Culture ceased to be the responsibility of professors. New films, plays, books and poems emerged from the Film-Makers’ Union and the Writers’ Union; the old stuff, reduced to a conservative selection of classics, it became the duty of every ambitious citizen to know. The Party wished the Soviet public to be kulturny, a term which stretched from brushing your teeth regularly to reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. There was an irony here. A hard-working promotee, with a nice clean background as a worker or a ‘poor peasant’, would get on in the world by carefully reading stories about aristocrats and princes and bourgeois functionaries – exactly the kind of people who would have been defined as ‘socially alien’, as ‘enemies’, if they were alive in the present. But it mattered far more that War and Peace or Eugene Onegin represented objects of guaranteed quality which ordinary people were now entitled to possess. None of that avant- garde hooting and face-pulling, thank you very much; just the best, the great works of the Russian past, in gold-stamped bindings you’d be proud to have on the shelf of your new apartment. And it wasn’t as if continuity with the past was completely lacking. There was indeed a strand in the old intellectual tradition – half of its coiled DNA – which could be adapted as a credo for these rising Stalinist graduates. The Russian intelligentsia had always been committed to modernising Russia: and what were these chimneys but modernity on the march? It had always thought of culture as something operating top-down, an enlightenment spread to the many by the educated few: and what was the Bolshevik mission but an elite’s twentieth-century effort to raise lumpish Russia high? It had always been prone to believing in panaceas, in ideas that could solve every problem all at once: and what was Bolshevism but the ultimate key to open all locks, the last and best and greatest system of human knowledge? Believing these things, the new technological intellectuals were willing to be told, were willing to believe, that the task of speaking truth to power was now redundant, because truth was in power. By definition, friends of truth, friends of thought and reason and humanity and beautyre williriends of the Party; friends of Stalin. To be opposed to the Party would be to become an enemy of truth, and to break the intellectual’s reponsibility to truth.
With a reliable substitute in place for the old intelligentsia, Stalin could afford to sweep away most of its surviving members in the purges of the late 1930s, along with most of his own political generation within the Party, and most of the people, formed by the pre-revolutionary world, who had risen to lead industry, the army, the state bureaucracies. He was left with the promotees: grateful, incurious, ignorant of the world outside the Soviet Union, and willing to accept the Stalinist order as the order of reality itself. A great silence reigned about the parts of intellectual life that had disappeared. Soon, young people were unaware that things had ever been otherwise. In the new curriculum, different subjects experienced different fates. The closer a science was to practicality, the more it was co-opted into serving the practical needs of power. The closer it was to the dangerous ground of social science, on the other hand, the more distorted by ideology it tended to become. And the more abstract it was, the more intellectually uncorrupted it was likely to remain. The result was a landscape of intellectual lives laid out very differently from its counterparts abroad. Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. Law, economics, history were sterile, insignificant fiefdoms, ruled by ‘little Stalins’, pint-sized intellectual stand-ins for the great mind in the Kremlin. After Stalin’s death, these subjects had to be revived by incomers from engineering and the pure sciences – who brought with them the engineers’ faith in the solvability of problems, and the scientists’ uncompromising delight in pure pattern. Biology continued to be a disaster area. The little Stalin it had been handed to, Trofim Lysenko, was an anti-Darwinist charlatan who managed to adapt himself in the 1950s to playing on Khrushchev’s insecurities.
By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had gone from being one of the most illiterate places on the planet to being, by some measures, one of the best educated. It turned out more graduates per head of population than any of the European countries; only the American college system, with its tradition of mass participation, did better. Entry was by competitive examination, set locally so that institutions could pick and choose exactly the intake they wanted. Courses lasted for four or five years, and students were expected to work steadily for thirty- five to forty-five hours a week, digesting the whole relevant body of knowledge in their subject. Nothing was dumbed-down except the Marxism – for having eliminated the tradition of independent Marxist thought in the 1930s, there was nowhere in the sciences to reignite it from. The drop-out rate was high, understandably; but every year almost half a million young men and women completed the ordeal, and stood in the corridors of their university searching through the thousands upon thousands of job offers posted there.
