Stalin's Meteorologist. Olivier Rolin
Birnbaum radios to Earth that the balloon has just passed the altitude of 16,800 meters, a world record at the time. Then the rate of climb gradually decreases, and at 12:55, after Prokofyev has dumped ballast several times, USSR-1, now perfectly spherical, a huge, glittering ball, bombarded by sunlight in the dark blue sky, reaches the altitude of 19,500 meters. Then they descend, releasing gas, and landing without a hitch, as planned, around a hundred kilometers from their departure point near the town of Kolomna, whose population turns out en masse to watch the big flower-shaped aircraft fall out of the sky on the banks of the Moskva River. “We congratulate the unsurpassed heroes of the stratosphere, who have brilliantly accomplished the mission entrusted to them by the Soviet authorities,” reads a telegram signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov.
Heroes, the USSR has in plenty at the time—heroes of the Arctic, heroes of the stratosphere, aviators who have beaten the world long-distance record at the controls of single-engine aircraft with razor-thin wings, work heroes, heroes building Moscow’s first Metro line with its stations that are people’s palaces. In 1934 the order of “Hero of the Soviet Union” is established, and the first recipients are the search and rescue pilots of the Chelyuskin. There are also the unlucky heroes, the proletarian Prometheuses, such as the crew of the second high-altitude balloon, Osoaviakhim-1: they ascend to 22,000 meters on January 30, 1934, transmitting from up there their “warm greetings to the great and historic Seventeenth Party Congress,” which is taking place in Moscow, “to the great and beloved Comrade Stalin and to comrades Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov,” but the descent goes wrong and ends up in freefall. They are given a state funeral in Red Square and monuments are built to them. (Six months later, the three Americans aboard Explorer-1 also end up in freefall, but they manage to extricate themselves from the gondola and parachute to safety.) Over and above the hyperbole typical of Soviet rhetoric, it is indeed a time of faith in scientific and technological progress, of conviction that socialism increases its strength by serving the people, a time of passionate enthusiasms and sacrifices. “We saw the future as an asset that indisputably belonged to us,” wrote Isaac Babel, evoking the era of the civil war, “war as a tumultuous preparation for happiness, and happiness itself as a trait of our personality.” A phrase that beautifully encapsulates the fierce hope of the time, and that we cannot read without emotion when we recall that Babel will end up being shot at the beginning of 1940. One can’t help wondering what would have happened if Stalin’s madness, decapitating all the country’s elites—scientific, technological, intellectual, artistic, military—decimating the peasantry and even the proletariat in whose name everything was done, whose fatherland the USSR was supposed to be, hadn’t substituted terror for enthusiasm as the bedrock of Soviet life. Could the elusive “socialism” that the “heroes” believed they were constructing—and those too like Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, who weren’t heroes, just honest Soviet citizens who loved their work and thought they were serving the people by doing it well—perhaps have been possible? Perhaps it would have proved a system that was infinitely preferable to capitalism? Perhaps the entire world, apart from a few backward countries, would have become socialist?
Dream on.
5
on january 8, 1934, the Commission for the Preservation of Lenin’s Body had respectfully proceeded with their inspection of the embalmed Vladimir Ilyich, who lay in the mausoleum in Red Square. The members of the Commission were extremely satisfied with the result: Lenin was fresh as a daisy, which represented, they stressed, “an unprecedented scientific achievement of worldwide importance” (the pharaohs were hardly presentable). It is possible to imagine the body remaining intact indefinitely (but what the Commission had not envisaged was that the sight of the corpse of this little man with a Mongolian face, dressed in a dark suit and tie as if he were on his way to a gala dinner, would not arouse the masses indefinitely). The Commission asked Professors Vorobyov and Zbarsky, in charge of this outstanding feat of Soviet science, to write a report describing their method in detail so that the operation could be replicated in the future (whom did they have in mind?). Molotov, who countersigned the Commission’s report, suggested that the two embalmers be awarded the Order of Lenin, and that they each receive the gift of “a good car.”
