Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Much of the Soviet Union was devastated after the war and many of its people were near starvation. But Korolev succeeded in persuading Communist Party leaders that rockets were worth funding because they alone could even the American advantage. The United States had military bases around the world, but the Soviet Union could deliver a nuclear warhead straight to the enemy. Gubarev, the former Apollo-Soyuz spokesman, believes it was “utterly illogical” for the Soviet Union to have been first into space, “but it happened because our rocket program was more closely tied to the military than the American one.” Stalin had wanted bombers to deliver nuclear warheads, but Korolev prevailed, with support from military generals who had seen legions of their soldiers killed during the war.

  After being given the go-ahead, it took years of intensive work for Korolev’s rocket design bureau to have a prototype ready to fly. Chertok oversaw the missile assembly at the new Baikonur Cosmodrome, built on an isolated steppe in Kazakhstan, where conditions made the work grueling. “Sleepless nights, temperatures soaring above one hundred and twenty degrees, dust storms, murky, undrinkable drinking water,” he explained. “But I remember it as one of the happiest times in my life.”

  The first R-7 rocket crashed when it was tested in May of 1957, and a second prototype failed to launch. Only the fourth succeeded in becoming the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. When the West failed to recognize the achievement, to the engineers’ amazement, Korolev suggested sending a satellite into space. “He was the only one who understood the significance of a satellite,” Gubarev said. Korolev went back to work and within weeks designed a simple, basketball-size sphere he called Satellite 1. It contained two powerful radio transmitters programmed to emit beeps over the course of three weeks. Sputnik I blasted off from Baikonur into Earth’s orbit on October 4, 1957.

  Although its beeps could be heard on radios around the world, its designers didn’t immediately see the launch as a major accomplishment. So focused were the team members on the military aspects of their work, Chertok said, that they failed to recognize Sputnik’s historical significance. “We prepared the launch with no great expectations,” he said. “If it were to succeed, three cheers. If not, no big deal because our main task was to get back to building a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.”

  The launch was first announced in a small item on the second page of Pravda, and the world reaction to Sputnik caught even the Soviet propaganda machine by surprise. “As for most of Sputnik’s creators, it took us four or five days to realize that from then on, the history of civilization could be divided into before the launch… and after,” Chertok said.

  Despite the tremendous publicity Sputnik generated for the Kremlin, the names of its designers would remain state secrets for years. Even inside the space program, Korolev was known only as the Chief Designer, which caused significant anguish to the man who was also in charge of the effort that made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space in 1961. Sending scientists with no connection to the space program to take credit for its successes at international conferences—men humiliated by that role—was especially upsetting to Korolev, who was publicly recognized only after his death in 1966. Although other gifted pioneers contributed to the space program’s historic achievements, the extent to which everything else depended on one man’s ability to overcome outsize obstacles remains underestimated.

  As they did with the space program, military strategy goals justified the funding of a large number of scientific institutes and projects. However, those aims weren’t enough to save many of them from ruin after the Soviet collapse because the state was no longer able to pay for much of anything beyond its most basic needs. Thousands of scholars and technicians who had helped engineer some of the USSR’s greatest feats lost their jobs. Many who didn’t emigrate survived by driving gypsy cabs, trading in cheap consumer products and taking part in other small-time businesses—as some still do.

  One result is that Russian science is declining dramatically despite the government’s claim to be modernizing the country. A 2012 report by the well-connected head of the Russian Association for the Advancement of Science said a precipitous drop in funding—although not for government officials who oversee scientific institutions and earn far more than the scientists conducting research—has contributed to a “catastrophic” situation. Another study in 2013 listed no Russians among leaders in the world’s one hundred top-ranked specialties in the sciences and social sciences.2 An astute observer, Olga Khvostunova, points out that much of what money does go to science is channeled toward unrealistic projects to boost national prestige, such as the drive to develop nanotechnology. “The collapse of Russian science,” she concludes, “will inevitably lead to a series of crises in the economy, social sphere, and public administration.”3 A recent plan to overhaul the Russian Academy of Sciences that would merge the hundreds of institutions it oversees under a single new government agency has prompted fears it will make matters even worse by putting scholars under the Kremlin’s control.

