When Kostya had finished, the circle surrounded him with whoops and murmurs of praise, then quickly drifted off downhill through the trees in separate threes and twos. Only Valentin and his reluctant partner lingered.
‘Well?’ said Kostya. He seemed to be smiling, but what if anything he expected was as hard to settle as his song.
‘Do you suppose this could be a magic wood?’ she asked. ‘You know, the story kind.’
‘Could be,’ said Kostya.
‘What kind of magic do you suppose it would do, a wood round here?’ she asked.
‘What kind do you want?’ said Valentin, too late and too fast; for after all, it would be in the nature of a genuinely enchanted forest that it would give you what you didn’t know you wanted, rather than granting dreary wishes as familiar to you as the lacks they were supposed to fill.
‘You know, I don’t think I understand this place at all,’ she told Kostya.
Kostya looked at her. ‘Why don’t you go on ahead,’ he said to Valentin. ‘We’ll catch you up.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘why don’t you?’
Very briefly, annoyance and pure amazement chased each other across Valentin’s expression, before amused good humour caught them both and wiped them away.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘See you on the beach,’ and he was gone, with Hairband Girl beside him exuding sudden, rabbity benevolence.
Alone, Kostya was no more shy but no less shy either. He unscrewed parts of the trumpet, and put it away in the bag he had slung over his shoulder. ‘Let’s walk down after them, but slowly,’ he said, ‘and you can tell me what it is you don’t understand.’
They moved off through the trees.
‘You all talk so much,’ she said. ‘Well: not you, individually. But collectively! As if it’s going out of style. I’ve heard things said tonight in public that I thought were strictly whispers for the kitchen.’
‘It’s very simple,’ said Kostya. ‘This is a privileged place, and one of the privileges is speaking freely. Or more freely. You live here, and you get a flat and a fridge and food delivered to your door, all exactly in accordance with your seniority, and you also get to talk. I’m not sure they know why we like it, the powers that be. They just know we do like it, and they want to keep us happy, within reason. But within reason, you see. There are limits. You mustn’t ever question the fundamentals. It’s like the paths in the wood: wander about on them as much as you like, but don’t step off them.’
‘Don’t step off the paths?’
‘Nobody’s told you? There’s a nasty little Siberian tick that lives in the undergrowth.’
‘Oh, marvellous. Can’t they spray, or something?’
‘They did, two years ago. Dusted off the whole area with DDT, using a jet engine for a fan. But apparently the little fuckers are back. You’re still puzzled,’ he observed.
‘It’s not just the talking,’ she said. ‘It’s what you say. You all sound like – I don’t know. I couldn’t work out, back there, whether I was listening to bohemians disguised as good boys, or good boys disguised as bohemians. You babble like dreamers, and then it turns out you’re dreaming of the Five-Year Plan. You seem to be saying whatever the hell you like, but … Maybe you’ve already answered me. Maybe it’s just … keeping to the paths?’
‘I hope not,’ said Kostya carefully. ‘Not the way you mean, anyway. I think it’s something about economists, probably. We’re used to reasoning as if we had our hands on the levers of power – change this, change that, see how it looks the new way. But that’s not necessarily megalomania. The ideas truly are powerful. Once they’re put in practice, there’ll be no stopping them, they’ll be having effects no one can take back again. Laugh if you like.’
‘I’m not even smiling.’
‘Some people here’, he offered, ‘call this place “the island”. You know, not a real island, a conceptual one; as if we were living just offshore of what is, a little way out on the water towards what might be.’
‘Like the man last night. When I first bumped into you? He said “Welcome to the island”, and I didn’t know what talking about, so far away from the ocean.’
‘Oh, but we have ocean. A toy ocean, all our own. Five more minutes, and you’ll see.’
‘Yes, Mr Mystery.’
‘I’m far less mysterious than you.’
