The only houses in the country Emil had ever really looked at had been dachas; these appeared to be constructed on the same general plan, only the wood was old, not new, and the walls were thick, not thin, and where the lines of a dacha made a trim summery sketch in the air the lines of these houses sagged heavily, as if they left the earth with reluctance. Traces of ancient colour clung to the shutters, like the last streaks of dried skin and gristle stuck in the creases of old bones. They were lairs, burrows. Sunflowers leaned over the crooked palisades of garden plots. Broken tools and pieces of rusty metal lay in the long grass.
‘Well, this is home,’ said his fiancée. ‘Or it was home.’ Her father had gone ahead, shouting that they’d arrived. They strolled downhill together in the blissful shadow. A granny at a doorstep gazed at them as they passed. A boy of about eight belted round the corner of a house and stopped dead, a jack-rabbit arrested by the sight of something terrifying.
‘Hey there,’ said Emil. He scrubbed again at his jacket, then gave up.
‘Feels a little strange to come back?’ he asked.
‘Stranger every time.’
Emil could imagine that. Even seeing her with the low shingle roofs of the village houses around her, he still instinctively believed that her natural environment must be urban, so deftly at home in the city she had seemed to be, so confidently embedded in its possibilities, when he first ran into her on the campus, grey scarf matching her grey eyes, under the giant spire of the new university tower. Knowing her had played a large part in his own pleasurable sense that he was turning into a Muscovite. Now she had invited him to see what had come before the poise. She was nervous, he could see, but there was also a kind of appeal in her look. She would like it, he thought, if he were able to show somehow that in his eyes this new part of her wasn’t a total mystery, wasn’t a complete surprise. But the truth was that he had no idea what life could have been like for her, growing up here. He didn’t quite believe the place was real. It looked like the set for some Chekhov story of country life. He kept expecting a hospitable squire or a melancholy doctor to pop up and start talking about his gooseberry patch.
‘I don’t think your father likes me much,’ he said.
‘Give him a chance,’ said Magda. ‘Men in suits always mean trouble, in his experience. Nothing good comes from the city.’igh>
‘Well,’ Emil said, nettled, ‘apart from manufactured goods, you mean. And, you know, progress, and culture, and civilisation.’
‘Oh yes?’ she said. ‘This is the village store. Look in here.’
To the left of the track, a shed had three steps up to a side door with a tin sign nailed over the lintel. Obediently, Emil pressed his nose against the glass pane in the bolted door. Through dingy glass, he could make out a counter, and a shelf behind it. The shelf was a graveyard for flies. That was its main function; but at one end, as an afterthought, some rusty cans of kerosene had been stacked, and blocks of sugar wrapped in blue paper.
‘There’s a supply problem,’ he said uncertainly.
‘No,’ she said, ‘there isn’t.’
‘But –’
‘There isn’t,’ she said. ‘This is the back of the queue, that’s all. Always the back of the queue. Come on, I can see my mother.’
Twisting her hands, a thin grey-haired woman like a beaten-down version of his fiancée was waiting in a doorway with a cluster of other people around her, and more people drifting into place between the houses to gawp, all silent, all unashamedly fixed on the spectacle Emil was providing. At the front of the group a sallow man in shirt and braces was standing with his arms crossed, an expression of bafflement on a face like a sweating cheese.
‘Welcome, Mister, welcome –’ began Magda’s mother, but the sallow man interrupted.
‘You’re the student, right?’ he said.
‘Pletkin the manager,’ murmured Magda.
‘More or less,’ said Emil. ‘Yes.’
‘You could have phoned the kolkhoz office. No need to’ve walked, someone like you, day like this. I’d’ve picked you up.’
‘That’s kind of you,’ said Emil.
‘No problem,’ said Pletkin. ‘After all, not every day, meet the young man’s going to marry our clever girl here.’ The words were friendly but the tone was on the edge of surly. Pletkin, Emil saw, was in a state of cognitive dissonance. He was set up to receive some well-connected stripling from the city, and instead he was having to make his obliging little speech, in front of all his people, to someone who looked like a tramp.
