The current bard finished, and a new one stepped up, a man in late middle age, gone shaggy and jowly, but with bright eyes. He had a moustache which might once have been dapper, but had escaped. He didn’t look bad.
‘Who’s this?’
‘Film-music composer, I think. Jingle-writer. Or something.’
‘Hello,’ said the bard. ‘Let me just tune this a little.’ He fiddled with his guitar. He was nervous. ‘Now, all right. This is something called “The Gold-Miner’s Waltz”.’
And he began to strum in waltz time, just a basic strum-strum-strum, with his voice doing all the work over the top. And he sang:
We’ve called ourselves adults for ages
We don’t try to pretend we’re still young
We’ve given up digging for treasure
Far away in the storybook sun.
We don’t strike out for the Equator,
Or get the hell off, out of sight;
It’s silence not treasure that’s golden,
And that’s what we dig for, all right.
Aptly the room had grown very quiet indeed: uncannily hushed, to the extent that it was hard to believe there were a couple of hundred breathing humans in it. Perhaps they were holding their breath. The bard sang:
Hold your tongue. Hold your tongue.
Hold your tongue, and you’ll make a ton.
Hold your tongue, hold your tongue, hold your tongue!
Strum-strum-strum, strum-strum-strum. There was more. She craned forward.
For ages we kept our hearts hardened
It was wiser to keep our eyes low
Many times we took refuge in silence
But our silence meant yes and not no
– and to her intense irritation a suave presence beside her was demanding attention. It was Shaidullin, no doubt fresh from concluding his own purge at the Institute of Economics. His shaved head gleamed. Oh, not now. Not another bout of ceremonial attack.
‘A word in your ear, doctor,’ he whispered. ‘You should know that our Kostya is knocking.’
‘What?’
‘He’s knocking on the Fifth Department’s door. He’s talking to them. I’m sorry.’ He was gone.
… because, you know, silence is gold.
Hold your tongue, hold your tongue.
Hold your tongue and you’ll be number one.
Hold your tongue, hold your tongue, hold your tongue!
Oh Kostya, she though, oh Kostya; and there, of course, he was, with the malign inevitability of nightmare, making his way towards her through the crowd and smiling, smiling. She closed her face and held her hand up by her chest, stop, and shook her head at him slowly, definitively. His face began to change but she looked away, back toward the bard. To be thought of later. To be wondered at, wept over, later.
And now we’ve survived to see better
Everyone talks such a lot
But behind the bright sparkling speeches
The dumbness spreads out like a blot.
Someone else can weep over the bodies,
For the insults and hunger untold.
We know there’s more profit in silence.
Yes we know that silence is gold.
Oh, they’ll close up everything here that can be closed, after this, she thought. And look what you’re doing to yourself, my friend.
It’s so easy, making a ton!
Or to have someone shot for a song!
Hold your tongue, hold your tongue, hold your tongue!
The end. The room was still rapt, stunned. She put her hands together and began to clap in the silence, till other people joined in, and others, and still others, till a good three-quarters of the audience were applauding. Not all of them. Some were staring appalled, and some looked as if they were taking notes. Shaidullin, back on the far side of room, was as impassive as an iron post. Poor man, she thought, you think it can still be mended, don’t you?
But Sasha Galich, on stage, was laughing like a man released from an ancient burden.
Notes – VI.2 Police in the Forest, 1968
1 Crave the use of telescopes, or gaze hungrily at the Computer Centre, like some of Akademgorodok’s children: for whom the ingenious Academician Lavrentiev, wanting to nurture future generations of scientists, created the ‘Club of Young Inventors’. There was also an annual summer school at Akademgorodok to which teenagers from across the USSR competed to come, to play mathematical games and have their brains stretched by the great. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
2 If today went as she expected it would: in this chapter I’ve telescoped together two adjacent but not simultaneous real events at Akademgorodok, the disciplinary meetings called in the Institutes to punish the forty-six signatories of the letter protesting the trial in Moscow of the dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg (early April 1968) and the Festival of Bards at which Sasha Galich gave the one and only public performance in the USSR of his satirical songs (May 1968). Raissa Berg, the real biologist in whose shoes the fictional Zoya Vaynshteyn is standing, was indeed one of the signatories, did indeed get fired in the same adroitly indirect manner as Zoya does, and did indeed have difficulties with an unexpected informer among her family circle – but Zoya’s character, relationships and motives here are all invention.
3 She flipped it over to look at the spine. Roadside Picnic. Well, well: another compression of the chronology. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s wonderful Piknik na Obochine, which Max is reading here, was in truth not published until 1972. The quotation is from the 1977 English translation by Antonina W. Bouis (London: Macmillan).
4 Computer programmers went by on cross-country skis: an ordinary method of Akademgorodok transportation, in winter. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
5 Under the wretched centennial banner of Lenin blessing the children: the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth in 1868, celebrated with outbreaks of unctuous Leninolatry in all artistic media. See Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’, for the intriguing possibility that the security services may ve deliberately seeded Soviet society in 1968 with several new tempting genres of ankedoty, in order to head off the possibility of a plague of Lenin jokes.