One person who would not be embalmed but cremated was Andrei Bely, who had died the previous day. The Symbolist poet and brilliant and somewhat eccentric author of Petersburg would be accompanied to the cemetery by a group of writers including Mikhail Prishvin, Nikolay Yevreinov, Vera Inber, Boris Pilniak (who would be shot), Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam (who would die in the Vladivostok transit camp). “Infamous representative of bourgeois literature and of the idealist mentality,” wrote Pravda, “in recent years, Andrei Bely sincerely sought to assimilate the ideas of socialist construction.” The last of the great exponents of Russian Symbolism, he had not shared, the paper smugly noted, “the fate of other leaders of this literary movement (Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Konstantin Balmont) who sank into the swamp of the White Russian emigration: he died a Soviet writer.” Bely’s real name was Boris Bugayev, and he was the son of the mathematician chancellor who, in 1901, had expelled Alexey Feodosievich from Moscow University.
In all other respects, that January 8 was a normal Soviet day. Work heroes and saboteurs played opposite one another. Izvestiya announced that the 1933 harvests had beaten all records, thanks to the Party’s far-sighted policy, which had prevailed over the kulaks’ sabotage and boosted the development of the kolkhozes (collective farms) and of mechanization (and caused the appalling famine in Ukraine, but that escaped Izvestiya). Improved mechanization, maybe, but tractors were still a problem. Admittedly, the 50,000th tractor, named “Seventeenth Congress,” rolled off the Kharkov factory production line; admittedly, but in the meantime, at the maintenance center in Tajikistan, workers were twiddling their thumbs, fulfilling only 0.3 percent of the plan. That’s right, 0.3 percent. For a much less serious shortfall, the manager of the Yaroslavl rubber plant was fired while waiting to be rehabilitated through work: set a target of 9,000 tires by the production plan, the impudent dog had declared on December 23 that this was not achievable. Not achievable. “The plan set by the Government is a law,” retorted Pravda; “to oppose it is a violation of Party discipline and Soviet law.” Alas, the deplorable Mikhaylov (as the sabotaging manager was called) was not the only one to put a surreptitious spoke in the wheels of socialism; the tractor maintenance workshops of central Asia had to send back 3,000 weak connecting rod bearings, 1,049 pistons manufactured at Plant Number Seventeen that were the wrong size, and as for the segments from the Frunze plant in Penza, they were all faulty. And what about the Skorokhod (“Walk Fast”) shoe factory in Leningrad that had to return 16,000 pairs of soles from Promtekhnika? When it emerged that Promtekhnika produced precisely 16,000 pairs of soles a day, that meant the factory had worked for an entire day for nothing. Who were they kidding?
And on the saboteurs’ side there was still Comrade (for how much longer?) Rusanov, director of the Moscow–White Sea railway (which Alexey Feodosievich would soon travel, in a cattle truck), who complained of not having enough rolling stock when he had more than enough. The thing was, he allowed shirkers to thrive, so the trains were never ready to leave. And Comrade, or soon ex-Comrade Zhukov, director of the Western Railway, was in the same situation. As was the head of the Southern Railway, who delayed the loading of coal from the Donbass mines. And then there were the good-for-nothings from the Perm power plant, who from the beginning of winter disrupted production with ill-timed power cuts.
Luckily there were the heroes, the shock workers. The kolkhoz zealots and workers on the “Prozhektor” kolkhoz who promised to work even harder and better. The activists building the Metro who, assembled by Comrade Kaganovich, pledged to finish building the first line in time for the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The Adzhariya kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers who dispatched seventeen wagons of clementines, oranges, and lemons as a gift to the delegates attending the Seventeenth Congress and to the workers of Moscow. The shock teams of women workers from twenty-five Leningrad factories sent a declaration of love to Stalin:
Great master, our best friend, dear Comrade Stalin,
The past is erased forever!
We have always been with the Bolsheviks,
The woman worker’s consciousness has been raised high beyond recognition.