Stalin's Meteorologist. Olivier Rolin
akin to Bouvard and Pécuchet—then he taught mathematics at the girls’ gymnasium in Dmitriev, a small town north of Kursk. Let us move on quickly, we’re not writing his CV, but all the same, in Dmitriev he did something important: in 1906 he married the history and geography teacher Yuliya Bolotova. They had a daughter together who would become a renowned psychiatrist. His next step was the Caspian hydrometeorological department, in Petrovsk (modern-day Makhachkala) where he researched variations in the level of this landlocked sea—a problem that had fascinated Alexandre Dumas during his voyage to the Caucasus and that led him to come up with the harebrained hypothesis of a sort of valve that would open and shut natural channels between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Then came war and Alexey was called up to head the weather forecasting service of the 8th Army, fighting the Austrians in Galicia. Forecasting which direction the wind would come from and whether rain was on the way was important for gas attacks, and that was how war was waged at the time, both in the East and in the West. Then it was the Revolution, and he was back in Dmitriev. The fronts of civil war shifted; unlike his brother Nikolay he was not on the side of the Whites, who took the town. He hid on a farm; the Reds recaptured it and he was made inspector for the People’s Commissariat for Education. He organized agitprop meetings in the villages, sported a Lenin-style goatee beard and wore boots, a dark peacoat, and a cap. Head agronomist of the oblast (province), he set up little weather stations in various places whose data would help improve the harvests, but he often had difficulty convincing the muzhiks (peasants) that weather vanes, anemometers, and other whirligigs and little dishes were not evil devices to blame for the droughts.
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ten years passed, and now we are at the beginning of the 1930s. He has divorced his first wife and married Varvara Kurguzova, whom he met in Dmitriev where she was director of School Number 40. He was living in Petrograd, where he was in charge of long-range weather forecasting for the main Geophysical Observatory, but now he lives in Moscow, where he has just been appointed head of the USSR’s newly established unified Hydrometeorological Service. He is a Party member. A bourgeois Communist, he sits on countless committees and subcommittees, presidiums, and scientific advisory boards. He knows Maxim Gorky and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow; Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar of Education; and the great scientist and Arctic explorer Otto Yulyevich Schmidt, who is only at the start of his illustrious career. In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Wangenheim is listed alongside Van Gogh. It looks as if he is well on the way to becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences and being decorated with the Order of Lenin, etc. In a contemporary photo, his face looks much fuller than in his Dmitriev days. He has shaved off his goatee, keeping only a pencil moustache, and he has his father’s wavy hair. He is wearing a white shirt beneath a dark jacket, and a knitted tie with a tie pin. He really looks like a big shot, but did Lenin himself ever look unkempt? With Vladimir Ilyich too, it was always tie and pin, waistcoat and watch chain. In this garb, in a three-piece suit of bronze or stone, Lenin has continued to rouse phantom crowds in every square in Russia, into the present day.
Establishing a unified hydrology and meteorology service over the entire territory of the USSR is no small matter; that territory, as was trumpeted in Soviet propaganda—and for once it was true—covering “a sixth of the Earth’s land surface.” A vast continent—wild, semidesert, almost without roads, bounded in the north by the Arctic Ocean, running from Poland to Alaska, and bordering Japan, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, furrowed by the Pamir, Altai, and Caucasus mountains, scorching hot in the steppes of central Asia, covered in snow and ice for a good part of the year, striated with great rivers, from the Volga to the Amur . . . Twenty-two and a half million square kilometers . . . Eleven time zones in those days (now there are only nine). Russia is “that land that does not care to do things by halves, but has spread a vast plain over half the world,” wrote Nikolai Gogol (exaggerating somewhat) of Wangenheim’s country. This is a different scale altogether, compared with Uyutnoye or even the Dmitriev region . . . Today, as I write, it is −39 degrees centigrade in Yakutsk, +17 degrees centigrade in Sochi, while a deep depression of 968 millibars is approaching the Kamchatka Peninsula. Thousands of kilometers from there another is developing in the Barents Sea to the west of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, whereas there is high pressure of 1034 millibars over the center of Siberia. Building a system capable of taking the temperature of this colossus each day and producing forecasts is a crushing task, especially since it involves overcoming the resistance of tangled bureaucracies each jealous of its territory, and we know that administrative inertia is one of the legacies from the Tsarist era that the Soviet regime managed splendidly to turn to advantage.