They emerged suddenly from the trees into open space. It was a highway, silent in both directions. The moonlight was giving way to the very first, faint grey tinge of dawn. On the other side, the trees resumed, and so did the path, steeper and more ceremonious, with electric lamp standards glowing at the turns, and making the blackness between blacker once more. She shivered, and yawned.
‘Can I ask you something, then?’ said Kostya.
‘All right.’
‘You have family, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘A husband?’
‘No.’
Then, when Kostya only padded along again in comfortable silence beside her, she said, ‘That’s it? You don’t want to know anything else?’
‘Not just now,’ he said.
The path crossed a railroad track on a footbridge, and became stairs, splitting and recombining at a descending series of concrete platforms like an outdoor sketch of the grand staircase into a ballroom. At the bottom, she stepped, disbelieving, onto sand. It was, indeed, a beach, dim and pale, under an abruptly wide sky just beginning to blush with colour. Dark headlands ran out to left and right. And from ahead came the quiet glock and splosh of waves, and voices calling.
‘It’s a reservoir?’ she said.
‘It’s the Ob Sea, thank you very much,’ said Kostya. ‘Sixty kilometres long, twenty kilometres wide, ten metres deep. Nature metamorphosed. Nature moulded like putty by the builders of socialism. Best seen from this spot, manufactured for the pleasure of the intelligentsia. Yachting, water-skiing. Swimming. Will you come?’
They ran to the water’s edge and undressed hastily among the other little piles of clothes, not looking at each other. Glassy little breakers rolled in, and she launched herself through the dark face of one, expecting a shock of cold to break in on her daze and her incipient headache; but it was only cool, under the surface, and saltless like the river water it was, with an unclassifiable other taste to it which, for the first time in the whole day and night that she had been here, really persuaded her that she had arrived far, far away from home, in strange Asia. This cool envelope of liquid, stroking her like a multitude of hands, had trickled down from mountains where yak-herds followed the bells of their flocks; and here she was in it, bobbing about, a head among the other heads breaking the smooth steel-coloured surface. She turned onto her back, and looking past her nipples and her toes at the horizon of the toy ocean, she laughed out loud with pure childish pleasure. Real life would resume, Max’s train was already descending the foothills of the Urals, soon daybreak would turn the water transparent: but there were little islands out there coming into view with the dawn, a puff of trees on a sandbank and no more, absurdly like the desert isles of picture books.
‘What now?’ called Valentin, across the water.
‘Well –’ she said.
Notes – III.1 Midsummer Night, 1962
1 A dust-up between institutes over rights in the next blocks to be completed: this particular dispute is invented, but the first few years of the Academy’s new science town outside Novosibirsk, founded in 1958, were indeed marked by fierce, sometimes unruly arguments between the disciplines over who got which new buildings. Cytology and Genetics itself obtained its premises by seizing, one weekend, a facility promised to the Computer Centre, and the Computer Centre nearly lost its next earmarked site as well, to an opportunistic grab by a group researching transplant surgery. For the history of Akademgorodok, I have depended heavily throughout this chapter on Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited; and for the look and the atmosphere of the place also on my own visit in 2006, corrected for anachronisms
(I hope) by the photographs in the museum of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But see also Jessica Smith, ‘Siberian Science City’, New World Review, third quarter 1969, pp. 86–101, and the section on Akademgorodok in Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes (London: Routledge, 1994). The pictures in ‘Star City’, Colors 45, August–September 2001, offer an evocative parallel portrait of the Soviet science town devoted to space technology. Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), pp. 63–78, draws a desolate, superstition-ridden portrait of Akademgorodok’s post-Soviet condition, but my sense was that the ambivalent, half-delivered promise of the place still lingered. As someone I spoke to joked, ‘There was a lot of freedom here. Oh, I’m sorry, I made a mistake in my English. I meant, there was a bit of freedom here.’