‘He’m covered in shit!’ said an old man who came up no further than the middle of Emil’s chest. ‘Magda’s boy from the city, he’m covered in shit!’ He began to wheeze with laughter. His next neighbour – beard, rags of a Red Army jacket – reached out and slapped him round the head with the mild exasperation of someone clouting a malfunctioning radio. Emil blinked, but Pletkin brightened, as if he had been provided with an axiom he could trust: no one important is covered in shit.
‘Don’t mind grandad there,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to say, son, you are a hell of a mess. Come on down to the office and have a wash. All the home comforts. You won’t find any of that in there, you know’ – jerking his thumb at the dark door of the hut.
‘Thanks,’ said Emil, ‘but I’m expected.’
‘Suiurself,’ said Pletkin. ‘Change your mind, want some hot water, come on over. Right, everyone who’s not in this happy gathering, clear off. There’s work to do.’ And he ambled away, scratching his armpit. Emil saw that he had a rolled-up newspaper tucked into the straining equator of his pants, like a holstered weapon. Judging by the headline, it was the day before yesterday’s. Prick, thought Emil; but he also felt a pang of anxiety as Pletkin left him to the closed faces of the villagers. For a moment even Magda’s seemed to be sealed away from him into unfriendly strangeness. It was the reverse of what he had felt only a few minutes before. He was suddenly afraid he wouldn’t be able to find the city girl in a village girl’s face.
‘Mister, welcome, you’re most welcome,’ said Magda’s mother, who had evidently rehearsed her line and needed to say it. ‘Welcome to the house and welcome to the family. Won’t you come in and take a little drink.’
‘It’s a pleasure to meet to you. Please, call me Emil,’ said Emil, and they stood aside and let him in. Inside, the house was a clutter of shadows, slowly resolving into wooden furniture and objects dangling from low rafters. Also, he couldn’t help noticing, the house smelled, with the strong odours of humans living close together, laid down in layers over time and engrained in the woodwork, he guessed, to the point that you’d probably have to burn the place down altogether to dislodge the laminated fug of sweat and smoke and human waste. That blur of painted glass and tin plate over there must be an icon, the first Emil had ever seen that wasn’t in a museum. Other figures crowded through the door, blocking off the light: Magda, her father, the old man, the fellow who’d slapped him. His eyes were still adjusting. Magda’s mother seated him at the table and in front of him put a jamjar two-thirds filled with something clear. The men sat down opposite, a grimly nervous tribunal.
‘My father you’ve met,’ said Magda. ‘My grandfather; my big brother Sasha.’
They got jars too. Emil sniffed his, trying not to be noticed. It wasn’t water.
‘Homebrew,’ Magda muttered in his ear. ‘A social necessity. Drink up.’
Emil tipped a mouthful into himself, cautiously. The caution was pointless: a tide of alcoholic fire flowed in across his tongue, hit his uvula with a splash and burned its way down his throat. After the burn came a fiercely warm afterglow, in which it became possible to taste what he’d just swallowed. It was faintly soapy, faintly stale. However they made it, the homebrew must be getting on for pure alcohol, much stronger than bottled vodka.
‘Good stuff,’ he said, and was pleased to find his voice was steady, not comically scorched. ‘A toast,’ he said, and held up the jamjar. ‘To journey’s end
and new beginnings.’ To himself, he sounded plainly fake; as theatrical as some perfect-vowelled stage actor hamming the part of the son-in-law from the metropolis. But they seemed to like it. They nodded, and gulped gravely at their jars. He gulped again too, and while he was recovering from the tide of fire, Magda’s mother deftly topped him up from an ancient jerrycan, which was not what he’d had in mind. A tin plate of sunflower seeds appeared. Magda was hovering behind him somewhere. He could feel her ironic gaze on his neck.
‘To marriage, then,’ said Magda’s father. Swig.
‘Yeah, to the bride and groom,’ said Sasha. Swig. Come on, this is better, thought Emil, this is going to be OK.
‘To Christ and his saints,’ said her grandfather. Silence.
