he measured his success by his ability to get the yellow-fingered, chainsmoking geniuses to stop being kind. When they gave up being encouraging, when they made their first sarcastic remark, when they started to sneer and to try to shred his theorems, he knew they had ceased seeing a kid and started to see a mathematician
casually at first, and then with sudden excitement, with the certainty that the hard light of genesis was shining in his head, brief, inexplicable, not to be resisted or questioned while it lasted, he had started to think.
he was following his thought into implications, into what he was suspecting might be a world of implications. Clearly, the world had got by quite well until now without this idea.
the era before half past two this afternoon,
But it was predictable. You could count on the extra 3% year after year. Above all it was free. It would come merely by organising a little differently the tasks people were doing already. It was 3% of extra order snatched out of the grasp of entropy.
Such a long journey to this point in time for the whole country; and none of it easy, none of it achieved without cost. No one gave us this beautiful plane. We built it ourselves, we pulled it out of nothing by our determination and our strength.
there were times when the only way to get an organisation to change course was to behead it, and promote new leadership out of the middle ranks. If he were in charge of American capitalism, he thought, that would be the tactic he would adopt. It had been a favourite of the Boss’s, and it worked; it had just been a mistake to think that the beheading had to be literal. Retiring people worked just as well.
They spoke good Russian, but you would have been able to tell they weren’t Russian girls even without the clothes or the narrow waists, because they smiled all the time, so much it must make their faces ache, she thought.
She could feel it, a faint intensifying of reserve in the presence of authority, or in the presence of somebody connected to authority, however long the string. She had done it herself, this slight withdrawal with no actual movement, but never been on the receiving end.
He made a nominal effort to get Roger Taylor to agree that the vehicles represented bourgeois waste, but his heart wasn’t in it, you could tell.
Consciously arranged society’ demanded conscious arranging, and conscious arrangers to do it.
Capitalism (he’d argued) created misery, but it also created progress, and the revolution that was going to liberate mankind from misery would only happen once capitalism had contributed all the progress that it could, and all the misery too. At that point, there would be so much money invested by capitalists desperate to keep their profits up, that the infrastructure for producing things would have attained a state of near-perfection. At the same time, the search for higher profits would have driven the wages of the working class down to the point of near-destitution. It would be a world of wonderful machines and ragged humans. When the contradiction became unbearable, the workers would act. They would abolish a social system that was absurdly more savage and unsophisticated than the production lines in the factories.
the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ Marx imagined was modelled on the ‘dictatorships’ of ancient Rome, when the republic would now and again draft some respected citizen to give orders in an emergency.
Very soon, it would no longer be necessary even to share out the rewards of work in proportion to how much work people did. All the ‘springs of co-operative wealth’ would flow abundantly, and anyone could have anything, or be anything.
Social Democrats still dreamed of the socialist future; but here and now they were in the business of securing old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, free medical clinics, and kindergartens equipped with miniature pinewood chairs.
The Bolsheviks had no chance of influencing events, and certainly no chance at getting anywhere near political power, until the First World War turned Russian society upside down. In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganised liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d'état – and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime. Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country that least resembled Marx’s description of a place ready for socialist revolution.
Discipline at work was enforced through the criminal code. Arrive late three times in a row, and you were a ‘saboteur'. Sentence: ten years.
Soviet scientists had learned to be good at telling when the party line in their subject was about to change, like birds who deduce from a particular subtle vibration that the firm earth is firm no longer, and take flight just before the earthquake.
Emil had the connections and the worldly wisdom but lacked the true lizard-brained coldness of those on their way to the very top, those for whom ideas and people were only ever useful. He suspected Emil, beneath the urbanity, of being secretly in earnest.
Leonid Vitalevich, who had invented a large part of what Emil was excitedly learning, yet whose idea of a political manoeuvre was to write a letter of terrifying frankness to the most powerful person he could think of.
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction.
‘In my opinion,’ said Nemchinov calmly, but with a clear sense of the closing distance, ‘if you care for the ideas we discussed today, if you care about bringing a semblance of rationality back to our economics, then you are obliged to feel a duty to Leonid Vitalevich. He’s cut out to be the citizen of a much more sensible world, and he needs the help of those of us who are better adapted to this one.
Electrons move when forces act on their speck of negative electrical charge or on their infinitesimal pinpricks of mass. They do not choose to move; they do not behave, except in metaphor. Yet the metaphors creep in.
By now the night tastes of nothing but ash. But nicotine substitutes for food, nicotine substitutes for sleep, and there is so little time left for the future, once all the demands of the present are taken care of.
Of course, Sergei Alexeievich, sitting up late in 1943 manipulating 1s and 0s with a pencil, could do this himself, and operations so much more demanding that the comparison is ridiculous. But he couldn’t do it in one ten-thousandth of a second, and do it again ad infinitum every ten-thousandth of a second. Here’s the power of the machine: that having broken arithmetic down into tiny idiot steps, it can then execute those steps at inhuman speed, forever.
