2 And, more secretly still, an M-40 exists, and an M-50 too: for Lebedev’s computers for the Soviet missile-defence project, and the imaginary Moow in the Kazakh desert, see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 101–3. For ‘military cybernetics’ in general, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
3 ‘We can shoot down a fly in outer space, you know’: Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 103
4 Remembering the story his rival Izaak Bruk told him: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 70, which does not however specify the codename flower the vacuum tube buyer had to mention. As well as supplying tulips, my rendition of the story has also simplified the bureaucratic level at which the polite people opposite the knitwear shop (real) operated. They actually told the student, ‘We only act at the level of raikom third secretary.’
5 The BESM. A picture of what? Of potatoes: the potato-optimising programme for the Moscow Regional Planning Agency was absolutely real, but was not written until 1966, and therefore probably ran on a BESM-6 or an M-20 rather than a BESM-2. It belongs, truthfully, to the period of slightly chastened moderate-sized implementations of ‘optimal planning’, rather than to the early period of grand expectations. I have cheated, and brought it forward in time, in order to give the optimism of 1961 some definite narrative substance. Altogether, in fact, this fairytale version of the history of mathematical economics needs to confess to tidying and foreshortening the movement from hope to despair it chronicles. The numbers of delivering and consuming organisations are authentic, and the variables and constraints; the dwindling kilometre-numbers are made up from thin air. For this and other 1960s experiments in mathematical planning, see Michael Ellman, Soviet Planning Today: Proposals for an Optimally Functioning Economic System (Cambridge: CUP, 1971), and Planning Problems in the USSR. Other sources, without Ellman’s bite and analytical clarity, are John Pearce Hardt, ed., Mathematics and Computers in Soviet Economic Planning (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1967), and Martin Cave, Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 1980).
6 The recording clerks sally out from the Ministry of Trade’s little booths: among other things, as an information-gathering exercise, to collect a set of market-clearing prices which could then be used to help establish the price level for the bulk of food trade, in state stores. The state price was always cheaper, guaranteeing that food at the state price would always be in shortage relative to the money available to pay for it, but how much cheaper it was varied, depending both on the irregular jumps of the official prices and the more continuous adjustment of the market prices. See Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928 ; as Chapman points out, the premium that could be charged at the kolkhoz market gives a measure of how difficult food was to find at the state price. In relatively good times for official Soviet agriculture, the prices ran relatively close together; in bad times, they diverged wildly. According to the Narkhoz statistical almanac for 1968, between 1960 and 1968 kolkhoz market prices rose 28%: see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
7 No wonder that Oskar Lange over in Warsaw gleefully calls the marketplace a ‘primitive pre-electronic calculator’: not in print he didn’t, in fact, until 1967. See Oskar Lange, ‘The Computer and the Market’ in C. Feinstein, ed., Capitalism, Socialism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge: CUP, 1967), pp. 158–61. But the idea that the computer had conclusively resolved the socialist calculation debate in socialism’s favour was very much a commonplace of the early sixties.
8 ‘Sorcery!’ he said, and winked: see Hally, Electronic Brains.
9 Universally caressed and endorsed, very nearly the official solution to every Soviet problem: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. Cybernetics did appear in the Party Programme: see the complete text of the programme, and commentaries, in Leonard Schapiro, ed., The USSR and the Future: An Analysis of the New Program of the CPSU (New York: Institute for the Study of the USSR/Frederick A. Praeger Inc., 1963). First had come the oppositional stage, during which cybernetics was officially condemned and seemed to scientists to represent a language of de-ideologised honesty. Then came this period of official acceptance, and excited claims for cybernetics’ reforming powers. Later would come a period of decay, in which Soviet cyberspeak became one more variety of officially sanctioned vacuity, as satirised (for example) in Aleksandr Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, translated by Gordon Clough (New York: Random House, 1978).
