6 And then he was backing, dwindling, absenting himself from the scene: husbands were forbidden to attend childbirths, or even to visit during the mandatory ten-day stay in the hospital afterwards. Some will have been sorrier than others about this, just as some women will have been sorrier than others for the enforced rest from family life. See Hedrick Smith, The Russians (London, 1976), for a description of the gaggle of men crowded beneath the recovery-ward windows to see the babies their wives were holding up, and to load eatables into the baskets the women lowered on strings.
7 A face beneath the white flowerpot that seemed to disapprove of the world: Inna Olegovna is entirely fictional, but my sketch of her aunt-like self-righteousness borrows from my memory of the array of censorious, reproving middle-aged men and women in the late-Soviet documentary film Is It Easy to Be Young?
8 Everything was white tiles, but not very clean ones: see Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union, p. 186. Her witness reports ‘sliminess’.
9 She let the midwife take back the gown and put her under a sluggish blood-warm shower: the shower, the enema, the shaving and the painting with disinfectant were all standard procedure. Having to walk up flights of stairs while in labour was not standard procedure, but hapened frequently anyway.
10 ‘Primipara,’ she said to the Angry Aunt, standing by with a clipboard: medical vocabulary authentic, and taken from the sample case histories given in Velvovsky et al., Painless Childbirth Through Psychoprophylaxis.
11 ‘You didn’t do the psychoprophylaxis classes?’: expectant mothers were in theory supposed to be led by patient stages through a confrontation with their fears over birth pain, a reassuring explanation of the physiology of childbirth and a demonstration of relaxation and breathing techniques. In fact, in almost every case the classes were taught by midwives or doctors who had not been specially trained, and did indeed consist mainly of the ‘stuff about taking lots of walks’ which Galina’s neighbour reports to her on the labour ward, with the specifics of what to expect and to do reduced to an unhelpful gabble at the end. Not knowing that there was anything important to learn, most women, like Galina, didn’t bother to go. So the positive programme of the psychoprophylactic method scarcely touched them, yet they were still subject to the prohibition on drugs associated with it, and were still likely to be judged as if difficulty with the pain represented a failure of virtue on their part.
12 When the contractions come, breathe deeply: if the few bits of psychoprophylactic advice Galina gets seem vaguely familiar, that’s because they are. Psychoprophylaxis, in a melancholy irony, is the basis of the phenomenally successful Lamaze method for natural birth in the West. The Soviet ideas were carried back to Paris by the French doctor (and communist) Fernand Lamaze, and humanised there – partly by bringing in birth partners, and less passive positions for labour, and more sophisticated techniques of auto-suggestion, but most of all by being made voluntary. A woman ‘doing Lamaze’ can aim for a birth with minimal medical intervention while knowing that the pethidine and the gas and the epidurals are there if she needs them. Psychoprophylaxis may seem to Galina here to be just another form of compulsory pretence; but it would be equally just to see it as another piece of mangled Soviet idealism, another genuinely promising idea ruined by the magic combination of compulsion and neglect. Velvovsky and his colleagues were the century’s pioneers in trying to see childbirth as something better than an illness to be endured.
13 It was really only messages from the subcortex of the brain which you could turn off by stimulating the cortex: one reason for the rapid promotion of psychoprophylaxis to orthodoxy in the USSR lay in its use of a Pavlovian framework that dovetailed with late-Stalinist ideological preferences. For the history and personalities involved here, and the role played by this association with soon-discredited science in later Soviet obstetricians’ indifference to the technique they were supposed to be promoting, see John D. Bell, ‘Giving Birth to the New Soviet Man: Politics and Obstetrics in the USSR’, Slavic Review vol. 40 no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 1–16.
14 It means they’re not going to give us any painkillers: in some hospitals, a single small injection of painkillers was allowed. See Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union.
15 She had only brought a bowl of water, and briskly wiped all the foreheads in the room with it: the only thing a midwife was permitted to do for women at this stage of labour, apart from watching for complications which might require surgery.