The market’s clock speed is laughable. It computes at the rate of a babushka in a headscarf, laboriously breaking a two-rouble note for change and muttering the numbers under her breath.
No wonder that Oskar Lange over in Warsaw gleefully calls the marketplace a ‘primitive pre-electronic calculator'. In the age of the vacuum tube, it’s an anachronism,
‘Sorcery!’ he said, and winked, as if we’d just shown him the cleverest conjuring trick in the world. Which Lebedev supposes they had, in a way; thrown some wires and some vacuum tubes into a hat, and pulled free brainpower out of it.
It was the kind of magic a good materialist could enjoy, certifiably the product of science even if it looked like a wonder out of the old tales.
People were dreaming the dream along with him; they were worrying, worrying helpfully, over its details.
Take the man who wanted more taxis. He’d noticed that the Draft guaranteed an automobile for every family, and not just any automobile either but one which, like all material blessings of full communism, would be ‘of considerably higher quality than the best products of capitalism’. All well and good; but where would they be parked, these Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame, these Ladas purring more quietly than any Rolls-Royce, these Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that reduced Mercedes-Benz to impotent envy? Had the Party considered the number of garages that would be required? The ‘deleterious effect on the hygienic conditions of city life’? The extra roadworks?
On one single occasion had he ever come close to danger, in ‘49, during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, wandering on a vague impulse of solidarity into a meeting of the Writers’ Union’s Yiddish section. Suspicious faces turned towards him as he walked into the room; everyone there, of course, as good a Stalinist as him, but bearded, foreign, exuding a perfume of alien pickles. ‘D’you speak Yiddish?’ asked someone. ‘No? Then fuck off, you louche little momzer. Visit your roots some other way. What, you think this is some kind of a Jew buffet? All the zhids you can eat? Out, out.’ Two weeks later, the section was disbanded, and most of the people in the room were on their way to execution. Only then, reading the paper, did he understand that he’d been protected by the kindness of strangers.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had been obvious to anyone educated that the tsarist regime was an embarrassing, oppressive anachronism. To be one of the lucky few who could read about the world outside therefore gave you a responsibility to try and do something about Russia;
Indeed, a number of scholars who had been happy to teach Marxism before the Revolution, as a way of sticking a finger in the eye of power, promptly started offering courses in religious philosophy after it, to achieve the same effect.
Most of the Party’s own intellectuals were needed, in the early years, to keep the improvised apparatus of the Soviet Union going, so for a decade the universities were essentially left in the hands of the academics.
There was an irony here. A hard-working promotee, with a nice clean background as a worker or a ‘poor peasant’, would get on in the world by carefully reading stories about aristocrats and princes and bourgeois functionaries – exactly the kind of people who would have been defined as ‘socially alien’, as ‘enemies’, if they were alive in the present.
Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists.
They also worked, right now, in the way that everyone was supposed to, when abundance came – for the voluntary love of it, treating the working week as their playground rather than their burden.
Khrushchev asks a friend to look over the text of one of his speeches. ‘I can’t deny, Nikita Sergeyevich, that I did find some errors. “Up yours” should be two separate words, and “shit-ass” is hyphenated.’)
‘And what is your field?’ asked Valentin politely. ‘Mutagenesis,’ she said. It was one of her rules that she would always name her research honestly, when asked about it. But it was up to the hearer what they were able to make of it. She saw no obligation to make life easy for the world’s legion of fools.
‘The lady has passed from a state of insufficient bafflement to one of excessive bafflement, without stopping at the point of optimal bafflement in between. For God’s sake, Kostya – help her, help her.’ Valentin bit into a slice of sausage and beamed.
Usually she would have scoffed. Not overtly, of course: by asking them how the great work was going, and leading them with gentle malignity to the point where they had to confess complications, frustrations, disappointment. She did not quite think of herself as a bitch, but the last few years had not been fun, and she had developed a certain sour pleasure in easing awkward facts into view.
Shaidullin exhibited an easy, impressive, tactful familiarity with the current anguishes of her subject, as if it were only normal for an educated person to know a smattering of every science; and an easy familiarity, too, with its big names, as if that were his natural company and (he flatteringly implied) hers as well.
But there’s a moral here, you know. I’ve seen old photographs of him, and he was good-looking himself, not too long ago. A nice, brown-eyed boy.’ ‘What’s your moral?’ ‘Simple. Brown-eyed boys don’t last very long. That’s why you have to pluck us while we’re ripe. During our brief flowering.’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Kostya.
