It was worst if he was stupid enough ever to watch a war film on the giant television receiver in the living room, still with the engraved plate under the screen declaring that it was a birthday gift ‘from your colleagues in the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers’. Knowing what they did to him, he never meant to look; yet somehow the tidy heroics drew him in, seeming to offer a sort of ease, a chance to be as comfortably proud of the past as the film. And there were things to be proud of, after all, about the war. All those brave boys they had bludgeoned on towards the enemy – well, the bravery had been as real as the bludgeoning; real enough to make you weep. And they had rid the world of a great evil. That was true. While he was actually watching, he felt only a veteran’s mild, containable annoyance at the things the director got wrong. It was later that it would all turn poisonous: in the night, in the still solitary centre of the night. He would dream all the vile detail of war that the film had left out, and when he awoke, beside the steady breathing of Nina Petrovna, he would find the images he had dreamed of still equally vivid in his mind’s eye; and hoisting up unstoppably behind them, lifted from the murk as if on hooks, out would come the other memories. Behind the picture of the piece of human gut frozen into the path to the forward bunker in Stalingrad, like mottled brown piping, the groaning trees in the Western Ukraine in ’45, when the NKVD hangmen had been at work, and the sight through an incautiously opened door in ’37 where an interrogator had been demonstrating the possibilities of a simple steel ruler, and the starveling child vomiting grass during collectivisation. And more; and worse.
So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured. The same things went on happening, the same old necessities bit just as hard. The garden came no closer, where the lion would lie down with the lamb and all could play at criticism after dinner, if they had a mind to. Today the radio was reporting that Budapest had come around again, just like the time he sent the tanks in; only this time it was Prague, this time it was the Czechs who needed the fraternal arm across the throat to keep them in line. Cheering on the streets, said the radio. Everywhere the workers welcoming the soldiers. Oh yes. Before Prague, Budapest; before Budapest, East Berlin. It all happened over and over again. Over and over and over, with the garden at history’s end scooting ahead, forever out of reach, as much of a justification as it had ever been, and as little of one. He fumbled with the tape machine, and found the RECORD key his son had shown him.
‘Paradise’, he told the wheatfield in baffled fury, ‘is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?’
He pressed STOP. Covered his mouth with his hand. And then, since he was tired of fear, of feeling it and of causing it, the retired monster sat very still on the bench by the field, and waited until Kava the rook hopped up onto his knee. A little wind came arrowing across the wheat and swayed the birches over his head. And the leaves of the trees said: can it be otherwise?
*
Three thousand kilometres east it is already night, but the same wind is blowing, stirring the dark branches of the pines around the upstairs window where Leonid Vitalevich is sitting by himself, optimising the manufacture of steel tubes. Five hundred producers. Sixty thousand consumers. Eight hundred thousand allocation orders to be issued per year. But it would all work out if he could persuade them to measure the output in the correct units. The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?
Notes – VI.3 The Pensioner, 1968
1 There was a bench by the wall at the end of the dacha’s grounds: Khrushchev’s retirement dacha had a bench, where he liked to sit with his dog Arbat and his rook Kava, and it had a wall by a fieldpath, where passing Soviet citizens in holiday mood did indeed shyly stop and ask to have their photos taken with him. But the bench was not by the wall. For the authentic melancholy of Khrushchev’s last years, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 620–45, and Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, pp. 165–332.
2 Frol Kozlov … on his deathbed, calling for a priest: recounted in Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 199.
3 It was worst if he was stupid enough ever to watch a war film: Khrushchev’s war movie-induced nightmares were described by Sergei Khrushchev in 2008 in a lecture attended by the writer Michael Swanwick. See Swanwick’s blog entry on the event at http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2008/02/khrushchev-isnt-he-russian-novelist. html [sic].
4 The giant television receiver in the living room: presented on his seventieth birthday, with many unctuous speeches, just before they deposed him. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 614.
5 Out would come the other memories: which are my imaginings of remembered horrors for him, not attested incidents. But when the playwright Mikhail Shatrov asked him, late on in his retirement, what he regretted, he said: ‘Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood.’ See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 639.
6 ‘Paradise’, he told the wheatfield in baffled fury: not really said in direct response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, as here, but a real quotation from the tapes Khrushchev recorded in retirement. This was among the passages held back from the transcribed memoir his son had smuggled to the West for publication, with help from sympathetic hands in the security service. So it’s not in Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1970); or in the first volume of supplementary material, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1974). See instead Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, ed. and translated by Jerrold V. Schecter and Vyacheslav V. Luchkov (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1990).