2 In the kitchen, predictably, only the cold tap worked: other defects complained of by the Academy to the town’s builders, Sibakademstroi, included poorly fitted concrete panels, and hallways so damp they grew more than thirty varieties of mushroom. But Zoya’s apartment is nevertheless luxurious by all ordinary Soviet standards. It comes about halfway down a ladder of accommodation exactly matched to the hierarchy of academic status. As a senior researcher and lab head, she gets a living space smaller than the houses and half-houses reserved for Academicians and Corresponding Members of the Academy, and the very best flats, which are reserved for holders of the Candidate of Science degree, but bigger and better than the sequentially dwindling flats for ordinary researchers and technical staff and the dormitories for grad students. Envy of the town’s material privileges was a factor in the unhelpfulness of the city government of Novosibirk over such issues as the water supply. At one point, the city stole an entire trainload of supplies earmarked for Akademgorodok, and Academician Lavrentiev, the de facto mayor, had to ring Khrushchev personally to get it back. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
3 Progulka, going for a wander: see the chapter on recreations and leisure in Thompson and Sheldon, eds, Soviet Society and Culture.
4 Both members of a seminar intended to train up the economic and the mathematical alike into cyberneticians: while Kostya and Valentin are boh fictional, the seminar wasn’t. Kantorovich and Aganbegyan, who ran it in the non-fairytale USSR, were deliberately creating a pool of expertise which crossed disciplinary boundaries. See ‘The Siberian Algorithm’ in Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
5 Listening to the jazz programmes on Radio Iran: at this point, sixteen years before the revolution against the Shah, a potent source of current western music for Soviet jazz fiends, and well within broadcast range of western Siberia, too. See Starr, Red and Hot.
6 ‘Mutagenesis,’ she said: Zoya Vaynshteyn, fictional from head to toe in her green dress out of Italian Vogue, is sharing here in the real research of the geneticist Raissa Berg (1913–2006), who really arrived in Akademgorodok at about this date, and really departed from it under very similar circumstances (see part VI, chapter 2), but who was not thirty-one and did not have a child of four. See her autobiography: Raissa L. Berg, Acquired Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the Soviet Union, trans. David Lowe (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), and the biographical article about her by Elena Aronova in the online Jewish Women’s Archive: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/berg-raissa-lvovna.
7 The party, it seemed, was being held in the restaurant of the hotel: an eight-storey building which had originally been scheduled to have twelve storeys. Khrushchev, taking a personal interest in the new town he had backed, found the height extravagant. ‘That’s what I think of your skyscraper,’ he said, making snipping movements with two fingers. See Josephson, New Atlantic Revisited.
8 The green dress, she was glad to confirm from a rapid eye-gulp at the room, more than held up: the Soviet Union produced a small amount of little-worn ‘high fashion’, and weirdly enough a vestigial tradition of couture survived in the satellite countries which party wives of sufficient status could patronise. See Bartlett, ‘The Authentic Soviet Glamour of Stalinist High Fashion’. But for all practical purposes, anyone who wanted to wear anything different from the unsurprising stock in the department stores would need to rely, like Zoya and her friends here, on their own skill with a needle, and the luck of access to pictures that could serve as patterns. For an English-language review of a special issue of the Russian journal Fashion Theory devoted to Soviet dress, see Anna Malpas, ‘Style for Socialists’, Moscow Times, 27 April 2007.
9 When Eddie Rosner’s big band was serenading the Red Army: in 1939 the jazz musician Eddie Rosner, finding himself stuck in Warsaw during the German invasion, presented himself to the Gestapo and demanded assistance as a German citizen, omitting to mention that he was a Jewish German citizen. They lent him a car, and he had himself driven straight to the Soviet forces who had seized the other half of Poland under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet pact. He crossed over, and next turned up in Minsk, where he put together a band under the patronage of a Byelorussian Party bigwig; then, with his reputation travelling ahead of him, he moved on to Moscow, where he was housed in the grandest of hotel suites overlooking Red Square. Throughout the war, and up until the Zhdanov-led repression of everything that had been allowed to loosen in Soviet culture during the war years, he rode high, immensely popular with the public. Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities. See Starr, Red and Hot. All the songs the scratch combo of scientists in the Akademgorodok hotel play at the party are real numbers from different eras of Soviet jazz.
