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 both 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 USSRAmerica/font>
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 holidays: perks also determined strictly by seniority. See Berg, 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.
III.2 The Price of Meat, 1962
1 Volodya stood by the parapet at the edge of the flat roof of the city procuracy: although Volodya himself is invented, along with Basov the regional first secretary, and the situation that Volodya finds himself in with his seniors disgraced, the Novocherkassk massacre of 3 June 1962 was all too real. M
y main source was Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk 1962 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 3, 1918–1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation V–VII, translated by H. T.Willetts (London: Collins/Harvill, 1978), pp. 506– 14, contains a passionate and horrified account of the massacre, but it was compiled in the rumour-chamber of samizdat, and is not reliable in detail. For an eye-witness account, drawn on by Baron, see Piotr Siuda, ‘The Novocherkassk Tragedy, June 1–3 1962’, Russian Labour Review 2, 1993.
2 Red flags flying, portraits of Lenin held high: Samuel Baron conjectures that the strikers, having no model for the act of going on strike that was ordinary and moderate and civic, may have found themselves imitating revolutionary behaviour as they had seen it in Soviet film and drama, because it was the only model of mass action that was available to them.
3 The grey pea soup and gristle served in their canteen: all the details of food are authentic.
4 Only to see the visitors from Moscow pouring out of the building: the panicky retreat from the Party office on the square to the barracks is factual, but I have confabulated the convoy of Chaikas.
5 The special forces squad had rescued them at dawn: true, but the idea of the local apparatchiks being carried around as an object-lesson in blame is my invention.
6 Putting in his footsoldier-time at some convenient raikom or gorkom in the Moscow region: a ‘raikom’ was a Party committee for a county, and a ‘gorkom’ was the same thing for a town, while an ‘obkom’, one step further up the ladder, was a committee for a whole region.
7 Even with his spets for the party store: a ‘spets’ was the document that gave you access to a spetsraspredelitel’, a closed distribution system for goods. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, for the 1930s beginning of such arrangements; Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), for their later growth and elaboration.
8 But Kurochkin, to his horror, had followed him: the scene in the conference room is all confabulation, from the humilation of Kurochkin (the real, historical director of the Budenny Electric Locomotive Factory in Novocherkassk) to the means by which Kozlov and Mikoyan reached their decision, though it appears to be true that Kozlov was pushing for the military option and Mikoyan was reluctant.
9 It had been a little after eight o’clock yesterday morning: Volodya’s memory of Kurochkin’s disastrous performance in front of the crowd is faithful to fact, including the ‘let them eat liver pies’ moment. I am not aware that anyone at the time noticed the Marie Antoinette parallel.
10 From the receiver, Volodya could hear the thready murmur of a voice familiar from newsreels: for Khrushchev’s part in events, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 519–23.
11 Shots have been fired at the central police station: I have compressed the timeline, but this was the report that trigged the decision to suppress the strike by force. It is not clear whether a genuine violent attack was underway, or whether this was another piece of naively insurrectionary behaviour by people who were unpractised at protest.
12 ‘And get me some real grub,’ he was saying. ‘This place is such a fucking hole …’: relocated to this moment, but an authentic remark by Kozlov in Novocherkassk. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 522.
13 ‘All soldiers out of the crowd,’ he squawked: the sequence of what the officer on the gorkom steps said to the crowd is genuine, although I have confabulated direct speech out of reports of subject matter. The slogans of the crowd are real, and so is the strikers’ tenacious refusal to believe they could be under real threat.
14 ‘Are you out of your mind? In our time?’: authentic incredulity. Samuel Baron suggests that the main reference in the strikers’ memories for a demonstration that was fired upon will have been ‘Bloody Saturday’ in 1905, when workers loyally carrying pictures of the Tsar were attacked by Cossacks. But that was part of the official iconography of Tsarist iniquity. The speaker here seems to have been taking it for granted that nothing of the sort could happen in the modern, enlightened country where he lived.
15 It was the crew on Volodya’s rooftop who were doing it: at this point, the narrative becomes contentious. It is not clearly established who did the actual shooting at Novocherkassk – the regular soldiers on the gorkom steps, the Interior Ministry troops who had been drafted into the town, or some other group brought in by the security services. Nor is it clear where they were shooting from. Baron’s Bloody Saturday outlines several possible scenarios, and I have chosen one.