‘Grandad here is getting a bit confused,’ offered Magda’s mother.
‘Soft in the head,’ agreed Sasha, grinning with fury behind his teeth, and lifted a hand.
id="filepos197077">I don’t mind drinking to that,’ Emil said hastily. ‘It’s what my grandfather says,’ he said, though it wasn’t, his grandfather having been brought up, long ago, as a good Kazan Muslim. Swig. Wary eyes everywhere.
‘I told you,’ said Magda from the shadows. ‘Emil is all right.’
‘I hope I am,’ he said, a little approximately. He was feeling the firewater. Various things inside him seemed to be coming unscrewed, desocketed. ‘I hope I’ll be able to do you some good, you know, now that I’m in the family.’
‘How’s that?’ said Magda’s father.
‘Tell them where your job’s going to be,’ said Magda.
‘Well …’ he said. It had seemed much less certain a thing to boast about, since he arrived in the village; but she was insistent.
‘Go on, tell them.’
‘Well, come September, I’ll be working for, for’ – no need to get into the detail of the bureaucracy – ‘the Central Committee.’
‘What,’ said her father slowly, ‘like, at the district office?’
‘Er, no –’ began Emil, but Magda interrupted.
‘He means the Central Committee. Of the Soviet Union.’
Silence. Magda’s dad looked at him as if he had just lost whatever comprehensibility he might ever have had; as if he had just been transformed into some dangerous mythological creature, right there at the table. But Sasha gave a long, low whistle.
‘Don’t you get it?’ he said to his father. ‘We’re going to have a friend up top. Right up top.’
‘Family,’ corrected Magda.
Sasha grinned, properly this time, teeth gleaming in his beard. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Pletkin is going to shit himself.’ Caressingly: ‘He is going. To. Shit himself. Why didn’t you tell him, just now? You could have wiped the floor with him, the fat fucker.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Emil. ‘I suppose I didn’t want to embarrass him. I thought he might, you know, take it out on you all somehow.’
‘Nah,’ said Sasha, thinking about it, ‘too cowardly. Don’t worry about him. Oh, this is going to be so sweet. C’mon, ma, give him a refill.’
Swig. Swig.
‘I was thinking,’ said Emil, ‘that I could get you stuff from the shops. In Moscow. And later, you know, that maybe I could do something to fix the shop here. I don’t quite get why it’s like that.’ He didn’t. The shop should have been the village’s connection to the general movement of the Soviet economy, the point at which the value they created – since they were independent producers, albeit collectivised ones – flowed back to them in Of form of goods.
‘Like what?’ said Magda’s father.
‘Emil has never been anywhere off the road before,’ explained Magda.
‘For instance,’ said Emil, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t see how it can possibly absorb your incomes. Would you mind telling me what you earn?’
‘How much do you want us to be earning?’ asked Magda’s father suspiciously.
‘Dad, it’s all right. It’s really all right. You can talk to him.’
And they did, in dribs and drabs, with many swigs of homebrew to moisten them, as if he were a prince in disguise, travelling with a chest of gold to reward the virtuous and put-upon. They talked to him, and he was appalled. The answer to his question was, literally, kopecks. At the price the state paid for the wheat they laboured six days a week to grow, nothing was left in Pletkin’s account-books, effectively, to pay them a wage. Cash came, if it came, from selling the vegetables from the private plots behind the huts, at the kolkhoznik market in Alexandrovsk. Their relationship to the state was not an economic relationship at all; it was primitive extraction. It was very nearly robbery. Something must be done. Fortunately, he was the man to do it. This was a task for conscious arrangers if ever there was one.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. Swig. ‘I’ll sort it out.’
‘Yes, brother,’ said Sasha.
It seemed to be evening now. Magda’s mother was lighting oil lamps. A number of people came and went, but Emil found it safest to concentrate on the lamplit wooden tabletop just in front of him.