  Other members of the intelligentsia—including those who provided some of the strongest support for Gorbachev’s reforms, which indirectly caused the end of their livelihoods—also continue to suffer. But prospects for some writers and artists have since improved with the rise of the consumer culture and its concomitant disposable income, which can be spent on diversions from the daily grind.

  Comparing rocket science to art isn’t a big stretch in Russia, where creativity and originality often come in sudden bursts and contrast sharply with the slavish imitations churned out in many other spheres. Some believe it is precisely the impediments in much of Russian life that feed wellsprings of creativity. The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described two contradictory principles at the heart of what he saw as the Russian soul—“the one a natural, Dionysian, elemental paganism and the other an ascetic monastic Orthodoxy.”4 The opposition between those principles helps explain such contradictions in Russian life as “despotism [and] the hypertrophy of the State” on the one hand and “anarchism and license” on the other. Among those who see that kind of paradox as central to Russian culture, one Moscow artist is especially skilled at dissecting and celebrating the apparent contradictions.

  Yuri Vaschenko, a smiling, mustachioed painter in his sixties, is a modernist fascinated by perceptions of open space, in which the Russian landscape is so rich. Although he spent several months each year in the United States over the course of many years, he always returned to Russia “because my inspiration is here,” he told me. Some of it is born from the kinds of disparities in which Russia is also very rich: the very wealthy versus the hordes of the very poor; the terrible taste in most things versus the deep, almost instinctive appreciation for the arts—music and ballet perhaps chief among them—in a country where aesthetic considerations are very important.

  Vaschenko’s large studio lies under the eaves of a pre-Revolutionary building off a small lane in one of Moscow’s charming old neighborhoods. He has illustrated many books, work that provided steady incomes for artists during the Soviet era, when the authorities frowned on most real creativity. Although the city provides the studio he works in, Vaschenko almost lost it when a well-connected businessman one floor down decided he wanted it for a duplex. Having surprised himself by persevering in court, Vaschenko continues to dissect the vicissitudes of Russian life over tea or vodka at a cozy round table surrounded by canvases, still-life props and photographs of Boris Pasternak and his other intellectual heroes.

  On a typical evening, he set herring, cold boiled beets, very dark Russian rye bread and vodka on his table: the substance of a delicious meal over which we talked well into the night. I hadn’t done that in a long time because Muscovites—renowned under communism for their “kitchen table” discussions of politics, metaphysics and anything and everything else—now tend to go to bars and restaurants, where conversation has become increasingly jejune. Despite Vaschenko’s hospitality, however, he someti
mes complained about being interrupted at work by friends who stop by unannounced, an old Russian practice and a staple of life when few people had telephones. Friends and fellow artists insist they urgently need to speak for a few minutes and take offense if they’re not invited to stay.

  Moscow seethes with corruption and violence, he told me, “but I sometimes daydream that I’m walking down a dark street and suddenly the side door of a tall building opens and inside a large smiling pasha [an Ottoman lord] is presiding over a big party in an enormous, ornate hall. I couldn’t conjure the image of abandon without the oppression. Maybe it could only happen here.” One theory about why Russian literature and art abounds with grotesque images and mystical realism is that absurdity is a response to the country’s history of unfathomable suffering. Vaschenko salvages significance even from the mediocre art that hardship often helps generate because he says bad work directs him toward useful visions. He told me that one evening, returning from a splashy exhibition of paintings mounted when the country’s new oil wealth was first fueling demand for big and gaudy works, he realized that he had seriously enjoyed going. The affair’s slogan, aping Soviet exhortations to “build communism,” was “Isskustvo—Pokupat!” (“Art—Buy It!”). The exhibits included warmed-over surrealism, huge canvases depicting the universe and paintings of Rollerbladers as well as motorcycles that had been airbrushed to resemble reptiles. The best of the pieces were whimsical. One untitled photomontage, by a talented and controversial artist named Oleg Kulik, showed the massive Christ the Savior cathedral with a crashed BMW in front of it, symbolizing the new Russia’s big spending and recklessness. “I didn’t go there expecting anything great,” Vaschenko explained. “I went to see artifacts. And it was incredible, like being on another planet!”