7 Five hundred producers. Sixty thousand consumers. Eight hundred thousand allocation orders: figures from the account of the Soyuzglavmetal project in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
The labourer awoke and saw that the princess, the flying carpet, and the magic tablecloth were gone. Only his walking boots remained.
Acknowledgements
More of a confession than an acknowledgement: I wrote this book without being able to speak or read Russian. I have therefore been able to draw on only a fraction of the available material, and readers should be aware that what they find here reflects the limited universe of sources that happen to have been translated into English; often, translated into English during the Cold War, as part of the West’s anxious guesswork about Soviet developments. This has meant that, not being able to look in archives for myself or go to original documents (except in a very few cases where material was kindly translated for me), I have been unusually dependent on a particular few books which have served me as fundamental gateways to the place and era I was trying to understand, or pathfinders within it. They come up over and over again in the notes, but I would wish to express a specific debt of gratitude to them here as well: Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, William Taubman’s monumental biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, and Michael Ellman’s Planning Problems in the USSR. Needless to say, none of the errors, misunderstandings, falsehoods, naiveties, glaring omissions and pl
ain old stupidities that are sure to be present here are the responsibility of these authors. But since this book is teetering on a pyramid of other people’s expertise, it seems necessary to acknowledge whose work I’m standing on top of. I also couldn’t have written it without the help of the two people who interpreted for me while I was in Russia, Josephine von Zitzewitz in St Petersburg, and Simmi Gill in Akademgorodok and Moscow. Ms Gill translated the key sections of L. V. Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii for me, pointed me towards Kolakowski, and provided high-quality irony on all occasions. For hospitality and encouragement, I am very grateful to Irene and Joseph Romanovsky, Kantorovich’s daughter and son-in- law, and to Professor Yakov Fet of Akademgorodok and his wife, who patiently answered questions from what must have seemed to be a puzzlingly innumerate Englishman. Professor G. Khanin also kindly made time to talk to me. These people gave their hospitality and encouragement when I thought I was engaged in producing a much more conventional piece of non-fiction than this has turned out to be, and they may very well not like what I have done with the memory of Kantorovich. But I hope they may nevertheless recognise my essentially celebratory intentions. While I was writing the book, I benefited from conversations with Michael Ellman, Alena Ledeneva of the School of Slavic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London, and Djurdja Bartlett of the London College of Fashion; again, I was usually stumbling about in these conversations, trying to form my first sense of the subject-matter, so Drs Ellman, Ledeneva and Bartlett may have felt their generosity with their time was being wasted. It wasn’t. Then, for reading and commenting from various different expert viewpoints on the draft of the book, I want to thank Emma Widdis, Margaret Bray, Gerald Stanton Smith, Oliver Morton, Andrew Brown, Claerwen James, Jonathan Grove, Jenny Turner, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Spufford, and David and Bernice Martin. Jessica Martin, meanwhile, had read it chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, and sometimes in times of need sentence by sentence. My students at Goldsmiths were a pleasure to teach. My colleagues at Goldsmiths were a pleasure to be colleagues with. My editor Julian Loose waited and waited and waited for the book, only to receive something very different from what had originally planned. My agent Clare Alexander dealt gracefully with the consequences. Lastly: my mother, the historian Margaret Spufford, has always been hearteningly sure that I should take risks as a writer. Without her encouragement I might not have been brave enough to move to this halfway house on the borders of fiction. Hence the dedication, though I know she didn’t have anything so shockingly unscholarly in mind.
I did the reading for this book in Cambridge University Library, in the University Medical Library and Marshall Economics Library in Cambridge, in the British Library, and in the library of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies in Brixton. Librarians are the unsung heroes of the world. And indispensable in any project as perverse as this one. St Deiniol’s Library in Flintshire provided a wonderfully benign setting in which to write the last chapter. Throughout, the panther-footed Mr Google laid stack upon stack of documents at my elbow. I cannot imagine being able to have written this story in the world before the internet – in the world, in fact, of the story itself.
Notes
Part I
Introduction
1 A bridge of white hazelwood: this, and every quotation from a fairytale, comes from Aleksandr Afanas’ev [Afanaseyev], Russian Fairy Tales, translated by Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon, 1945), in some cases slightly adapted. For formal and anthropological analysis, see Maria Kravchenko, The World of the Russian Fairy Tale (Berne, 1987).
