Only a couple of things gave him pause. Small things; crumbs of straw lifted and dropped again before you could decide whether there was a true current in the air or just stray gusts. Directly after the switchover, a peculiar and discordant piece had been printed in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, warning economists ‘not to comment on decisions that have already been taken’. A call to order, clearly, but why? It was the reformist line that had been decided on. And then, this year, just as the building work at Akademgorodok was more or less finished, there came a reorganisation of the lacework of Party committees within all the institutes. Now, instead of reporting to the Academy’s own main Party committee for the Siberian section, they all answered directly to the district committee of the town. It didn’t sound like much, and it was done very quietly and unemphatically, but if you considered it suspiciously, it was true that it w have the effect of cutting out the layers of scientists through which directives used to have to go. It stopped the scholars from policing themselves. He had put out feelers but again there seemed to be no sign of any intention to use the new structure for any particular purpose. It might just be one of the periodic assertions of control the system was prone to; a signal to tighten up generated almost vegetatively. Wherever it came from it was certainly far more benign than some frenzied attack on the actual existence of the Academy, and Emil had to say, now that he was one of the institute directors who ran the town, that he had not himself been inconvenienced or interfered with in any way.
He might have worried more if he had not been so excited. For months, he had been in a condition of trembling anticipation which felt very similar to anxiety. When he woke up in the morning, there it was, a tautness in his chest, gripping on again with a lurch as if it were bad news not good that he remembered anew each day and carried with him to the sluicing water of the shower, to the breakfast table with the children, to the walk to work under the big trees. (For now that he was a corresponding member and so to speak halfway to full Academician-hood, he had been assigned exactly half a house for the family, and lived near Leonid Vitalevich among the foxgloves and the tall Siberian grasses.) He couldn’t have talked himself out of his excitement if he’d wanted to. How could your heart not race, to know that the consummation of your working life was rushing on towards you, closer and closer? This was the time, this was the year, this was the moment, when history at last sent out the call for the conscious arrangers; and it just so happened that it had come when he had himself risen high enough to answer, when he was known in the land, as a name, as a new star of the Academy, as the public face of the newly mathematised economics. It had grown clearer and clearer that Kosygin was serious about the upcoming reform of the economy. When good reports came back, in December, from an experiment in letting clothing stores determine the output of two textile factories, Kosygin instantly extended the experiment to four hundred factories, bang, just like that. When he gave a speech on the reform to Gosplan in March, he sounded like one of Emil’s own circle. ‘We have to free ourselves completely’, he said, ‘from everything that used to tie down the planning officials and obliged them to draft plans otherwise than in accordance with the interests of the economy.’ Away with ideology at last, and at last, in its place, a blank slate on which to write the technical solution for plenty.
And at the same time, gloriously, it was growing clearer and clearer that of all the various reform proposals, only the Akademgorodok group’s was still a contender. A beautiful paper at the end of last year had skewered Academician Glushkov’s hypercentralised rival scheme for an all-seeing, all-knowing computer which would rule the physical economy direct, with no need for money. The author had simply calculated how long it would take the best machine presently available to execute the needful program, if the Soviet economy were taken to be a system of equations with fifty million variables and five million constraints. Round about a hundred million years, was the answer. Beautiful. So the only game in town, now, was their own civilised, decentralised idea for optimal pricing, in which shadow prices calculated from opportunity costs would harmonise the plan without anyone needing to possess impossibly complete information. The signals from on high all showed that Kosygin accepted the logic. The minister had listened to the arguments of the mathematical economists, the minister was using the language of the mathematical economists, the minister meant to act on the ideas of the mathematical economists. Daily, Emil expected the call toe, for the reform was palpably under construction within Gosplan by now, and the time was short to get the economists involved.
Yet the call had not come, and not come, and not come, right through the spring, while he felt the clamp of hope tighten his chest every day. And then, surprisingly late in the game, it had: an invitation to Moscow, to consult with Minister Kosygin. The invitation had left room for Leonid Vitalevich to come along if he chose. They had decided he’d better not, for obvious reasons. And Emil had boarded the plane with a briefcase full of position papers and a head full of persuasive arguments, and flown west. And he had been met at the airport in style, and chauffered out of roasting Moscow to the country retreat where Kosygin did business in summertime. And he had been greeted warmly. And now he was baffled.
*
Emil felt the sting of burnt skin tighten again on his forehead the minute he stepped back into the dacha’s main room, but the minister looked as cool and self-contained as ever, in his seat at the front of the three rows of chairs facing the blackboard. The screen door out onto the verandah was open to let the air circulate, but the air would not oblige. It hung in place, thick and still, flavoured by the wheatfields outside with a smell like bakery dust. Yet the white of the minister’s shirt had not crumpled; the black knot of his tie was drawn up high and tight under his grizzled chin. Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin was a neat old, solid old, dry old pol, with deep lines running from his nose to the outside corners of his upper lip, which lifted his cheeks, when he smiled, into little sardonic bunches of muscle as round as billiard balls. He sat at his ease with an arm along the back of the empty wooden chair next to him and gazed at Emil with a bright-eyed curiosity. He was supposed to be very intelligent, for a commissar, and Emil believed it. You could imagine him easily enough as the factory foreman he had once been, so long as you pictured him wearing overalls just the way he wore his suit now: as a costume, within which the man himself remained detached and observant.