10 Ot zadachi, ‘from the problem’, and ot fotografii, ‘from the photograph’: the distinction is discussed in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR. Both conservative criticism of mathematical economics, for instance from within Gosplan, and criticism by more radically sceptical economists, like Janos Kornai of Hungary, often focused on the obvious weakness involved in working ‘from the photograph’. See Kornai, Anti- Equilibrium (Amsterdam, 1971); for a Gosplan critique of reforming impracticality, twenty years later but directed at much the same target, see Michael Ellman and Volodyamir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). To some extent the distance from the system at which the optimisers were working had to do with their status as un-trusted academic outsiders to the real operation of industry. It also followed from the powerfully abstracting nature of Kantorovich’s models, which could reduce a whole technology to the letter ‘t’ in an equation. But the optimisers of course saw and understood the difficulty: it was one reason for their increasing interest in systems of indirect control which did not require complete information at the centre.
II.3 Stormy Applause, 1961
1 Lucky Sasha Galich: for my portrayal here of the songwriter, screenwriter, playwright and poet Alexander Galich (1919–77) I have drawn heavily on the biographical introduction, ‘Silence is Connivance: Alexander Galich’, to Alexander Galich, Songs and Poems, edited and translated by Gerald Stanton Smith (Ann Arbor MI: Ardis, 1983), pp. 13–54. See also Alexander Galich, Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapter983), pranslated by Maria R. Bloshteyn (Bloomington IN: Slavica, 2007).
2 ‘I loved Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears’, she said: not the award- winning film of 1980, or Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel of the 1930s, but the middle one of the three artefacts to bear the name Moskva ne slezam verit, a play on which Galich collaborated in 1949. I have not been able to find out its content, and it is quite possible that I am mistaken in guessing that it shows a sensitivity to the struggles of women which Marfa Timofeyevna the Glavlit rep would admire. But then Marfa Timofeyevna is herself pure fiction, no more substantial than the clouds over Moscow.
3 The address that Khrushchev was due to give to the Party Congress today: for the real text of it, complete with italicised rapture, see Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Ann Arbor MI: Joint Committee on Slavic Studies), vol. 13 no. 45, p. 25.
4 Letters; letters from readers across the whole double-page spread: the correspondence from the Soviet public on the Draft of the 1961 Party Programme was just as copious as I’ve represented it being here, and genuinely covered all the subjects listed here from peas to television parlours. See Wolfgang Leonhard, ‘Adoption of the New Programme’, in Schapiro, ed., The USSR and the Future, pp. 8–15. However, the particular letter about taxis in the imaginary Morin’s imaginary newspaper which Galich looks at here comes in fact from the postbag of the Party’s journal Kommunist. See Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Ann Arbor MI: Joint Committee on Slavic Studies), vol. 13 no. 42, pp. 13–17; vol. 13 no. 43, pp. 18–23.
5 ‘Of considerably higher quality than the best products of capitalism’: again, see the text of the Programme in Schapiro, ed., The USSR and the Future.
6 The censor turned to him and said: ‘Oh, so the Jews won the war for us now, did they?’: for dramatic simplicity I’ve conflated the dress rehearsal with the meeting next day when a version of these words was really said to Galich. See Galich, Dress Rehearsal.
7 It’s bachelo
r freedom all the way with you, isn’t it?: Alexander Galich was married twice, in 1941 to Valentina Arkhangelskaya, from whom he separated in 1944, and from 1945 to his death to Angelina Nikolaevna Shekrot, who followed him into exile from Russia in the 1970s, but ‘did not demand fidelity … and took a rather ironic view of her husband’s romantic affairs’, according to www.galichclub.narod. ru/biog. htm.
8 To sign a petition protesting some new slander broadcast by Radio Free Europe: a regular duty of trusted writers like Galich. The lunch with the fictional Morin, the episode of the French journalists, the tactlessly visible ground-floor restaurant of the Writers’ Union – all cloud-moulded, all untrue; but Galich’s status as the insider’s insider is entirely factual.