6 The man who, they said, had tried to pose a problem to each of the candidates: see Aganbegyan’s memoir of Kantorovich in Kantorovich, Kutateladze and Fet, eds, L.V.Kantorovich, Chelovek i Uchenii.
7 Cybernetics was not the meeting ground it used to be: for the decline of cybernetic hopes, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
8 Down he went into a heap: as I was told in Akademgorodok, one of the legendary qualities of Kantorovich (alongside his fondness for dancing with tall women, and his wish to be driven everywhere by car if possible) was the ease with which he managed to have accidents.
9 A good joke to lock the Jews out in the cold overnight: for the depressing resumption of ordinary post-Stalin levels of anti-Semitism in what had been a relatively prejudice-free zone, see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited. For the specific incident of the dormitory lockout, and the Jews/chickens sign, see Berg, Acquired Traits, p. 366.
10 Nuclear fusion in the post office queue: it was exactly this conversation, overheard in late 1962 while waiting for a stamp, which charmed the visiting sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaia into moving to Akademgorodok. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited. The clampdown at Akademgorodok, beginning in 1965 but severely intensified after 1968, never quite eliminated the town’s free-speaking ways, because it never eliminated the combustible and facinating mixture of people, but it removed the public venues for unguarded speech and restored something like a Soviet-normal degree of caution.
11 The grants from the Fakel collective were entirely legal and above board: Fakel, meaning ‘torch’, had been founded in June 1966 as a ‘young people’s scientific production association’. In effect, it was the nearest thing in Soviet history to a spun-out tech startup. By 1968, when it was indeed suppressed, it had fulfilled more than a hundred commissions for software
and could call on the talents of eight hundred people, 250 of them undergraduates. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
12 Under the Integral, the Cybernetics Kaffee-klatch, the lot: Akademgorodok had been remarkable for the profusion and freedom of its social clubs, where you could find dancing, snacks, cards, improvised art shows, and discussion, discussion, discussion. At the Kofeinyi Klub Kibernetiki – jokily, the KKK – the rule was that anyone who spoke had to address the listeners as ‘respected non-empty set of thinking systems’. But often there weren’t any listeners, exactly. KKK meetings were notorious for ending with everyone down at the front, all scribbling excitably on the blackboard and trying to talk at once. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
13 ‘Theay he’s saving the steel-tube industry now, since they wouldn’t let him save the world?’: A sarcastic allusion to Kantorovich’s important role, throughout the second half of the 1960s, in a project to rationalise production scheduling in the rolling mills controlled by Soyuzglavmetal, ‘Union Metal Supply’. The team he led created the part of a vast software ensemble that automated and optimised the traditional paper files of bronirovshchiki, production schedulers. Kantorovich may well have thought of the project as a very large-scale demonstration of the viability of optimal planning. Needless to say, while the planners were happy to let him use his shadow prices as an analytical tool for tuning a mill’s output, they declined to take up his larger scheme of using them to automate and decentralise their own activities. It was claimed that, by the second half of 1969, the optimised method was giving an extra output of sixty thousand tonnes of steel tubes. Whatever the exact truth, the irony remains that, in the 1970s, it was down Kantorovich’s optimised pipes that the oil flowed which Brezhnev’s government used as their free-money alternative to sorting out the economy. See Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
14 Tick the boxes, write the numbers on the cyclostyled returns: a conjectural rendition, with invented details, of the real research project pursued at Akademgorodok by Raissa Berg until she was fired for signing the 1968 protest letter. The process of deduction here, from rates of birth defect to concealed social history, is entirely authentic. See Berg, Acquired Traits, pp. 356–9.
15 ‘We have just one unpleasant item on the agenda today,’ said the Director: much, but not quite all, of the dialogue that follows is a greatly redacted and compressed version of real utterances recorded by Raissa Berg from memory after her own equivalent hearing, and triumphantly recorded in an appendix of her autobiography Acquired Traits, pp. 453–68. I have selected to suppress a set of criss-cross personality clashes too complex to convey, and to bring out the almost universal exasperation with ‘dissident’ behaviour.