‘Are you ready to resume?’ said an aide, contriving to suggest that Emil had paused the meeting for hours rather than minutes. Perhaps his long experience of the minister enabled him to detect the tiniest trace quantities of impatience in Kosygin: Emil couldn’t see any, though what he could see was bad enough.
‘You were just telling us, Professor,’ said Kosygin, ‘how we had got everything wrong.’
‘Of course not –’
‘Good,’ said Kosygin, ‘because so far as I can see, the measure as we’ve outlined it to you contains almost nothing you didn’t recommend. This would be a peculiar moment to change your mind, don’t you think?’ The aides snickered. He counted off on his pale hand. ‘An interest rate to allow the future benefit of investment decisions to be properly discounted. Yes. A new way of calculating enterprise profits which includes a rent charge for using machinery and resources. Yes. Plan fulfilment to be based on profits, not on physical output. Yes. All ideas promoted by your group. So what is it you don’t like? What stupidity do you think you have caught us out in?’
‘None at all, Minister. Of course not,’ said Emil. ‘These are all excellent practical applications of mathematical economics.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Kosygin. The aides laughed.
‘It’s just that something is missing;hing essential.’
‘Yes? Go on.’
‘Well,’ said Emil, trying not to lecture, ‘it’s a question of … rationality. Why is it advantageous to shift our planning from the quantity of an enterprise’s output to the profit the enterprise makes? Because profit is a better measure of
how useful the output is, as well as of how efficiently the enterprise works. As our Leonid Vitalevich has put it, “an optimal plan is by definition a profitable plan”.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Kosygin. ‘That argument is won. Move on. What’s your point?’
‘My point, Minister, is that this is only true under certain conditions. Profit only gives a rational indication of success if it is, itself, generated from selling goods at rational prices. We will be telling enterprises to maximise their profits. At the same time we will be telling them to supply the goods their customers require. But they will only be able to do both these things at once if the goods in greatest demand are priced so that they give the greatest profit; otherwise, they will have a choice between giving the customers what they want and failing to earn the profit level in their plan, or meeting their planned profit target by palming off the most profitable goods on the customer, whether they want them or not. Profit is only rational if price is rational. I can give you an example,’ said Emil, and flipped through his notebook, his fingers leaving moist smears on the corners of the pages. ‘Take the experiment at the Bolshevichka and Mayak factories last year. There was a report in January in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta –’
‘I read it.’
‘Of course, Minister. Then perhaps you remember the section about profits. During the six-month period when the factories produced only what the stores ordered, sales went up, but profits actually went down, compared to the six months before. At the Bolshevichka plant, from 1.66 million roubles to 1.29 million; at the Mayak plant, from 3.15 million to 2.3 million. And as the report pointed out, this was not because of any defect in the work of the two plants. It was entirely a phenomenon of irrational pricing. It turned out, for instance, that virtually identical men’s suits – the same size, made of the same cloth – had quite different prices.’
‘You really want to talk about the price of trousers?’ asked Kosygin. The aides began to laugh again, but he held up his hand for quiet, and went on, ‘I don’t see a serious problem here, Professor. These are the little difficulties of a change from one rulebook to another, surely; nothing more. They may make for a bumpy ride in the short run, but the price revision scheduled for ’67 will iron them out. You can be assured that when the Price Bureau reviews the retail and wholesale lists they will take all this into account. That’s what the run-in period is for. Now, let’s move on. What is the next item of your, ah, critique?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Emil with a flustered tenacity, ‘but I have to insist on this point. Irrational pricing is not a transitional difficulty. It is a fundamental issue. I’d thought this was understood. It won’t go away by itself, and it can’t be dealt with by the Price Bureau. There are hundreds of thousands of commodities in the specified classifications. How is a committee – forgive me, how is even the best-informed committee going to know what price point for all those myriad things will reflect the true state of the possibilities of producing each one, and the true need for each one? It’s impossible, it’s quite impossible. And the consequences are not trivial! If managers have only profit to guide them, but prices do not give them reliable information about the priorities of the plan as a whole, then the priorities of the plan as a whole will not be maintained. Output will wander off God knows where.’
‘We’ve thought of that,’ said one of the aides. ‘That’s why we’re modifying the production-to-order system before extending it to the whole economy. Detailed selections will still come from customers, but the total volume of the enterprise’s output will now be set by Gosplan.’
‘What?’ said Emil.
‘The total volume of output will be set by Gosplan, and raw materials will be centrally allocated, as before.’
‘But … that defeats the entire object of the reform,’ said Emil, whose hands had risen all by themselves and were now clasped over the sore apex of his head, as if incredulity might pop the top off his cranium, if he didn’t hold it on.
‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ said Kosygin. His face was too impassive to be startled, but his eyebrows had risen; and around him, the aides were acting out astonishment.
