the endless coiled helix where it happens to make contact, the gloop locks on. Where it jostles forward with its missing electron to embrace one of the DNA’s electrons, there’s a little chemical reaction, and the electron in question bonds to both the DNA and the gloop. The gloop is now an ‘adduct’, glued to the helix. But the helix is changed too, by having the blob of tobacco residue stuck to it. At the position where the adduct sits, the information in the DNA has been corrupted. Instead of the G, T, C or A that should be there, in the four-letter alphabet of the genome, it reads as one of the other letters instead. The adduct has written an error into the code.

  But it’s all right. In the vast majority of positions along the genome where goo might attach itself at random, altering one letter won’t produce any significant mutation, even if the alteration lasts. The genome is Lebedev’s software, but unlike software written by humans, it is not a set of procedures packed end-to-end, all of which at least purport to do something. It is a jumble of legacy code spread out in fragments through a whole voluminous library of nonsense. Almost always, a random change of letter will either hit some existing nonsense, or turn some sense into new nonsense. And because the chromosomes come in pairs, with a version of every chromosome contributed by Lebedev’s mother floating there opposite a version from his father, if some sense on the version on one side turns to nonsense, the equivalent piece on the other version will go on making sense just fine. Dangerous mutations usually only happen in the rare cases where sense is accidentally turned into different sense. Which is not what has happened here. Here, the arriving molecule has glued itself where it makes no difference at all.

  This has happened billions of times.

  *

  ‘Minister Kosygin is extremely busy,’ says the woman behind the desk. She is in her late thirties, with a cynical droop to her mouth. Nevertheless, she is made up like a plump doll, with pink circles on her cheeks and eyelids painted metallic blue. The curls of her hairdo shine as if they were parts of a single piece of plastic. ‘As I told you, he can’t say when he will be free. He apologises for not keeping your appointment, but suggests you might prefer to return another day.’ Almost word for word, she is repeating what she said when Lebedev arrived, an hour or more ago.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Lebedev. ‘I’m happy to wait.’

  She compresses her lips; sniffs. The door she keeps is at the end of a panelled passage lost to sunlight. When it opens, as it does occasionally, some pale reminder of day slips out, and the sound of typing, but the rest of the time it might as well be midnight where Lebedev is sitting, on a bench by the wall. The lamp on her desk glows in the gloom like the lantern radiating at the centre of some very brown old painting, the kind where the human figures almost vanish into the soot and the varnish. Lebedev wishes the thin cushion beneath him were thicker, for these days his buttocks seem to have been replaced, for sitting, by two sore angles of bone like the outer corners of a coat hanger. He aches. He waits. There isn’t much to look at. It’s a wonder that the rubber plant survives down here: perhaps it has found some alternative to photosynthesis. On her desk she has only the appointment book, a telephone and a bowl of peppermints to be offered to favoured passers-by. He has not been given one. She turns the pages of her magazine with short pink fingers. When he coughs she clicks her tongue disgustedly. True, it is a disgusting noise he makes. It begins as a commonplace wheeze in his throat, but tumbles down into his chest where it hacks and rattles and audibly moves clots of viscous wet stuff around, till the wet stuff has been dragged up into his airway, and he’s in a gasping, gargling struggle to get it off his epiglottis, and out, so that he can breathe again. He spits into his handkerchief, clean this morning, now stiff and crusty, stained with nameless emulsions. He’s been bringing up the traditional jade mayonnaise of bronchitis every winter for as long as he can remember, but this is something different, something thicker and redder and meatier, like liquescent liver. He folds the handkerchief away, and tries to muster his persuasive powers.

  *

  Another lung cell. The soft rainfall of gloop onto Lebedev’s DNA continues. By chance, this particular sticky drop in the statistical rain is one of the small minority that is going to land somewhere that matters. By chance, it is falling onto a stretch of code on Chromosome number 11 which scientists will know later as the gene ras, or hRas. The electrophile noses in; it suckers on; the guanine (G) it has suckered onto on the helix now reads, for all intents and purposes, as cytosine (C). And this time, it happens that changing G to C creates sense, not nonsense, in the code. Ras with a C in it at this specific position is a viable and functional piece of software. But much more of a change is in prospect than there would be if someone substituted a new programme for the one that was supposed to be running in a computer. Human-made software is only an informational ghost, temporarily given possession of the machine and allowed to change 0s to 1s and vice versa. The software of humans, on the other hand, actually builds the hardware it runs on. It creates the machine. So a mutation in the code means a mutation in the body too, if the error endures.

  Ras is one of the genes that control cell growth and cell division. In adults, it switches on and off periodically to govern the normal cycle of the cell’s existence. You wouldn’t want it switched on all the time. Foetuses in the womb run ras continually to generate all the new tissue that the Build-A-Human programme demands when a human is being first assembled. Otherwise, cell multiplication must happen when, and only when, the body part the cell is in needs a new cell. But it’s the switch that has been altered by having C where G used to be in this mutant version of ras. C instead of G at this one particular point jams the ras gene at ‘on’ – throws the lever for unstoppable growth, and then breaks the lever.

  But it’s all right. This copy of ras may be corrupted, but the cell has a failsafe mechanism built int
o the shape of the DNA molecules. The helix is a double helix. On the other side of the double corkscrew there runs another strand of Gs, Ts, Cs and As which carries all the information of the genome, only in reverse, like the negative of a photograph or the mould a jelly was turned out of; and the cell, which is used to operating in an environment of small chemical accidents, operates a handy editorial enzyme that moves up and down the chromosomes checking that the two strands remain perfect opposites. The editorial enzyme doesn’t find absolutely all of the changes the adducts gummed to Lebedev’s DNA have made, but it finds most of them, the harmless and the harmful alike, methodically correcting each little mutation. It finds this one. The new C in the mutant version of RAS on one side clashes with the existing C on the reverse side. C against C isn’t a legitimate opposite. A quick editorial snip, and there’s the original G again. Lebedev’s factory settings have been restored.

  This has happened millions of times.

  *

  ‘Minister,’ says Lebedev inside his head, ‘I know that the decision has already been taken, but I must draw your attention – I must ask you to consider – I must question the wisdom – I must – I must –’

  What’s this? A bulky middle-aged man is strolling up the corridor towards them, brush-cut black hair gleaming in the lamplight, hands the size of hams playing little tunes on the air, equable smile on his face. For a moment Lebedev thinks the General Secretary himself is upon them, but it isn’t; it’s one of the regional Party bosses, he forgets the man’s name, who thanks to the magical osmosis of power all tend to look faintly Brezhnev-ish these days, just as the littler bosses used to resemble Khrushchev, as far as they could, and before that Stalin. The cheery gaze passes over Lebedev as if the air were empty where he sits on the bench, and settles on the doorkeeper. Mr Belorussia, or is it Mr Moldavia, winks. She blushes and reaches a hand up to her meringue-hard hair.