And now, just when he was coming to hate his luck, it seemed to be spreading out, becoming general. He was not an economist; he had no idea what part of Khrushchev’s promises was feasible. But the Sparrow Hills were one big building site. New boulevards marked out with pegs and string branched off a road that not long ago had been a one-lane strip of country blacktop. There were cranes on every rounded rise of ground, and concrete panels dangling from them swayed up to fill out the skeletons of endless new apartment buildings, blessed by the bright air today like every other surface. The pale panels were the hopeful white of clean pages. You could look at them and feel that cockroach days were nearly over for the people who didn’t live among amber and inlay above Aeroflotskaya. No more scuttling in the dark and the damp for them. The city of light was rising in the Sparrow Hills.
‘Lot going on,’ said Galich, experimentally.
‘Ah, Nikita Sergeyevich is a miracle worker!’ said the taxi driver. Did he mean it? Or in other moods was he ready to pun on Mr K.’s name and the word for slums, and call these blocks khrushchoby? Impossible to tell; he’d said it in the deadpan style that refused to collapse into meaning just one thing. Normally Sasha admired this folk art of undecidedness, but today it only made him feel the more alone with his private clot of dark. Moscow glowed like an icon, the future shone, and only he was left out of the happy concord. At the next corner, a giant banner rippled and flapped against the end wall of a block, with the honest face of Yuri Gagarin on it, six storeys high, and underneath the words he was supposed to have said, back in April, when they lit the rocket beneath him: LET’S GO. Upwards with Yuri! Up to the stars; up Mr K.’s ladder to the heavens, whose foot stood in a mulch of blood and bone.
The radio roared its approval.
*
Lucky Sasha Galich. Lucky him, joking through the script conference; lucky him, chatting to the hoofers as they rehearse today’s big number; lucky him, homeward bound with his latest beautiful young thing. Though later, after they’ve made love and he’s asleep, she stands at his window overlooking Aeroflotkskaya, smoking, and feeling that he withdrew from her into some place much further off than the slightly rueful place you always go, when joined skins separate back into two cooling island selves. ‘1980’, blinks red neon in the distance, 1980, 1980, 1980, as if the figures were all the lullaby the city needs. It’s started to rain. She’d meant to discuss with him a part she’d been offered, out of town, but the lead, and a good director; but somehow Sasha’s charm never let up long enough to give her an opening. Yes, she thinks, she will go to Minsk. There’s not much to keep her here.
Notes – 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 Chapters, translated 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. 8–1 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 bachelor 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 Abundance 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.b> 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 organisations 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).
‘Do not worry, my soul,’ said the wise wife. ‘Go to sleep. The morning is wiser than the evening.’
PART III
In 1930 the Bolsheviks abolished universities. Only the two famous ones at Moscow and Leningrad survived, drastically truncated. But this was not an attack on education as such, as in Maoist China later, or still more so in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where the authorities would aim at burning away intellectual life altogether and leaving a level plain of pure ignorance as the foundation for a new society. Nor was it an attempt to do without an intelligentsia. The universities were closed in order to open them again, massively expanded and redesigned as factories for the production of a new kind of intellectual.
The Bolsheviks had been having trouble with the old kind of intellectual ever since the revolution. The tiny professoriat they inherited – a fraction of an educated class which was itself a small fraction of Russia’s literate minority – was shaped by an ethical tradition more than a century old. Pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals felt a sense of public obligation not shared by their equivalents abroad. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had been obvious to anyone educated that the tsarist regime was an embarrassing, oppressive anachronism. To be one of the lucky few who could read about the world outside therefore gave you a responsibility to try and do something about Russia; usually not in a directly political way, unless you were one of those with a very pronounced bump of idealism, but by building up an alternative Russia in culture, in novels and poetry and art where stupidity was not enthroned. Above all, to be an intellectual was to feel that you were, at least potentially, one of those who spoke truth to power. By teaching and learning at all, reading and writing at all, you were implicitly acting as a witness, as a prophet of a larger life.