‘Go on, Grandad, give us a story,’ someone said. ‘How’s your memory tonight? Got a whole one in there?’
a id="filepos202992">Well, I’ll try,’ said the old man doubtfully. ‘In the thrice-ninth kingdom of the thrice-tenth land, there lived a poor man who had, uh, a miraculous horse. No, he bought the miraculous horse, he bought it with … Or was it a miraculous wife he had? Dammit, I used to know all of ’em. No, it’s gone. I’ll tell you what, though,’ he said, ‘I can sing you a song from that fillum the fellow with the van showed us.’ And he launched quaveringly into a tune Emil just about recognised as the title song from the old musical, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys’.
a id="filepos203623">Did something bad happen here?’ asked Emil, muzzily. Sasha laughed. Magda leaned towards him, her face a pink whirl at the far end of a tunnel.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. He was all right, he was very all right. Hadn’t they covered that earlier? In fact he was having a new idea. He was thinking to himself that an economy told a kind of story, though not the sort you would find in a novel. In this story, many of the major characters would never even meet, yet they would act on each other’s lives just as surely as if they jostled for space inside a single house, through the long chains by which value moved about. Tiny decisions in one place could have cascading, giant effects elsewhere; conversely, what most absorbed the conscious attention of the characters – what broke their hearts, what they thought ordered or justified their lives – might have no effect whatsoever, dying away as if it had never happened at all. Yet impersonal forces could have drastically personal consequences, in this story, altering the whole basis on which people hoped and loved a worked. It would be a strange story to hear. At first it would seem to be a buzzing confusion, extending arbitrarily in directions that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. But little by little, if you were patient, its peculiar laws would become plain. In the end it would all make sense. Yes, thought Emil, it would all make sense in the end.
Notes – I.4 White Dust, 1953
1 For him the beginning was the day he walked to the village: Emil Shaidullin’s walk to his in-laws in 1953 is a fictional embroidery on the similar journey taken by Abel Aganbegyan, and described in his Moving the Mountain. The events of Emil’s walk should not be read back to Professor Aganbegyan’s, any more than Emil’s character, throughout this book, should be taken as a portrait of Professor Aganbegyan.
2 Stalin’s little book: J.V.Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, English edition (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952).
3 And while Marx didn’t say much about economics after the revolution: for most of what he did say about it, see Robert Freedman, ed., Marx on Economics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), pp. 229–41.
4 Here and there, economists were starting to talk to biologists and mathematicians: for this first, semi-clandestine stage in the co
nversation of the disciplines which would produce Soviet cybernetics, which was not quite the same thing as Western cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Boston: MIT Press, 2002).
5 For economics, after all, was a theory of everything: for a readable narrative history of the discipline’s history and universal ambitions, see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). For a much more intricate and specific (but still narrative) study of the ambitions that seemed to be enabled by economics’ encounter with information technology in the post-war twentieth century, see Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).
6 Value shone in material things once labour had made them useful: the ‘labour theory of value’, as originated by Adam Smith and passed via David Ricardo to Marx. Soviet economists tended to be aware of pre-Marxian classical economics, at least in the form of citations and summaries, but not the post-Marxian development of it. The ‘marginalist revolution’ of the late nineteenth century was little known, and with it the characteristic mathematical formalisations of Western economics. Those who were well-enough informed to know about the ‘socialist calculation debate’ (see below, introduction to part II) were conscious that their proposals for optimal asset allocation presupposed a Walrasian model of general equilibrium, but Pareto was reputed only as a quasi-fascist, and Keynes as one more ‘bourgeois apologist’, whose fancy footwork could not disguise the unchanging operations of capital, as diagnosed once and for ever by Marx. For Marx’s formulation of the labour theory, see Freedman, ed., Marx on Economics, pp. 27–63; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, translated from the Polish by P.S.Falla, one-volume edition (New York: W.W.Norton, 2005), pp. 219–26. For the question of what Soviet economists knew, see Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain; Joseph Berliner, ‘Economic Reform in the USSR’ in John W. Strong, ed., The Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), pp. 50–60; Aron Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR (New York: Pergamon, 1980); Alex Simirenko, ed., Soviet Sociology (London: RKP, 1967). For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
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