Alexey Feodosievich sets to work with energy, and even passion. Curiously, later, in his letters, he often refers to the unified Hydrometeorological Service as “my dear/beloved Soviet child.” He battles officialdom, forces the hand of the republics and shakes up the narkoms—the various People’s Commissars—making them all delegate the sections of sky and water that they believe belong to them. He extends his network of forecasting stations, he receives news of the winds in Sakhalin, the thousands of cubic meters of water per second flowing down the Yenisey River, the ice blocking the Northern Sea Route—which we in western Europe call the Northeast Passage, and the millimeters of rain that have or have not fallen on the Ukraine plains. Just as Genrikh Yagoda, head of the GPU, is supposed to know everything about Soviet citizens’ declared opinions and even more their secret thoughts, so he, Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, is the spymaster who probes, collects, and records the continent’s moods. Aircraft need his intelligence to land, ships to navigate a passage across the Kara Sea, tractors to plough their furrows in the chernozem (black earth). On January 1, 1930, the first weather forecast is broadcast on the radio, on a 3350-meter-long wave. Naturally these forecasts aren’t for the benefit of holidaymakers or weekenders, who are few at the time in the land of the international proletariat, but for the construction of socialism, and more specifically of socialist agriculture.
And, God knows, socialist agriculture needs help. Stalin’s insane policy combining the elimination of rich or supposedly affluent peasant farmers (sometimes owning one cow was enough to be decreed a kulak and to be deported or shot), with forced collectivization and the requisitioning of grain, results in a terrible famine in Ukraine. Some three million people will die between 1932 and 1933 in the region where Alexey Feodosievich spent his childhood and youth. When people have eaten all the cats, dogs, and insects, gnawed the bones of dead animals, chewed grasses, roots, and leather, they sometimes eat the dead, and on occasion even help them to die. In Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman describes these terrible times when entire villages, silent and pestilential, house nothing but dead bodies, where, every morning, carts collect the corpses of children come to beg in the streets of Kiev. Then, of course, it is not weather forecasts that the rural areas need, but simply a little humanity. But does he know that? Does he know it more than the others, the millions of others who are unaware, or who choose to be unaware, that the famous “construction of socialism” leaves so much suffering in its wake, who continue to believe that in the Soviet Union a new humanity is being born, freed from its chains? Who ignore or accept the famine (believing it is the price to be paid, and after all the victims are backward, reactionary peasants), as they will ignore or accept the mass deportations and deaths in the Gulag? Stalin knows of course that the Ukraine countryside is dying, yet persists with his fatal policy because it cannot be said that he is wrong, and also to crush a peasantry he considers to be a class enemy; the high-ranking officials in the Kremlin know, the Kaganoviches, the Voroshilovs, the Molotovs, who are no more than senior lackeys, but even supposing they do not share Stalin’s views, they would never dare oppose him. But Alexey Feodosievich is not a high-ranking official. The hydrometeorological department isn’t the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, he probably doesn’t know that the cobs being harvested in the fields of his youth are human heads. He believes that the rumors he has heard—if he did hear any—the quickly hushed-up rumors, because people repeating them risk their lives, are slander cooked up by the inexhaustibly destructive imagination of the enemies of the Revolution. The formidable killing machine is also a machine for obliterating death, which makes it all the more formidable. He continues to perfect his network of weather stations, refine his forecasts, and broadcast his bulletins on long wave, quietly certain that he is helping with the construction of socialism and in particular improving the farming yield.
And he takes a