9 ‘The Universal Andance of Products’, read Galich: the quotations that follow are not from a newspaper feature on ‘Life in 1980’, but a learned article by I. Anchishkin of the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences. See I. Anchishkin, ‘The Problem of Abundance and the Transition to Communist Distribution’, in Harry G. Shaffer, ed., The Soviet Economy: A Collection of Western and Soviet Views (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 133–8; originally published in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 1, 1962.
10 On the island opposite the Patriarchate: at this time, the riverside site of the Patriarchate was occupied by a popular open-air swimming pool, which had filled in the hole intended to accommodate the foundations for a gargantuan Palace of Soviets. As of the present day, all of the twentieth-century changes to the site have been reversed, and the Patriarchate stands there again, as it did in 1900.
11 The soundtrack it would have, if it were filmed on a day like today: to make a movie such as 1964’s Ya shagayu po Moskve, ‘I Walk around Moscow’, directed by Georgii Daniela; or Zastava Ilicha, ‘Ilich’s Gate’, directed by Marlen Khutsiev, which was made in 1961, but not released till 1965, under the title Mne Dvadtsat’ Let, ‘I Am Twenty’.
12 He remembered a joke. What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age: authentic, and taken, as are all the Soviet jokes in this book, from Seth Benedict Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’, PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2003
13 He had had one of the happy childhoods Stalin had promised would someday be universal: here I have taken the data about Galich’s childhood in the biographical essay prefacing Galich, Songs and Poems, and amplified it with some of the sights and sounds of happy (Jewish) Soviet childhoods of the 1930s evoked in Slezkine, The Jewish Century, pp. 256–7.
14 Surly boys cracking into smiles at his teasing chastushki: chastushki are improvised satirical verses, designed to provoke good-humoured, only very slightly rueful laughter in the person they describe. Inventing inoffensively Stalinist chastushki which were still funny must have posed problems of tone, which the young Galich, who really did go off to entertain the troops like this, was presumably good at solving. The songs mentioned are real hits of the Great Patriotic War; ‘Goodbye Mama, Don’t Be Sad’ is a real tear-jerking number by the young Galich.
15 Wandering on a vague impulse of solidarity into a meeting of the Writers’ Union Yiddish section: event real, dialogue invented. This was one of the indicative moments of the turn to undisguised anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. The position of Soviet Jews had been worsening since the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1938, but things took a sudden downward turn after the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, which effectively reclassified all Jews in Stalin’s eyes as people of potentially divided loyalties. All explicitly Jewish Soviet oanisations were closed, including the Yiddish Section of the Writers’ Union, the Yiddish-language theatre, and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had raised support for the Soviet war effort among the western diaspora. As a result of these moves, a number of Soviet citizens who had thought of their Jewishness as one of the least important facts about themselves began to feel differently.
16 Quiet conversations with a returned choreographer: all the details here of how he came to see the monsters in the wood are made up, though he was certainly svoi in the sense that the concocted uncle’s friend means, and the real horrors of the famous year 1937 did indeed include (for secret policemen) the problems of disposing of a very large number of bodies, very fast. Whoever Galich had conversations with, they were of a kind to get him writing, eventually, songs that were mistaken for the work of a genuine ex-Gulag prisoner.
17 The words he was supposed to have said, back in April, when they lit the rocket beneath him: see The First Man in Space. Soviet Radio and Newspaper Reports on the Flight of the Spaceship Vostok, compiled and translated by Joseph L. Ziegelbaum, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Astronautics Information Translation 22, 1 May 1961 (JPL, California Institute of Techology).
Part III
Introduction
1 In 1930 the Bolsheviks abolished universities: for the reconfiguration of Soviet education in the 1930s, Stalin’s call for a ‘productive-technical intelligentsia’, the rise of the ‘promotees’, and the ‘eight small benches’ inherited by the Poultry Institute of Voronezh, see Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the USSR.
2 Pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals felt a sense of public obligation: the classical discussion of the Russian intellectual tradition is Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).
3 Kulturny, a term which stretched from brushing your teeth regularly to reading Pushkin and Tolstoy: see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 79–83.