‘Minister,’ said Emil. ‘Minister! If you reimpose control of that kind, you will have a system whose components fight against each other. Part of the system will encourage managers to think in terms of profit, and part of it will encourage them to think in the old way, about getting hold of materials whatever they cost. And they’ll know that they can’t do both, so they’ll reckon up which is most important. They’ll say to themselves, “Profit is all very nice, but if we have to stop the line because the aluminium has run out, then we’ll really be in trouble.” So they’ll concentrate their efforts on supply problems, and the reformed elements of the system will shrivel and die. They’ll slough off like a snakeskin, Minister.’
‘Professor, Professor,’ said Kosygin. ‘That’s a little hysterical, don’t you think? There are always multiple factors for a manager to consider. It’s a complicated world. And you admit yourself, some kind of guidance is necessary, or there’s no telling whether they’ll produce what the plan requires.’
‘Yes,’ said Emil desperately, ‘but I meant, give them guidance by giving them prices which make sense. We have done the work on this, Minister. The mathematics is clear. It is perfectly feasible to calculate a price for every product which reflects its value to the plan. Then all the manager has to do is to make the biggest profit he can, at those prices, and his output is guaranteed to accord with the plan. It’s automatic! I thought’, he said again, ‘that this was understood.’
His hands were down from his head, and were making big fervent sweeps as he spoke: not very urbane. Kosygin’s hands were up too, tapping one set of dry fingertips against the other. But he said nothing.
‘It’s true,’ added Emil, ‘that the prices would have to be active. They’d have to be recalculated frequently –’
‘Like the prices in a market economy,’ said one of the aides.
‘No!’ said Emil. ‘This would be an alternative to a market economy. The prices would represent genuine social utility. And calculating them would be well within the powers of existing technology. We have the software ready! Most of it, anyway. This is not like Glushkov’s scheme –’ He stopped. Smiles had appeared on the faces of the aides which made it horribly plain that, to them, optimal pricing was indeed just like Glushkov’s scheme.
Tap, tap, tap went Kosygin’s fingers. Then he said:
‘It’s a very pretty idea. Very clever. But not practical. Not a serious proposition.’
‘You haven’t even considered it,’ said Emil, wonderingly. ‘Have you?’
‘Watch your tone, Professor,’ said Kosygin sharply. ‘I don’t answer to you.’ The aides hissed. Kosygin’s mouth, which had thinned to a flat line, curled upwards into his smile. His cheeks bunched. ‘Really, how can we consider it?’ he went on, as if Emil ought to be able to share the absurdity of the idea. ‘How can we possibly take you seriously when you’re telling us we should let a machine take over a job as sensitive as deciding prices?’
‘Within the bounds you set in the plan!’
‘Pfft,’ said Kosygin. ‘As if people would blame the machine and not us, when it suddenly doubled the price of heating oil in December. Sorry, no. We’ll just have to muddle along with the prices we’ve got. We’re not going to tear up a working system for the sake of some little theoretical gain in efficiency. Now, move on. I don’t know why you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about this one detail of the reform, and I don’t much care. I do know that I don’t want to hear any more about fucking prices. Move on.’
‘It’s not a detail,’ said Emil, with a wretched stubbornness. ‘The wrong prices will ruin everything.’
Kosygin sighed.
‘Oh, Professor,’ he said. ‘You have no idea what the wrong price can do.’
‘I have no idea?’ said Emil. ‘I have no idea?’
The aides gasped.
‘I think you had better leave the room,’ said Kosygin, slow and steady and calm as a glacier.
*
Oh God, what have I done to myself? thought Emil, leaning on his elbows on the wooden balustrade of the verandah with his hands clutched to his sore temples. And: What the hell is going on? The two thoughts scrambled over each other, like puppies in a too-narrow box, each trying to be the uppermost. The security men had stirred when he came stumbling out and pitched up against the railing; one spoke into a walkie-talkie. Whatever the answer was, it made the agent laugh, and the ring of suited muscle had dispersed again, back to the shade of the trees and of the parked limousines. The wild-looking professor was to be left alone. Emil stared down at the long yellow grass where the sun roared, and tried to collect himself. He saw vistas of disgrace among the dry stalks.
After a while the voices inside changed tempo, back from the spikes of shock and outrage to the sine-wave hum of business being transacted. They were going on without him. Presumably someone would come out to tell him his fate when the meeting ended. Emil took out his cigarettes and shakily tapped a filter tip out of the pack; then the screen door clicked. He stood up straight and scrubbed his hands against the pockets of his jacket, accidentally rubbing the unlit smoke he ws holding into a mess of torn paper and tobacco, but the man coming out made pacifying flaps of his long hands at him, and came to lean against the rail beside him, almost companionably. He was the black beanpole of a fellow, fiftyish or so, thin to the point of emaciation, who had sat in the back row during Emil’s humiliation, his legs spiderishly tucked up. So far as Emil remembered, he had not spoken and nor, probably, had he snickered.
‘Mokhov; Gosplan,’ he said, holding out a hand bristled with dark hairs right down to the knuckles. ‘You’ve dropped your cigarette. Have one of mine instead. They’re Swedish; not bad.’
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