It would have been an absurd error, therefore, to suppose that the room in any substantial sense contained the economy. The best that could be said was that it contained a kind of strategic outline of it. No; that was not quite true. The best that could be said about the room was that it worked, and had done for thirty years.
clothing manufacturers were waiting for the ordinary yarn it made, but compared to the tire plants they were a distinctly low priority; because, one single step beyond them, you arrived at the consumer, and the consumer was an end-point of the system, and therefore a natural sink for shortages. All that consumers did with viscose was to wear it. No one stood beyond them in the chain, so there were no consequences whatsoever for inconveniencing them, no farther balances to consider. You could inconvenience the consumer with impunity.
They wanted your whole attention on pushing the plant to do that little bit more that made the difference between failure and success. Hence the utter importance of plan bargaining; hence the necessity, in normal times, of low-balling your first production estimate, so that the sovnarkhoz’s reflexive upward correction would put the target back in the band you had privately calculated was achievable.
The sovnarkhoz, needless to say, knew what you were doing, knew the first estimate was always going to be deceptive. The trick was to make the deception seem transparent, thus gently flattering them in their sense that they knew what was really going on. It should seem to be offering them a hint about where you thought the true figure ought to lie.
He pieced together all stories, if he could. It was his business to do so, he made his living snapping up these trifles. Not to pass judgement; to try to see what, in each case, might be the quickest way to sympathy with that person, and what they might have and what they might need in this life.
His clients paid him to solve problems, not to create them.
Today, six of the fifteen firms he represented had sent messages, though a couple of them were only expressions of anxiety, reiterated statements that they were depending on him for the timely despatch of this item or that. He couldn’t blame them. They were only acting in accordance with his own great principle that, when you need something from someone, you should never quit their consciousness, you should always make sure to be there on the edge of their attention, pleasantly maintaining the need to deal with you and your request, soon; and he was the person whom his firms could bother.
No point in talking to a secretary or a foreman on this one. On the other hand, till he could work out what was going on, he should also avoid speaking to anyone so senior that they might have prestige at stake. Nothing solidified a problem like making some grandee feel that they’d have to eat dirt to change their mind. What he needed here was the bottom of the top, someone with a junior post in senior management.
that’s an advantage we want you to have in this case. Which is why, when you sign up with me, I will not just be asking you to pay me a monthly retainer which will make your eyes water, but which you will pay, because I am worth every kopeck; and my expenses, which will be large. I will also be asking you to trust me, and to make just a little bit of your output available, now and again, when I ask you to ship it somewhere. Because friends look after friends; and when you’re with me, you aren’t just friends with the people you do business with direct, you’re friends with everyone I’m friends with. And that’s enough people, I promise you, to solve virtually any problem you may have. So tell me, while we get another bottle of this good sweet wine here – what are you worrying about, just now? What can I help you with?’
He had told the story of Mr Gersh’s herrings so many times now he barely remembered the experience, as opposed to the anecdote; or the particular nature of Gersh’s sad end, and the part played in it by his own need to extricate himself.
High-level Party meetings became extravagantly foul-mouthed from the 1930s on, as a way of signalling that practical people were now in charge, down-to-earth people: and honest Russians too, not those dubious Balzac-readers with funny foreign names.
Once a turnip said, ‘I taste very good with honey.’ ‘Get away, you boaster,’ replied the honey. ‘I taste good without you.’
he’s a man who can get out of his depth in a puddle.
‘But optimal prices don’t contain errors.’ ‘Don’t they? They’re only as good as the data they’re based on. If I understand correctly, they’re calculated from the efficiency of the enterprises’ equipment. In other words, they depend on managers submitting completely truthful information about what their enterprises are capable of. Speaking as somebody who has been trying to get them to do just that for nearly thirty years, I have to say it strikes me as a trifle unlikely that they’ll change their ways just because you’ve sent them a new form to fill in. Assume, instead, an average degree of duplicity and self-interest, and your lovely new prices have just as many errors in them as our nasty old ones – with no way of cutting off the mischief they’ll do.’
Those bonds should have been going into the draws for prize money, not into the incinerator. They were promises. But we burned them anyway, because the theory was only theory, and it counted for nothing against the logic of tidying up the state budget when we could. If I ever believed that we would let ourselves be constrained by roubles and kopecks, I had it burned out of me then.
For you, I foresee a shower of prizes and honours. And you have your research! Fascinating research on a subject which – who knows? – may someday be of enormous importance.’ ‘Can I hope, then?’ said Emil, despite himself. ‘Oh, you can always hope,’ said Mokhov warmly. ‘Be my guest.’
They were on the river embankment, a place where kisses were unremarkable, so she stepped forward to give him a dry-mouthed peck of gratitude and he ran a finger down her spine while she was doing it. A quite new and disturbing ripple of feeling followed his finger; she shivered and choked, because her mouth was suddenly wet.
He said the right things copiously, effortlessly, it having apparently never occured to him that you could care enough about the content of politics to say anything except what you were supposed to say.
Her parents came to visit once, and she watched Fyodor working like a safecracker on her gruff father, who had expected better for her, till he too grinned and guffawed and started to say what a good fellow she’d found.
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?