16 They were filing one by one across the little stage in the hot box of the House of Science’s atrium: in fact, the Festival of Bards was held in the much larger auditorium of the House of Science, which held two thousand people, but I have moved it for the simple reason that, of the two, the atrium is the space I have seen and can describe. Even in the auditorium, the concert was as packed as I have represented it being here. And so many people were unable to get tickets at all, particularly among the students of Novosibirsk State University, which had a campus at Akademgorodok, that a deputation fetched Galich from the hotel at midnight and carried him off to play a complete second show at 2 a.m. in the eight-hundred-seater ‘Moscow’ cinema. Other performers at the first, official show included Volodyamir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava and Iulii Kim. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
17 ‘Who’s this?’ ‘Film-music composer, I think’: Zoya’s ignorance of who Galich is, and her complete surprise at what he sings, are unrealistic here. Anyone with her sympathies and connections, even if they were wholly uninterested in music, would by 1968 have heard of his underground songs, which by now he had been composing – and singing to friends – for some years. Probably she would me years. ally have listened to some of them. They circulated as magnetizdat, illicit tape recordings. So once again here, I have cheated for the sake of heightened drama, and in order to bring out more strongly the genuine shock and astonishment caused when Galich uttered in public thoughts that were only permissible in the most private of conversations. For Galich’s magnetizdat reputation, and the impact of his performance on the Akademgorodok audience, see Berg, Acquired Traits, pp. 375–7; for the institutional consequences of the Festival of Bards, see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited; for the consequences for Galich himself, including his expulsion from the Writers’ Union, loss of all privileges and eventual exile from the USSR, see the biographical introduction to Galich, Songs and Poems.
18 This is something called ‘The Gold-Miner’s Waltz’: a real Galich song, with the translation by Gerald Stanton Smith slightly tweaked by the author for singability, but not one he is on record as performing that night. Instead he played ‘Clouds’, about an ex-prisoner of the Gulag getting drunk in a bar, ‘The Ballad of Surplus Value’, about a Soviet citizen who inherits a fortune, and ‘Ode to Pasternak’. It was this last one that smashed all the taboos of appropriate speech and brought the house down gasping at Akademgorodok – but the ‘Ode’ is complicatedly allusive in its outrage, so I have substituted the more self-explanatory silence-breaking of ‘The Gold-Miner’s Waltz’. Besides, it has treasure islands in it.
19 Just a basic strum-strum-strum, with his voice doing all the work over the top: another calculated artificial naivety on Zoya’s part, because this is pretty much what the whole Soviet genre of ‘bard songs’ sounds like. Think Jacques Brel.
3.
The Pensioner, 1968
There was a bench by the wall at the end of the dacha’s grounds, overlooking a wheat field. Sometimes tourists came walking along the fieldpath, and wanted to have their photos taken with him, when they found the former First Secretary sitting there. Nobody was on the path today. There was just the grey heat of August, and himself sitting in his shirt and his hat, with his shortwave radio and the tape recorder his son had given him to record his memoirs. Kava the rook was scratching at the ground by his feet. He had expected, when they first sacked him from the Presidium, that he would at least be allowed to help with Party work at the lowest level, back in the most local of cells, or committees, or whatever they were called nowadays. He ought to know the name but the org chart had changed so many times while he was living up in the high, fruit-bearing canopy of the Party. He had just had a nostalgic memory of the way the meetings had been, at the beginning, in some raw-built concrete room under a bare bulb, with a newly-literate secretary stumbling proudly through the big words of the agenda; and he had hoped that he’d find something like that again, if they let him join in once more with the donkey work of painting May Day banners, and giving speeches in lunchrooms, and visiting kindergartens, and expounding Pravda editorials to workers at shift-end. (Make them laugh, that was the secret.) But none of that had happened. The word had gone out: he was untouchable. Nobody was to go near. Nobody was to speak to him, write to him, phone him; and though now and again it would be made distantly clear that his former colleagues were still thinking about him, still including him in their calculations, he never learned about it directly. The consequences would filter down, in some little change of the regimen he lived under, or in a favour done for his son.
So the days stretched out, extraordinarily long and extraordinarily empty. He had gardened like crazy at first, laying out long ambitious vegetable beds, pruning and composting from dawn till dusk, except when Nina Petrovna called him in to meals – but it grew old, after a while. And you couldn’t fill a mind with such things. Before, whenever he doubted, he had worked. Whenever he had been troubled by a memory, he had worked, telling himself that the best answer to any defect in the past must be a remedy in the future. The future had been his private solution as well as a public promise. Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no
means to lose the thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above. He did his best to keep his thoughts in order, for self-pity would be disgusting, and he had the example of Nina Petrovna’s Bolshevik calm always before him. If she could manage the change in their lives, the change in her duties, without ever once complaining, so could he, surely. He could repair his mental filters and get through each day. But he understood now why, according to the rumour, that foul-mouthed block of beef Frol Kozlov should have ended up, on his deathbed, calling for a priest. God forbid that he himself should ever be so weak: but he could see now the appeal of the idea of being purged of it all, of it all somehow being taken magically away, so you could leave this life as innocent as you had entered it. It was this damnable idleness, that was what it was. Kozlov too must have lain in bed in the months after his stroke, with nothing to do but think. Perhaps he should have visited him. Too late for that; too late for anything but to haul himself onward through the days. Sometimes the stuggle in his head seemed so disconnected from the eventless world around him that it felt as if the whole thing, the whole bloody history, the whole of the vast country out there beyond the wheatfield, might have been a dream of his, one of those particularly intricate and oppressive fever dreams whose parts you struggle over and over to try to put into order, yet never can; as if there might never have been a Soviet Union at all, except in his head, only this field of Russian wheat.
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