  Although the Soviet authorities suppressed the work of many like Vaschenko, they invested in other creative spheres that also suffered when communism’s collapse dried up their funding. The flagship of Soviet culture, the Bolshoi Ballet, suffered serious damage to its morale and standing in the 1990s following the ousting of its famed director Yuri Grigorovich, who had run the company with an iron fist for thirty years. After years of infighting under a string of directors, Mikhail Shvydkoi, then the culture minister, was appointed to rebuild the theater in 2000. A savvy manager held in high esteem by many creative types, he told me he found the ballet in ruins. “The Bolshoi lost a lot of the really big stars and needed new blood,” he said.

  Even in those years, when tickets were relatively cheap and some productions embarrassingly substandard, others were magical. Attending the ballet remains one of the great pleasures of living in Moscow, although music and theater are often no less brilliant. Some of the enchanting feeling surely must have to do with the soaring Bolshoi Theater itself, its gilded balconies and hundreds of chandeliers evoking pre-Revolutionary timelessness and grandeur. Founded in 1776, the ballet troupe long remained a poor cousin of the Imperial Russian Ballet—today the Mariinsky Ballet—in St. Petersburg. But it came into its own in the early twentieth century, before the Soviets advanced it as a showcase of communist achievement.

  Shvydkoi hired the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, but his appointment of a talented new director who tried to reinvigorate the ballet in 2006 drew the enmity of Bolshoi veterans who accused them of destroying celebrated traditions. Thirty-seven years old at the time, Alexei Ratmansky forced the ballet to do more than restage classic productions; he hired new young talent and experimented with choreography by foreigners. One of his innovations that prompted vigorous criticism was his staging of a version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet by British theater director Declan Donnellan.

  Nikolai Tsiskaridze was prominent among the critics. A huge but aging star, the tall principal dancer with a trademark mop of long dark hair and a penchant for controversy told me that Ratmansky had trashed the Bolshoi’s traditions and insulted its dancers. “I’ve been the main face of the Bolshoi for the past fourteen years,” he declared in his spacious dressing room. “And suddenly he arrives from nowhere, someone who never danced here, and who couldn’t even have dreamed of it. Now he’s saying the Bolshoi has no good traditions and its dancers are old supporters of the Communist Party.”

  Not everyone agreed. Liudmilla Semenyaga, one of the Bolshoi’s biggest stars in the 1970s, who had become a coach of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova when I spoke to her, told me that conflicts between dancers and choreographers were nothing unusual and praised Ratmansky for provoking controversy. “We need a breath of fresh air,” she said. Nevertheless, Ratmansky left for New York’s American Ballet Theatre a little more than a year into his tenure and has since become one of the world’s most acclaimed choreographers.

  The Bolshoi’s deep divisions erupted into public view in 2013, when a masked man attacked one of Ratmansky’s successors outside his apartment building by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. A former principal dancer, Sergei Filin suffered third-degree burns and serious damage to his eyes. His injuries astounded Moscow. In the preceding weeks, his car’s tires had been slashed, his cell phones disabled and his e-mail account hacked. Some suspected that Tsiskaridze was a leader of the faction of dancers who railed against Filin’s changes to the Bolshoi’s classical repertoire. Tsiskaridze had been passed over for director and later lost an attempt to replace Filin. The Bolshoi’s general director at the time, Anatoly Iksanov, went as far as telling a newspaper that even if Tsiskaridze had no part in the attack, “he led the situation in the theater to the state where someone else could have gone further.” The contracts of both Tsiskaridze and Iksanov were later allowed to expire.