10 In fact Academician Glushkov … has proposed a rival system: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, pp. 271–4.
11 It turns out that the mathematics is indifferent to whether the optimal level of production is organised hierarchically: I’m being a little anachronistic here. In a paper published in America in 1961, George Danzig (the mathematician who had independently rediscovered Kantorovich’s Plywood Trust breakthrough while working for the USAF during the war) showed with P. Wolfe that some linear programmes could be split into almost independent sub-programmes; in 1963, another American paper, by C. Almon, showed that this could be interpreted as central planning without complete information. Formal Soviet response to the idea didn’t arrive until a paper of 1969 by Katsenelinboigen, Ovsienko and Faerman, but it must have been an influence much sooner. See Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
12 ‘A programmer … must combine the accuracy of a bank clerk with the acumen of an Indian tracker’: see A.P.Ershov, The British Lectures (Heyden: The British Computer Society, 1980). Ershov (1931–88) was a heroic figure in the thwarted attempt to get computers out of the exclusive grip of academia, industry and the military, and into the hands of Soviet citizens.
13 One of Timofeev-Ressovsky’s famous genetics summer schools: true, including the lake. See Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, and Berg, Acquired Traits.
14 Small cuts on rayon and sugar, 25% rise on butter, 30% rise on meat: the price rise went into effect on 1 June 1962. For the politicking leading up to it, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 518–19. For the general economic context, see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
15 It costs eighty-eight roubles to produce a hundred kilos of usable meat: figures taken from A. Komin, ‘Economic Substantiation of Purchase Prices of Agricultural Products’, Problems of Economics (translated digest of articles from Soviet economic journals, International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 5 no. 9, January 1963, pp. 29–36, originally in Planovoe Khosyaistvo no. 7, 1962; and S. Stoliarov and Z. Smirnova, ‘Analysis of Price Structure’, Problems of Economics vol. 6 no. 9, January 1964, pp. 11–21, originally in Vestnik Statistiki no. 1, 1963.
16 Cheap meat, cheap butter, cheap eggs, and cans of salmon on public holida
ys: perks also determined strictly by seniority. See Acquired Traits, pp. 346–50; Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
17 ‘“Blue in Green”,’ he announced, ‘by Mr Miles Davis’: of course, from Kind of Blue, 1959. Bebop had its Soviet followers, but it was at the avant-garde, ideologically risky edge of jazz in this relatively jazz-friendly period. See Starr, Red and Hot. Kostya will presumably have been getting his Miles Davis from Radio Iran.
18 I’ve heard things said tonight in public that I thought were strictly whispers for the kitchen: I have exaggerated the town’s freedom of speech to make it audible, and the excitement about it therefore comprehensible, for Western readers. Imagine a degree of ordinary constraint that corresponds to nothing in your (our) experience, and then imagine that constraint loosened into a state that we would still find stiff and cautious and calculating, but which struck those experiencing it as (relatively speaking) a jubilant holiday from caution.
19 Dusted off the whole area with DDT, using a jet engine as a fan: an insecticidal assault carried out in the spring of 1959. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
20 ‘It’s the Ob Sea, thank you very much,’ said Kostya: all quite true. The Ob Sea can be found on Google Maps, just south-south-west of Novosibirsk. For the ideological background to moulding nature like putty, see Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, on Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, pp. 308–26, and on the ‘Promethean motif ’ in the thought of Marx, pp. 337–9. The Ob Sea itself dates from the mid-1950s, the beach from the aftermath of a cyclone in October 1959, when it was decided to stabilise the shoreline with three miles of sand.
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