4 By definition, friends of truth, friends of thought and reason and humanity and beauty, were … friends of Stalin: for Stalinism as an eagerly-adopted way of being modern and enlightened, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
5 From being one of the most illiterate places on the planet to being, by some measures, one of the best educated: for the Soviet university system of the 1960s and its social functioning, see L.G.Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: An Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Int Russian ituals During the 1960s (London: RKP, 1973).
6 Mikhail Romm’s 1962 hit film: Devyat’ dnei odnogo goda (‘Nine Days in One Year’), 1962.
7 The gentle satire of the Strugatsky brothers’ 1965 novel: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Ponedelnik nachinaetsya v subbotu, translated as Monday Begins on Saturday by Leonid Renen (New York: DAW, 1977); translated as Monday Starts on Saturday by Andrew Bromfield (London: Seagull Publishing, 2005).
8 Groups of intellectuals were gathered together to be shouted at: see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 306–10, 383–7, 589–96, 599–602; and Fedor Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, translated by Daphne Skillen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), pp. 140–3.
9 ‘I can’t deny, Nikita Sergeyevich, that I did find some errors’: see Graham, A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot.
10 Seen in absolute terms, more Jews than ever before: for the breakdown of employment in the sciences in the USSR by ‘nationality’, from which these figures come, see Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia.
11 Khrushchev’s red-faced rage over the Academy rejecting one of Lysenko’s stooges: in an extremely rare example of out-and-out electoral rebellion in a Soviet institution, the Academicians used their secret ballot in 1964 to disbar Lysenko’s candidate. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 617.
III.1 Midsummer Night, 1962
1 A dust-up between institutes over rights in the next blocks to be completed: this particular dispute is invented, but the first few years of the Academy’s new science town outside Novosibirsk, founded in 1958, were indeed marked by fierce, sometimes unruly arguments between the disciplines over who got which new buildings. Cytology and Genetics itself obtained its premises by seizing, one weekend, a facility promised to the Computer Centre, and the Computer Centre nearly lost its next earmarked site as well, to an opportunistic grab by a group researching transplant surgery. For the history of Akademg
orodok, I have depended heavily throughout this chapter on Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited; and for the look and the atmosphere of the place also on my own visit in 2006, corrected for anachronisms (I hope) by the photographs in the museum of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But see also Jessica Smith, ‘Siberian Science City’, New World Review, third quarter 1969, pp. 86–101, and the section on Akademgorodok in Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes (London: Routledge, 1994). The pictures in ‘Star City’, Colors 45, August–September 2001, offer an evocative parallel portrait of the Soviet science town devoted to space technology. Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), pp. 63–78, draws a desolate, superstition-ridden portrait of Akademgorodok’s post-Soviet condition, but my sense was that the ambivalent, half-delivered promise of the place still lingered. As someone I spoke to joked, ‘There was a lot of freedom here. Oh, I’m sorry, I made a mistake in my English. I meant, there was a bit of freedom here.’
2 In the kitchen, predictably, only the cold tap worked: other defects complained of by the Academy to the town’s builders, Sibakademstroi, included poorly fitted concrete panels, and hallways so damp they grew more than thirty varieties of mushroom. But Zoya’s apartment is nevertheless luxurious by all ordinary Soviet standards. It comes about halfway down a ladder of accommodation exactly matched to the hierarchy of academic status. As a senior researcher and lab head, she gets a living space smaller than the houses and half-houses reserved for Academicians and Corresponding Members of the Academy, and the very best flats, which are reserved for holders of the Candidate of Science degree, but bigger and better than the sequentially dwindling flats for ordinary researchers and technical staff and the dormitories for grad students. Envy of the town’s material privileges was a factor in the unhelpfulness of the city government of Novosibirk over such issues as the water supply. At one point, the city stole an entire trainload of supplies earmarked for Akademgorodok, and Academician Lavrentiev, the de facto mayor, had to ring Khrushchev personally to get it back. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
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