  Soon after the attack, police arrested a dancer in Tsiskaridze’s camp who was a staunch Grigorovich supporter and regularly clashed with Filin about money and roles. Pavel Dmitrichenko, who lived in Filin’s building and is the son of professional dancers, confessed to organizing the attack. In a sign of just how deep suspicions run, however, many ballet members said they didn’t believe Dmitrichenko alone hatched the plot and that someone else may have coerced him into becoming involved.

  Whatever the truth, Filin wasn’t the first to be so publicly targeted: a leading candidate for artistic director before him had resigned after sexually explicit photographs of someone who looked like him were posted on the Internet. Despite the Bolshoi’s recent turmoil, however, ballet scholars say its artistic quality has continued to approach that of its chief rival, the Mariinsky, which added a modern new building in 2013 under its legendary director Valery Gergiev. In any case, Russian dance remains unmatched, a sphere in which Russian pride in mastering a foreign art form is truly deserved. Strict discipline is partly responsible. I’ve seen Bolshoi dancers perform astounding feats as if they were effortless even during their daily morning classes when I observed them in a large, airy room of the theater. Maybe because it’s connected to art, Russians’ mastery of ballet training appears to go against the general lack of discipline in other spheres. But that doesn’t entirely account for, among other virtues, the unrivaled gracefulness in the way Russian dancers hold their hands, which conveys an impression that they have achieved emotional mastery over their bodies. The same is true for their ice dancing, which draws heavily from ballet.

  The Soviet Union produced many of the world’s top figure skaters until its Olympic training machine collapsed along with communism. But conditions have improved under Putin, who presided over a tenfold increase in funding for the sport. When I observed Russian champion Elena Sokolova prepare for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin by training in a well-outfitted Moscow ice rink, her veteran coach, Victor Kudriavtsev, told me that although training programs had undergone a sea change since the previous Winter Olympics, Russian figure skating had never really suffered serious decline. He said the consistency was partly explained by the difference in technique and choreography between the Russian school and its American and European counterparts. “We look at figure skating as art as well as sport. Russian athletes’ pr
ograms are more than performances; they’re spectacles.”

  In tennis, too, Russians believe their national characteristics have helped them excel. Although the Communist Party authorities viewed the supposedly bourgeois sport with suspicion, Ekaterina Kryuchkova, who trained Alyona Bovina and Vera Zvonoreva in a tennis center near the Kremlin, told me the sport has since exploded because emotions play a large role in the game. Russians are “colossally emotional” people, she said approvingly.

  I’ve often overheard conversations on the street whose pathos was so moving it seemed unreal, as if straight from the pages of a great nineteenth-century novel. My father liked to say that Russia’s celebrated realists, along with some of their twentieth-century successors such as Isaac Babel, were Russia’s best reporters partly because they fashioned plots from news stories of the day. Although the scenarios may appear absurd and the dialogue over the top to Western readers today, the fiction was far less fanciful than many imagine, much truer to the kinds of anything-goes talk that really takes place.

  “Since college, when I first started reading them, I thought the great Russian writers invented this kind of dialogue, where they all speak, few if any listen, and non sequitur piles joyfully or gloomily upon non sequitur,” the celebrated correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote. “Invent, my foot. They were reporting. Russians talk this way.”5

  Although the idea that suffering nurtures artistic creativity is hardly new, some believe there’s something else about Russia that distinguishes it, something that prompts its intellectuals to think especially big. The historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed to the country’s “intellectual vacuum,” as he called that aspect of its backwardness—for which its lack of a tradition of secular education was partly responsible. It allowed new ideas, when they arrived, to take root as if people were intoxicated by them.