2 Russians stopped telling skazki: for the deliberate attempt to manufacture a continuing Soviet ‘folk’ tradition, with Stalin cast as mythic champion or good tsar, see Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1990); and also John McClure and Michael Urban, ‘The Folklore of State Socialism’, Soviet Studies vol. 35 no. 4 (1983), pp. 471–86; Felix J. Oinas, ‘Folklore and Politics in the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review 32 (1973), pp. 45–58; and Rachel Goff, ‘The Role of Traditional Russian Folklore in Soviet Propaganda’, Perspectives: Student Journal of Germanic and Slavic Studies (Brigham Young University), vol. 12, Winter 2004, at: http://germslav.byu.edu/perspectives/w2004contents. html. For an exploitation in contemporary fantasy of Russian folklore and the Soviet/post-Soviet setting, see Liz Williams, Nine Layers of Sky (New York: Bantam Spectra, 2003).
3 The stories’ name for a magic carpet: see Kravchenko, The World of the Russian Fairy Tale.
4 ‘In our day,’ Nikita Khrushchev told a crowd: see Khrushchev in America: Full Texts of the Speeches Made by N.S.Khrushchev on His Tour of the United States, September 15–27, 1959 (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), which includes this speech, made in Moscow on his return.
5 All Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’: technically, in fact, a prediction by him about the working of post-revolutionary society, made just before the Bolshevik putsch, and published just after it, in The State and Revolution (1918), ch. 5. ‘The whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay.’ There are many, many editions, but see, for example, V.I.Lenin, Selected Works vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).
I.1 The Prodigy, 1938
1 Without thinking about it, Leonid Vitalevich: Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich (1912–86), mathematician and economist, nearest Soviet equivalent to John von Neumann, later (1975) to be the only Soviet winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics (shared with Tjalling Koopmans). Calling someone by first name and patronymic expresses formal esteem, in Russian; he is mostly referred to that way here, to suggest that he is being viewed with respectful acquaintance but not intimacy. With fictional elaboration, this scene on the tram is true to his history, for which see his Nobel Prize autobiography, in Assar Lindbeck, ed., Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969–1980 (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1992); and the collection of his letters and articles, with colleagues’ memoirs, in V.L.Kantorovich, S.S.Kutateladze and Ya. I. Fet, eds., Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii (‘Man and Scientist’) (Novosibirsk: Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 1 2002, vol. 2 2004); and S.S.Kutateladze, ‘The Path and Space of Kantorovich’, talk at the international Kantorovich memorial conference, Euler International Mathematical Institute, St Petersburg, 8–13 January 2004.
2 Gangs worked the trams: for 1930s crime and 1930s streetcars, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (OUP, Oxford 2000), pp. 52–3.
3 The slogan advertised Soviet Champagne: it had begun as a comment by Stalin (naturally) to a meeting of combine-harvester drivers on 1 December 1935 – ‘Everybody now says that the material situation of the toilers has considerably improved, that life has become better, more cheerful’ – and then been pressed into service in songs, speeches, posters, newspaper banner headlines. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 90 and note; for Soviet Champagne, see Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
4 On his professor suit would have been a cotton star: for Jewish experiences of the USSR in the 1930s, and Jewish perceptions of it as a place of philosemitic enlightenment and opportunity, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). ler Intern height="0em">
5 A request from the Plywood Trust of Leningrad: I have imagined the details of the approach to Kantorovich, but the origin of his mathematics of optimisation in the Plywood Trust’s commission is absolutely authentic. When Kantorovich was celebrating his seventieth birthday in 1982, he was presented with a piece of plywood on which was inscribed ‘I am a simple plank, but I too am rejoicing, because it all began with me’. The first publication of his method, proving his priority as discoverer, was in a sixty-eight-page pamphlet of 1939, Matematicheskie metody organizatsii i planirovaniya proizvodstva (‘Mathe
matical methods of production management and planning’), and his university also organised a small conference; but very little notice was taken officially, which was probably the safest outcome for him, and it is not even clear whether the Plywood Trust used what he had presented to them: quite possibly not. The method was then independently reinvented in the United States by Tjalling Koopmans and by George Danzig, who while working on transport and allocation problems for the US Airforce during the war coined the phrase ‘linear programming’. Koopmans’ formulation had one difference from Kantorovich’s: it assumed that any maximised selection of outputs would count as efficient, whereas for Kantorovich the selection was a given. It came from the planners, and there was only one of it to maximise. See Michael Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR: The Contribution of Mathematical Economics to Their Solution 1960–1971 (Cambridge: CUP, 1973).
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