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 publid 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 have 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 ‘They say 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 sudents 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 actually 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.
VI.3 The Pensioner, 1968
1 There was a bench by the wall at the end of the dacha’s grounds: Khrushchev’s retirement dacha had a bench, where he liked to sit with his dog Arbat and his rook Kava, and it had a wall by a fieldpath, where passing Soviet citizens in holiday mood did indeed shyly stop and ask to have their photos taken with him. But the bench was not by the wall. For the authentic melancholy of Khrushchev’s last years, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 620–45, and Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, pp. 165–332.
2 Frol Kozlov … on his deathbed, calling for a priest: recounted in Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 199.
3 It was worst if he was stupid enough ever to watch a war film: Khrushchev’s war movie-induced nightmares were described by Sergei Khrushchev in 2008 in a lecture attended by the writer Michael Swanwick. See Swanwick’s blog entry on the event at http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2008/02/khrushchev-isnt-he-russian-novelist. html [sic].
4 The giant television receiver in the living room: presented on his seventieth birthday, with many unctuous speeches, just before they deposed him. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 614.
5 Out would come the other memories: which are my imaginings of remembered horrors for him, not attested incidents. But when the playwright Mikhail Shatrov asked him, late on in his retirement, what he regretted, he said: ‘Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood.’ See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 639.
6 ‘Paradise’, he told the wheatfield in baffled fury: not really said in direct response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, as here, but a real quotation from the tapes Khrushchev recorded in retirement. This was among the passages held back from the transcribed memoir his son had smuggled to the West for publication, with help from sympathetic hands in the security service. So it’s not in Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1970); or in the first volume of supplementary material, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1974). See instead Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, ed. and translated by Jerrold V. Schecter and Vyacheslav V. Luchkov (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1990).
7 Five hundred producers. Sixty thousand consumers. Eight hundred thousand allocation orders: figures from the account of the Soyuzglavmetal project in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
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