Stalin's Meteorologist. Olivier Rolin
content with casting his net over the vast territory of the Soviet Union, he dreams of a global meteorological system. Of course, he believes that to achieve this, the proletarian revolution will have to triumph throughout the entire world, and he has no doubt that this will eventually come to pass. Political conjecture is risky, but scientific forecasting, bold as it is, has proved accurate. In two or three clicks, on my screen I can see a depression approaching the Kamchatka Peninsula, another heading for Novaya Zemlya, gales blowing over the Sea of Okhotsk, curves showing high pressure areas in wide bands over the center of Siberia, I learn that it is −31 in Kolomenskoye, on the infamous Kolyma River, −5 in Arkhangelsk, +5 in Astrakhan, and zero in Kiev where the people have just overthrown a dictator; and if I’m interested in South America, far away in the other hemisphere, it’s 28 degrees in Santiago de Chile where the sun’s shining, as it is in Buenos Aires where it’s only 22 degrees, while gentle high-pressure curves snake from Juan Fernández Island, where the real Robinson Crusoe lived, to the Pampas, straddling the Andes Cordillera on their way: Wangenheim’s dream has come about, without waiting for an increasingly unlikely world proletarian revolution. Electronic bugs with golden forewings and blue silica wings, dozens of satellites rotate in the dark sky, monitoring the clouds, the rain, the ocean currents, the temperatures, sea levels, the melting of the ice: this is the world revolution (nowadays called “globalization”).
And then, in the domain of what we now call “energy transition,” Alexey Feodosievich really is a prophet. If he has established a “wind registry,” it is because he has the vision of a forest of wind turbines stretching from the Bering Strait and the Kamchatka Peninsula to the shores of the Black Sea, supplying energy to the frozen wastes of the north and the scorching deserts of the south—and, as is common knowledge, “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.” “Not only does our country have immense wind power,” he writes, in 1935, “it is renewable and inexhaustible. It will enable us to combat drought and tame deserts, wherever we find strong, scorching winds, and wherever it is very difficult to transport fuel to. The wind can transform deserts into oases. In the north, the wind will provide heat and light.” He will write this in a letter to his wife, from the Solovetsky Islands where he was deported, and where for six months of the year, the wind makes the huge trees creak and sway and freezes the backs of the zeks (convicts) marching in columns along the snow-covered path. While there, he reads a brief article about wind power in a magazine, and ruminates bitterly that he had been a pioneer, when he was free: “All these thoughts were going round in my head and I said to myself that I was the first to tackle these questions with the wind registry project. Soon the vast territories of the USSR will be electrified thanks to wind power, and my name will vanish without trace.” Similarly he launched the “sun registry” because, even though no device capable of transforming its light existed yet, he foresaw that “the future belongs to solar energy and wind power.”
Attempts to open the Northeast Passage to shipping are no modern endeavor either. In 1932, well before global warming and the melting of the Arctic ice sheet became a pressing issue, the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route, the Glavsevmorput, is established, the proconsulate of Otto Yulyevich Schmidt. Mathematician, geophysicist, explorer, editor-in-chief of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, this bearded colossus of Germano-Baltic origin is a friend of Alexey Feodosievich’s—at least for as long as the latter remains persona grata. But at the time we are talking of, 1932 to 1933, he is very much persona grata, and is even deemed useful. Not only is he head of the weather forecasting services, but he is also chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Second International Polar Year. The ships trying to force a passage through the ice, from west to east as far as Vladivostok via the Bering Strait, are in constant communication with him, via stations positioned at intervals the length of the Siberian coast: they send him their observations and he transmits his forecasts. In 1932, the icebreaker Alexandr Sibiryakov makes the first successful crossing of the Northern Sea Route without wintering. She sets sail from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea on July 28 and docks at Petropavlovsk in the Kamchatka Peninsula three months later; Schmidt is the expedition leader. The following year, the steamship Chelyuskin puts out to sea from Leningrad in mid-July, waved off by a vast crowd on the quayside. She sails around Sweden and Norway and struggles across the Barents, Kara, and Laptev seas, but is blocked by the ice field in the Chukchi Sea. She drifts and eventually sinks, her hull caving in under the pressure of the ice, on February 13, 1934.