16 The far side blew out in a geyser of red and grey: the details of the massacre are mixture of real and imaginary. The grey-bearded drinker shot in the head is imaginary; the nursing mother sprayed with blood and brains is not, and neither is the hairdresser ceasing to be in the salon up the street. Baron has a complete list of the dead.
Part IV
Introduction
1 Khrushchev gave a speech to an audience of Soviet and Cuban teenagers: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 523.
2 Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground: see Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union.
3 Till he had a stroke the following April: see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 613–14.
4 Contemporary joke: What do you call Khrushchev’s hairdo?: see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’.
5 New cybernetics institutes and departments had sprung up: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
6 But Nemchinov himself was no longer in charge: for a sharp-tongued account of his sudden loss of standing, and the appointment of Academician Fedorenko to TSEMI instead, see Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR. Trying to read the situation from California eight years later, Simon Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research: A Preliminary Study of Organisations and Personalities, RAND Corporation report R-909-ARPA (Santa Monica CA, December 1971), pp. 86–7, remarked that Fedorenko seemed to be ‘without observable experience in computer technology or automation’, and wondered whether this was why TSEMI ‘appears to have gradually changed from an economics laboratory, engaged in the realization of a preconceived theoretical system of ideas, into an operational support agency for the Gosplan’. The banner saying ‘Comrades, Let’s Optimise!’ was seen by Michael Ellman on a research visit to Moscow in the mid-sixties: Ellman, Soviet Planning Today.
7 ‘The main task,’ he had told a new conference at Akademgorodok: see V. Kossov, Yu. Finkelstein, A. Modin, ‘Mathematical Methods and Electronic Computers in Economics and Planning’ [report of Novosibirsk conferences, October and December 1962], Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 6 no. 7, November 1963; originally in Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 2, 1963.
8 Academician Glushkov’s group down in Kiev: see, again, Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, pp. 271–4, and for Glushkov’s life history and the story of his negotiations with government, Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 29–59.
9 An economist from Kharkov by the name of Evsei Liberman: see E.G.Liberman, ‘Planning Production and Standards of Long-Term Operation’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 5 no. 8, December 1962, pp. 16–22; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 8, 1962. Liberman was interpreted outside the Soviet Union as being the leader of economic reform in general, as in V.G.Tremi, ‘The Politics of Libermanism’, Soviet Studies 19 (1968), pp. 567–72. He was put on the cover of Time – ‘Borrowing from the Capitalists’, Time Magazine, 12 February 1965 – and an answer appeared under his name in the magazine Soviet Life in July 1965, for which see E. G. Liberman, ‘Are We Flirting With Capitalism? Profits and “Profits”’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 4, August 1965, pp. 36-41.
10 Every enterprise in the Soviet Union had to agree a tekhpromfinplan: for the tekhpromfinplan system, and a mercilessly lucid demonstration of why it could not produce a plan that was eit
her complete or consistent, see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR. For the zaiavki (indents) see Herbert S. Levine, ‘The Centralized Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’, in Franklyn Z. Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962).
11 But at the time we are talking about, the intermediary was a sovnarkhoz: see, again in Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy, David Granick, ‘An Organizational Model of Soviet Industrial Planning’, and Oleg Hoeffding, ‘The Soviet Industrial Reorganization of 1957’. For an assessment of the effects of Khrushchev’s experiment with the sovmarkhozy, and the planning of production by region rather than ‘branch’, see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
12 Every spring, as the Soviet Union’s rivers broke up into granitas of wet ice: for the detailed chronology of the planning year, in pristine theory and imperfect practice, see Levine, ‘The Centralized Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’.
13 All clear so far?: a phrase shamelessly borrowed from the explanation of mid-twenty-first-century US military procurement in Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast (New York: Tor, 1988).
IV.1 The Method of Balances, 1963
1 Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov was a very kind man: but an entirely fictional one. Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods was a real job, but the relationship I have suggested between professional-bureaucrat deputies and political-appointee sector directors is conjectural, and I have no knowledge of anyone being called up from the middle ranks to serve in a ‘kitchen cabinet’ for the Minister, as Mokhov does here. He is acting in this book as a confabulated embodiment of the institution. His tone of voice draws on the exasperated Gosplanes,ess in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V chapter 2, on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. There’s also useful material on official attitudes (at different levels) to property, in Hachten, Property Relations.
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