16 So pull yourself together and breathe right, or you’ll kill the baby: an encouraging remark passed on to the American journalist Peter Osnos by the woman who had it said to her. See Osnos, ‘Childbirth, Soviet Style’.
17 They were all mashed flies, swatted and left to fester: attested in Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union.
18 Baby already papoosed up and whisked away: immediately after birth, the newborn was swaddled in a tight roll of white cloth, held up for the mother to see, and then carried off to a nursery for twenty-four hours – apparently to reduce mother–baby transmission of infections, although it is hard to see how this can have worked. After that, the baby would be returned for breastfeeding, the Soviet Union being, in one more authoritarian commitment to naturalness, partly caused by the faulty supply of powdered milk, an entirely pro-breast society. See Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union, and Lee, ‘Health Care in the Soviet Union’.
Part VI
Introduction
1 The ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965 put a lot more money in factory managers’ pockets: see Ellman, Planning Problems in the Soviet Union. The reforms created, as well as the cash bonus fund for managers (still tied to the overfulfilment of the plan), three ‘incentive funds’ indexed to enterprises’ sales growth. These were supposed to stimulate local initiatives, and received about 14% of profits by 1968; their distribution was strongly skewed towards management and ‘engineering-technical personnel’, with the result that they reversed the very egalitarian income policy of Khrushchev’s time, under which in some places foremen had received less than workers and workers had earned more than all white-collar staff without technical qualifications. It is also worth remembering that management had very considerable discretion about how the two non-cash incentive funds (for local investment and workers’ facilities) were actually spent, so long as the books looked all right.
2 There was only a 0.5% upward blip in growth: see above, note to the introduction to part II, for the full panoply of sources on Soviet growth. Figures here from Gregory and Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure.
3 In 1961 the first oilfield had been discovered in western Siberia: for the transforming effects of the Soviet oilstrikes, and their fortuitous timing, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005); also Nove, Economic History of the USSR, and Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.
4 There were thirty million TV sets in Soviet homes in 1968: figures here from Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
5 A heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which had now become its own justification: as seen as early as the mid-1960s, with oblique but inescapable intellectual force, in the ‘variant calculation’ performed by the Gosplan Research Institute for the 1966–70 Five-Year Plan. Gosplan’s figures showed that increasing the rate of investment in the economy would increase output growth in industry but give only minimal extra growth in consumption – 0.3% extra consumption growth for nearly 6% more investment. Industrial growth in the USSR did not carry over into general prosperity. The linkages were missing. See Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
6 More of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else: far more, for instance, than Britain, France or the United States in the most frenzied stages in the history of their industrial revolutions, or India and China now. In this highly specialised and fetishised sense, the USSR had indeed overtaken and surpa
ssed. See Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
7 The control system for industry grew more and more erratic: for the ever wilder game-playing by management, and ever more drastic surprise moves by planners, see Kuznetsov, ‘Learning in Networks’.
8 One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value: see Hodgson, Economics and Utopia. His example is the men’s shirt so unwearably hideous that ‘even Soviet citizens’ would not touch it, woven from cotton that could have been sold on the world market for actual money.
9 Indeed an emigré journal reported the rumour: see Dora Sturman, ‘Chernenko and Andropov: Ideological Perspectives’, Survey 1 (1984), pp. 1–21.
10 Brezhnev-era Soviet joke-telling: for many, many real examples, see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’. The Brezhnev joke had a characteristic tone of near-endearment about it, as if the stupidity of what was being mocked was ultimately comfortable. For instance: the General Secretary is entering the third hour of his speech to the Party Congress when the comrades from the organs of security suddenly swoop and arrest a group of American spies in the audience. ‘Brilliant work!’ says Brezhnev. ‘But how did you pick them out?’ ‘Well,’ say the KGB men modestly, ‘as you yourself have observed, Comrade General Secretary, the enemy never sleeps …’
11 Science … was to be ‘administered’ not ‘supported’: a deliberate change of vocabulary after 1965 by Brezhnev’s new Central Committee Secretary for Science, Trapeznikov. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
12 The discreet little unmarked offices of the security service’s Fifth Department: see Churchward, Soviet Intelligentsia.