Schmidt evacuated the entire crew, more than one hundred people including, unusually for a polar expedition, some twenty women—one even gave birth to a little girl halfway across the Kara Sea—journalists, a cameraman who filmed everything of what was to become an epic voyage, and even a Constructivist poet, Ilya Selvinsky. Schmidt organizes the camp on the ice like an ideal Communist microcosm, with military discipline (anyone trying to run away, he warned, would be shot), daily saluting of the red flag to the tune of the Internationale, gymnastics sessions, and lectures on historical materialism (given by him). They clear a landing strip, ramming down the snow, and soon, arriving from makeshift airfields on the Siberian coast, the drone of the first rescue planes is heard. They emerge from the blizzard and fog, skating on the ice as they land. Aviator heroes, helmeted, strapped in, booted, wearing fur-lined leather gloves and huge goggles. Bear hugs all round and everyone is crammed into the cabins in small groups. On April 13, two months after the sinking, the evacuation is complete. They even take the sled dogs. The last to leave the camp is the captain of the Chelyuskin, Vladimir Ivanovich Voronin—this is not the Costa Concordia.
The survivors and their rescuers are given a triumphal welcome, but on a much bigger stage than ancient Rome: crowds throng every station along the entire 9288-kilometer length of the Trans-Siberian Railway, low-flying planes escort the train, fireboats salute them when they cross the rivers. In Moscow, they board Black Torpedoes, the procession descends Teatralny proyezd escorted by horse guards, under a shower of streamers, and on to Red Square where they are welcomed by Stalin. A gigantic parade—tanks, planes, goose-stepping regiments, and the flower of Russian youth in the white uniforms of Red athletes. What was originally a failure is transformed into a spectacular celebration of the USSR’s newfound power. But Alexey Feodosievich is no longer there to see all this: fate has turned against him. While his “friend” Schmidt is strutting around the platform of Lenin’s mausoleum, beard thrust out and a flower in his buttonhole (white, curiously, not red), he has been incarcerated for two and a half months in the “Solovki Special Purpose Camp.”
His final hour of glory was the flight of the USSR-1 high-altitude balloon. The space race between the Soviet Union and the USA is already on, but for the time being they fly no higher than the stratosphere, going up in a balloon suspended from a huge envelope containing twenty-five cubic meters of hydrogen (smoking strictly prohibited!). The spherical gondola made of duralumin bears the letters CCCP (USSR). It has little portholes and a hermetically locking hatch, making it look just like a space capsule. And the launches, frequently postponed owing to adverse weather conditions, are as nail-biting as those of a shuttle (albeit less spectacular). The USSR-1’s maiden flight, originally scheduled for September 10, 1933, is delayed by fog and rain, and the same happens again on the 15th and 19th of that month. On the 23rd, it is decided that the launch will take place the following day. At dawn on the 24th, the military airport of Kuntsevo, to the west of Moscow, is shrouded in fog. Even so, they start inflating the 650 balloons inside the envelope held down by 150 men: the giant ectoplasm rises slowly but, saturated with moisture, it is too heavy. It wobbles at the end of its twenty-four cables and ultimately refuses to rise. During the night of the 29th, they make another attempt. The sky is clear, this time, there is no wind (the center of the anticyclone is over Moscow), but another unforeseen problem emerges: Professor Molchanov, the designer of the instruments to be carried by the balloon and that he alone knows how to operate, hasn’t arrived. The train bringing him to Leningrad has been severely delayed . . . Alexey Feodosievich spends the night studying and regulating all this fancy apparatus: precision instruments, meteorographs, barographs, altimeters, cosmic ray recorders, and so on.
Thanks to him they are ready early in the morning of September 30. At 8 a.m., the crew of three, pilot Georgy Prokofyev, Konstantin Godunov, copilot, and the radio operator Ernst Birnbaum, clamber into the gondola and, after a final wave, close the hatch. It is the dawn of space-hero imagery that will later feature Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong and a whole army of men and soon