Universities were only for teaching, though. Research usually happened elsewhere, in special institutes operated by the Academy of Sciences or the various industrial ministries, with scholars flitting back and forth betwee professorships and their labs. At the crown of the system were the ‘science towns’ built to house research work that had been designated as a strategic priority, from nuclear physics and aeronautics through to computer science and mathematical economics. The people who lived here were among the most privileged of Soviet citizens – and they were held up as well, in popular culture, as forerunners of the coming world of abundance. Not only did they live, right now, as all Soviet citizens were shortly going to live, with commodious flats and lavish food supplies and green spaces all around. They also worked, right now, in the way that everyone was supposed to, when abundance came – for the voluntary love of it, treating the working week as their playground rather than their burden. For the most part, scientists accepted the idolising, just as they mostly accepted the legitimacy of the arrangements of power in their society. Physicists themselves enjoyed Mikhail Romm’s 1962 hit film, Nine Days in One Year, about a driven, wisecracking nuclear researcher who irradiates himself so that humanity can have energy. A little later, they smiled at the gentle satire of the Strugatsky brothers’ 1965 novel Monday Begins on Saturday, in which a secret department investigates, appropriately enough, the magical objects in Russian fairytales. The scientists were confident; and in a curious way, they were also innocent. By now, they usually didn’t know what it was that they didn’t know, about the non-Soviet experience of mankind. International contacts were opening back up, but from a very low level; ‘special collections’ of foreign material were available in libraries to senior scholars, but a separate permit was required on each visit, and you needed to know exactly what you were looking for. So they evolved their ideas with almost no reference to analogies, to parallel cases, to the accumulated mass of situations in history in which someone might have tried something similar. Above all, they had very little access to pessimism. Stories of good intentions turning out badly were in short supply where they lived – published, written-down stories, at any rate.
But there were frustrations. All of a sudden, for example, in 1958, Khrushchev had announced that far too many of those getting into universities were themselves the children of intellectuals and white- collar workers – and passed a law that harked back to the wild old times of the First Five-Year Plan. School-leavers now had to do two years of work experience before they were let in. This was unpopular with students, unpopular with parents, and unpopular with academics, whose first-year physics students now had their fading knowledge from school overlaid by two years of semi-skilled drudgery in a warehouse or a factory. It also rankled with the intelligentsia that, having forsworn the more brutal methods of ensuring conformity, Khrushchev was now trying to achieve it by exhortation. Which meant that, from 1961 on, groups of intellectuals were gathered together to be shouted at; some
times by Khrushchev’s aide L.F.Ilichev, head of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, and surprisingly often, in crude and ungrammatical Russian, by the man himself. (Contemporary joke: Khrushchev asks a friend to look over the text of one of his speeches. ‘I can’t deny, Nikita Sergeyevich, that I did find some errors. “Up yours” should be two separate words, and “shit-ass” is hyphenated.’) There were more specific grievances if you were a serious biologist, obliged to disguise your real research behind screens of dissimulation; or if you were Jewish. In the 1930s, Soviet Jews had been perhaps the most spectacularly mobile and high-achieving group in the population, but the wave of official anti-Semitism from the late 1940s on had brought restrictions and quotas. Seen in absolute terms, more Jews than ever before were employed in the sciences in 1960 – 33,500 out of 350,000 Soviet ‘scientific workers’, or 9.5% of the total, when Jews made up only 1% of the Soviet population – but certain specialisms and certain elite institutions were closed to Jewish candidates altogether, and, on the whole, the route to the very top was blocked. You had to be unignorably brilliant, now, as a Jew, to be promoted as far as your ordinarily diligent and distinguished ethnically Russian colleagues – which left behind it the peculiar sting of a prize confiscated after it had once been given, of an acceptance turning conditional when you’d believed it was permanent.
Gradually, something unexpected was begining to happen. These frustrations, small and large, had started to draw the scientists’ attention to a difference between the kind of educated they were, and the kind the vydvizhentsy engineers running the Party were. The scientific method itself taught lessons, and so, in fact, did reading all that compulsory Tolstoy. When they reflected on the idiocy of anti-Semitism in the country that defeated Nazi Germany, when they heard of Khrushchev’s red-faced rage over the Academy rejecting one of Lysenko’s stooges, they started to suspect that truth and power might not be so united; that what was enthroned in Russia, after all, might be stupidity.
Notes – 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 Intellectuals 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.
These old men were not ordinary people; they were the Freezer, the Glutton, and the Magician. The Magician drew a picture of a boat on the sand, and said: ‘Brothers, do you see this boat?’ ‘We see it.’ ‘Sit in it.’ All of them sat in the boat. The Magician said: ‘Now, little light boat, serve me as you have served me before.’ Suddenly the boat rose in the air …
1.