13 A minute fraction of the intelligentsia gave up on the Soviet system altogether: Churchward’s taxonomy of Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s classes 75% of them as ‘Careerist Professionals’, with most of the remainder accounted for by the various wings of the ‘Humanist Intelligentsia’ of the arts establishment. Everyone in the Akademgorodok sections of this book with the exception of Zoya Vaynshteyn and Mo would fall into the ‘Loyal Oppositionist’ subgroup of Churchward’s Careerists.
14 Several times in the late 1960s and 1970s there were strikes: see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
15 Ty-mne, ya-tebe, ‘you to me and I to you’: the Russian proverb equivalent to ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’, but with particular blat associations. For this and other phrases of the blat vocabulary of the 1960s–1980s, see Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours.
16 The vast majority of the Soviet population were, indeed, basically contented: for the lack of pressure from below for change, and the origin instead within the Party of the system’s collapse in the late 1980s, see Kotkin, Armageddon Averted. On the face of it, one of the great historical mysteries of the twentieth century should be the question of why the Soviet reformers of the 1980s didn’t even consider following the pragmatic Chinese path, and dismantling the economic structure of state socialism while keeping its political framework intact. Instead, the Soviet government dismantled the Leninist political structure while trying with increasing desperation to make the planned economy work. But the mystery resolves rather easily if it is posited that Gorbachev and the intellectuals around him, all children of the 1930s and young adults under Khrushchev, might strange to say have been really and truly socialists, guarding a loyal glimmer of belief right through the Brezhnevite ‘years of stagnation’, and seizing the chance after two decades of delay to return to their generational project of making a socialism that was prosperous, humane, and intelligent. With disastrous results. This whole book is, in fact, a prehistory of perestroika.
17 The environment was increasingly toxic: as revealed not just in life- expectancy figures trending gently downwards again from the 1960s, but also in falling birth weights and other physical indicators. See Elizabeth Brainerd, ‘Reassessing the Standard of Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and Anthropometric Data’, William Davidson Institute Working Paper no. 812 (January 2006). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=906590.
18 Time for KVN, Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh: for the influence of humourous Soviet TV, see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’.
19 Brezhnev himself, for example, was very taken with denim jackets: the story of the General Secretary’s one-off jean jacket is in his tailor’s memoir. See Aleksandr Igmand with Anastasia Yushkova, Ya Odeval Brezhneva (‘I Dressed Brezhnev’) (Moscow: NLO, 2008). I found it, however, in an English-language review of the book: Anna Malpas, ‘Suits You, Ilyich’, Moscow Times, 14 November 2008.
VI.1 The Unified System, 1970
1 A cell. A lung cell: the molecular biology of this chapter is accurate as far as it goes, and I am assured that the dwindling probabilities of the molecular events in it are at least of the right orders of magnitude. But it should be remembered that the chapter only follows one possible route by which one toxin in tobacco smoke can induce one variety of lung cancer. There are many other routes, other toxins, and other cancers, so a realistic path towards carcinogenesis would be much less linear than the simple illustrative zoom I have selected here. It would trace its way in massive parallel through a massively forking labyrinth of probabilities. I drew heavily on – inhaled heavily from – Theodora R. Devereux, Jack A. Taylor and J. Carl Barrett, ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Lung Cancer: Interaction of Environmental and Genetic Factors’, Chest 1996, 109; 14–19; and on Stephen S. Hecht, ‘Tobacco carcinogens, their biomarkers and tobacco-induced cancer’, Nature Reviews Cancer 3, October 2003, pp. 733–44. I am also indebted to Dr Claerwen James for enlightenment via conversation and email.