These attitudes meant that while intellectuals largely welcomed the Revolution as the end of tsarism, very few of them signed up for Lenin’s brand of Marxism, even when – or especially when – it had state power behind it. Indeed, a number of scholars who had been happy to teach Marxism before the Revolution, as a way of sticking a finger in the eye of power, promptly started offering courses in religious philosophy after it, to achieve the same effect. Most of the Party’s own intellectuals were needed, in the early years, to keep the improvised apparatus of the Soviet Union going, so for a decade the universities were essentially left in the hands of the academics. The scholars were purged and sometimes deported; they had university rectors and department heads imposed on them; experiments with the admissions system gave them, some years, mostly war veterans or factory workers to teach; but they continued to offer an education in criticism and argument. College buildings were among the last places in the Soviet Union where itwas still possible to find printed leaflets issued by the Central Committee, not of the Bolsheviks, but of the dying Mensheviks, forlornly calling for social democracy without dictatorship.
By the end of the 1920s, however, the Party was in a position to enforce ideological conformity. The first Five-Year Plan had just begun, and ‘bourgeois specialists’ were being hunted out of industry and government. With Narkompros, the ‘Commissariat of Enlightenment’, in the hands of Stalin’s allies, the bourgeois specialists of education were next. ‘It is time for Bolsheviks themselves to become specialists,’ said Stalin in a speech. And ‘the working class must create its own productive-technical intelligentsia’. He had in mind something very different from its predecessor: a service class, speedily and narrowly trained in the disciplines required to operate heavy industry, with membership held out as a reward for the loyal and the ambitious.
First, the universities were abolished. Then, they were replaced by a multitude of ‘VUZy’ and ‘VTUZy’, ‘schools of higher learning’ and ‘schools of higher technical learning’, usually all chaotically time- sharing the same old buildings to maximise throughput. From the Agricultural College of Voronezh, for example, the Poultry Insitute of Voronezh inherited ‘eight small benches, a corridor, and one lecture room (shared with the Mechanisation Institute)’. Students were drafted in in bulk from the Party itself, from its tame labour unions, from newly established shopfloors and the newly starving countryside. These vydvizhentsy, ‘promotees’, were indeed working- class, but mostly not in the European or American sense that they belonged to an existing, urbanised, long-disadvantaged mass of the industrial poor; they were representatives of a class that the Party’s own policy of crash industrialisation was calling into being. Their numbers swelled the system enormously. Where there had been around thirty thousand old-style graduates a year before the change, there were getting on for a hundred thousand a year by the second half of the 1930s. In the Party alone, more than 110,000 people had studied for a degree, including Nikita Khrushchev, Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev.
By that time, things had settled down in higher education, from some points of view. Though spending was skimped – like spending on all present-tense human needs – enough money was put in to end the jostling scenes at the back of every lecture theatre, where twenty or thirty students had struggled to share a single textbook. Entry was, once again, by examination, and not just by political recommendation. The universities’ traditional names and styles crept back, in line with Stalin’s own preference for respectability and hierarchy. Stalin had been willing to work with educational radicals, as part of his meticulous campaign to destroy all the independent factions within the Party by feeding them to each other, one at a time, but once he was in a position to impose his tastes, he wanted to see tidy tsarist-style uniforms on high-school boys again. He wanted learning to look august and venerable. The Party’s rival to the old autonomous Academy of Sciences was abandoned, and effort directed instead into making sure that the Academy became a pliable, reliable instrument of prestige.
But the change in the subject-matter of eduction was permanent. The old universities had taught the European liberal arts curriculum. All of that vanished, and technology took over. Almost half of all students now studied engineering, following a fiercely utilitarian curriculum designed to feed the economy with specific skills. When they graduated, they were supposed to know everything they required to go out solo and kick-start a power station, or a metals refinery, or a rail line. Ne
xt came the pure sciences, with physics and maths leading the way, chemistry a surprising poor relation, and biology in deep ideological trouble; then medicine, disproportionately studied by women, and ‘agricultural science’, intended to provide expertise to collective farms. Humanities departments were closed down altogether – though a few historians then had to be put back in business, in order to prepare school texts stuffed with figures and dates, and praise for previous centralising rulers. Literature became ‘philology’, a technical subject mainly devoted to teaching the many languages required to rule the Soviet Union. Philosophy died, anthropology died, sociology died, law and economics withered: the Party regarded ‘social science’ as its own private technology, to be taught to cadres within the Party itself, and dispensed to college students in the form of compulsory courses in Marxism–Leninism.
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