Midsummer Night, 1962
It had all taken longer than it needed to, of course. The super at the block in which the institute thought it had booked her an apartment had no record of her, and when she followed the trail back to the central office for the allocation of housing, it turned out that there had been, a few months back, a dust-up between institutes over rights in the next blocks to be completed – and poor Cytology and Genetics had lost out, unofficially, to the physicists. Her promised flat had disappeared into a file. Instead of simply collecting the keys, she had had to get the Director’s secretary to call the housing office, and to ask, as a special gesture of goodwill, for an apartment to be released. But it was done. The stairwell in the new building might be finished to roughly the look and standard of a coal cellar, but it led, up four flights, to a front door she could call her own; with, beyond it, quiet rooms filled only by late-afternoon sunlight and the shadows of leaves.
Dizzy with change she walked through her domain. Here would be her bed. Through here Max would sleep, with the door open a chink so he’d know his mama was still within reach, even though they were no longer sharing the fold-up couch under the oil painting. A room of his own: she could paint the alphabet on the wall, some cheerful animals maybe. Here they’d live, with the books lining the wall opposite the window, and a worktable like so, in the good light, which could be cleared for mealtimes. In the kitchen, predictably, only the cold tap worked. But you could manage perfectly well without piped hot water in summer; plenty of time to get things fixed up before Siberia began to show a less friendly face. She sat on the new linoleum of the kitchen floor and drew up knees to her chin. Too late today to start hustling for furniture, or to spy out the kindergarten situation; nothing she could be doing at the institute, till they issued her with a pass tomorrow. Max and her mother were still almost two days away, chugging east safe aboard the train she’d put them on in Leningrad, before making her own disbelieving way to the airport to present the institute’s extravagant ticket. She hoped the other people in the compartment were making nice. A four-year-old with a habit of questions was not the easiest companion for a long journey. But there was nothing she could do about it if they weren’t. She’d deal with the aftermath of the experience, whatever it had been like, when they arrived, and Max came out grubby and upset, or grubby and smiling, onto the platform in Novosibirsk; till then, they were out of reach, in a capsule that could not be opened for another two days. They were in suspension, and so till then must be the whole hyperactive part of her that schemed and fended and smoothed Max’s path through the world, and explained (a big item recently) the different colours of sunlight and moonlight. Suspended; unneeded. It was the strangest feeling. She couldn’t remember a time since Max had been born – certainly since his father had skedaddled – when nothing was expected of her. But now the impetus of the journey had run out, and deposited her, with nothing she ought to be attending to, in these empty rooms. The leaf shadows tossed slowly on the wall behind her. There see
med no particular reason why she should not go on sitting under them in vegetative silence until night fell and eased the dappling into the general dark. But she supposed she had better get up and do something about finding herself supper. In her bedroom-to-be, she opened her case and hesitated. Well, it was summer. She picked out the armless green dress; brushed her hair; went out.
Not knowing quite where she was going, she strolled. Men with briefcases, and a few women, were threading their way homeward around the brick-stacks and duckboards of a landscape that was still mainly a construction site. The concrete cliff-face of her block stood, with its trees, on a gentle slope grubbed full of holes for foundations not yet laid. Most of the labourers had already knocked off for the day; the last ones were closing down the drills and steam-shovels, and setting off downhill, smoking and talking. Probably, she thought, there was a model somewhere showing how the Academy’s city of science was going to look when it was finished, all terribly clean and modern, the buildings immaculate white solids – but midway through the process, entropy was definitely defeating geometry. Mud was winning so far. Living in Leningrad, unfortunately, made a visual snob of you. If you were used to the casual beauty of the old capital, there was not much to get excited about in what she’d seen today. The flats were flats, no different from the blocks going up on muddy fields everywhere, and the institutes were standard lumps of public architecture, nondescript and undecorated. From close up, the wide grey frontage of Geology, where Cytology and Genetics had squatters’ rights till a building of its own should appear, resolved into wavering courses of mud-grey blocks, alternating with mud-grey tiles, as if a clay mound in the approximate shape of a scientific institute had been reared up from the earth by termites. The clumsy corridors inside ignored the scale of the human body. They were sized for the convenience of giants. The doors of labs and offices came less than halfway up the slab walls. No, not much to please the eye in Akademgorodok. Not much beauty in Academyville.
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