2 Lebedev has smoked sixty unfiltered Kazbek a day for fifty years: I’m making up the specific numbers, but he’s known to have been a persistently heavy smoker. See Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 26.
3 Hero of Socialist Labour, Order of the Red Banner of Labour, two Orders of Lenin: Lebedev’s authentic ironmongery. The Orders of Lenin are the biggest deal. For the fringe benefits of the various Soviet medals, see the Wikipedia entries for each.
4 As the joke says, if a crocodile ate him: authentic. See, again, Graham, A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot.
5 ‘The Minister does know I’m waiting, doesn’t he?’ says Lebedev: this scene, up at the macro scale of the dark corridor in the Kremlin, is a fantasia generated from the single true fact (for which see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 26) that Lebedev did drag himself to a meeting with Kosygin in 1970, when he had a ‘life-threatening pulmonary illness’, to remonstrate about the decision in December 1969 to abandon independent Soviet computer design in favour of trailing after IBM, years late; and Kosygin did refuse to see him. But in life, the palming-off took the form of an unsatisfactory encounter with one of Kosygin’s deputies, not the complete stonewalling that happens here, and no doubt it happened in bright daylight.
6 And the ignorance is particularly bad in the Soviet Union: for a sense of what Soviet medicine did know, clinically, about cancer in the mid-sixties, see the vivid descriptions of diagnosis and radiotherapy in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s banned Cancer Ward, translated by Nicholas Bethell and Dd Burg (London: Bodley Head, 1968).
7 On 18 December last year Lebedev sat in a meeting at Minradioprom: Malinovsky has a partial transcript of the discussion at this crucial meeting, which was complicated by political rivalries between different bureaux which stood to lose or gain depending which way the decision went, and by the fact that Lebedev and his allies’ proposal to maintain native Soviet design capability came with a secondary plan to cooperate with ICL in Britain. See Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 130–2. For the IBM-modelled ‘Unified System’ as it actually inched into existence in the 1970s, late at every stage, see N.C.Davis and S.E.Goodman, ‘The Soviet Bloc’s Unified System of Computers’, Computing Surveys vol. 10 no. 2 (June 1978), pp. 93–122.
8 Brusentsov’s trinary processor at the University of M
oscow: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 134–8.
9 Fluid build-up behind the lung obstruction eventually leads to pneumonia and death: despite the tone of clinical certainty here, I do not know what kind of carcinoma Sergei Lebedev contracted, or even for sure that his ‘serious lung disease’ was cancer, though it seems overwhelmingly likely. But he did die of it, whatever it was, in July 1974; the fuzzy undesigned probabilistic machinery of his body did, in one fashion or another, generate the deterministic process required to shift him, conclusively, from 1 to 0.
VI.2 Police in the Forest, 1968
1 Crave the use of telescopes, or gaze hungrily at the Computer Centre, like some of Akademgorodok’s children: for whom the ingenious Academician Lavrentiev, wanting to nurture future generations of scientists, created the ‘Club of Young Inventors’. There was also an annual summer school at Akademgorodok to which teenagers from across the USSR competed to come, to play mathematical games and have their brains stretched by the great. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
2 If today went as she expected it would: in this chapter I’ve telescoped together two adjacent but not simultaneous real events at Akademgorodok, the disciplinary meetings called in the Institutes to punish the forty-six signatories of the letter protesting the trial in Moscow of the dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg (early April 1968) and the Festival of Bards at which Sasha Galich gave the one and only public performance in the USSR of his satirical songs (May 1968). Raissa Berg, the real biologist in whose shoes the fictional Zoya Vaynshteyn is standing, was indeed one of the signatories, did indeed get fired in the same adroitly indirect manner as Zoya does, and did indeed have difficulties with an unexpected informer among her family circle – but Zoya’s character, relationships and motives here are all invention.
Red Plenty Page 50