Stalin's Meteorologist. Olivier Rolin

      And the proof that life was getting better and richer all the time was the shop Gastronom, at the corner of Tverskaya Street and Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky pereulok in Moscow (just one example), which a report showed groaning under the weight of sausages from Kraków and Poltava, strings of sausages, hams, “the finest specimens from the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Barents Sea as well as of the Soviet rivers,” herring from Kerch, salmon, sturgeon, pike perch, mullet, and so on. It was a real symphony, which quite understandably reminded the Pravda journalist, a man of letters and poetry, of the descriptions in Zola’s The Belly of Paris. The first television set, the TK-1 model, was made at the Kozitsky factory in Leningrad, the production of electric gramophones was beginning, red flags fluttered above the Communist Youth International factory to celebrate the launch of sewing machine needle production, twenty-one bicycles made in the factories of Moscow, Kharkov, and Penza were about to set off on a 1200-kilometer race along the Black Sea coast to test the quality of the equipment. The agitprop squad of the paramilitary organization Osoaviakhim had taken off from Kharkov for Stalino oblast, in the Donbass region.

      Maybe Alexey Feodosievich glanced distractedly at this latest news, unaware that this issue 5894 of Pravda was the last he would buy from a kiosk (or perhaps he had it delivered to his office?); the last, in any case, of his life as a free man. Did he recall now the malicious Nikolay Bugayev, father of Bely, who thirty-three years earlier had fired him from Moscow University—where Alexey himself now teaches physics? A great mathematician, all the same, that Bugayev. Perhaps he’d read, stifling a yawn, the story of the manager of the Yaroslavl rubber plant, or perhaps with indignation, who knows, unaware that the next day he would also be a saboteur and a Soviet outlaw. Unaware that this issue of Pravda was the last of the era when he was known as Comrade Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, director of the unified Hydrometeorological Department of the USSR, chairman of the Hydrometeorological Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars, head of the Weather Bureau, chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Organization of the Second Polar Year, and numerous other titles? Of the time when he was called simply Comrade?

      I imagine—but I could be wrong—that he paid scant attention to all those stories of tractors, sewing machine needles and succulent sausages. Not that he wasn’t a good Communist, but his field of expertise was clouds, winds, rains, isobars, the ice sheets of the Northern Sea Route. His role in the construction of socialism was to help the revolutionary proletariat control the forces of Nature. Each person to their work station, their battle station: he was an organized man. Did the story of the professors opening up Vladimir Ilyich to see if he’d gone off make him smile? I don’t think so, I can’t imagine him showing any inclination to disrespect. I’d like to, but somehow I don’t think so, unfortunately. Did he take an interest in international news, then? From London, there were cables expressing growing concern for the fate of Georgy Dimitrov, still held prisoner by the German government even though he had been found not guilty of the charge of setting fire to the Reichstag. From Paris, the TASS agency wired that the former president of the Chamber of Deputies, Édouard Herriot, was on a lecture tour of the South of France to extol the achievements of Soviet industry and agriculture. (Herriot had been shown all over the devastated Ukraine in 1933, but of course he had only seen happy kolkhoz workers feasting beneath portraits of Stalin, which permitted him to “shrug” when anyone spoke to him of famine. Grossman alludes to Herriot’s visit in Everything Flows: in the heart of the Dnipropetrovsk region, where cannibalism was rife, he was taken to a kolkhoz crèche, and he asked the children what they’d had for lunch that day. “Chicken soup, pirozhki, and rice croquettes,” came the answer. Herriot was less perceptive than André Gide—sometimes writers are better judges of world affairs than politicians.) There was also the scandal still referred to as “the Crédit municipal de Bayonne affair,” an ingenious swindle carried out by an embezzler called Alexandre Stavisky. Correspondence dated January 7 mentioned his countless relations among the French ruling class. As Alexey Feodosievich was perhaps skimming this article, “the handsome Sasha” was found dying in a chalet in Chamonix, having committed “suicide with a bullet from a revolver fired point blank”—but the readers of Pravda would only learn of this the following day. The article of January 8 was the first of a serial, the rest of which the meteorologist would never know, although it probably did not interest him greatly. Perhaps he might infer a few vague considerations from it (or rather confirmations of his beliefs) about the corruption of the capitalist world and the inevitable victory of socialism (etc.).

      In the Far East, Japan was tightening its grip on North China, and was preparing to make the weak Puyi “the last emperor.” Imprisoned in Shanghai, the Comintern agents Paul Ruegg and Gertrude Noulens, real names Yakov Rudnik and Tatyana Moiseenko and not at all Swiss as shown on their passports, were on their nineteenth day of hunger strike, and their lives were in danger. Telegrams of protest poured in from around the world, and especially Paris, to the Chinese embassies or of what remained of China (this was straight out of The Human Condition, André Malraux’s novel that had just won the Prix Goncourt). In Harbin, in the north of Manchuria under Japanese occupation, the tortured body of a young French pianist had been discovered. The unfortunate Simon Kaspé, son of a wealthy Jewish businessman in the city, had been kidnapped three months earlier, when he had come to visit his family, by a gang of henchmen of a Russian far-right group who demanded a ransom of 100,000 dollars. They had cut off his ears, among other acts of torture. The Japanese police had made no effort to track them down (and when they were arrested, they were pardoned by the emperor).

      In those days, there was no weather forecast in Pravda. Was that because it wasn’t considered useful? Had Alexey Feodosievich asked in vain to be given a regular column in the organ of the Central Committee? I don’t know. It was an austere paper, as one would expect, with a single photo illustrating the manufacture of sewing machine needles, which was not a very photogenic subject. If there had been a weather bulletin, it would have said something like a vast anticyclone with central pressure of 1,045 millibars, directly over the Urals, will result in the arrival of very warm air over the west of the country and cause heavy snowfall from Karelia in the north to Mordovia in the south. Conversely it would bring very cold temperatures with a clear sky over the far east, from the West Siberian krai (region) to the Pacific coast. The next day, little change: heavy snowfall expected over the Moscow region and the Volga, while the entire east would continue to have dry weather with temperatures of −20 to −30 degrees. But the next day . . . Two further articles must certainly have caught Alexey Feodosievich’s eye for a moment, if he had time that day to read Pravda: Ilya Selvinsky, the Futurist poet, had sent news over the wireless that the Chelyuskin had begun drifting again on the Arctic Ocean heading in a southeasterly direction, whereas during December it had been moving northwards. A violent northeasterly wind had broken up the ice field, piling up blocks several meters high. The ice was compressing the ship’s hull, which for the moment was holding out. All the same, measures had been taken in readiness for an evacuation, with provisions and tents stored on the deck. Schmidt thought of everything. The scientific research went on. And then, a second little article: Kliment Voroshilov had informed Stalin that the preparations had begun for the flight of the high-altitude balloon Osoaviakhim-1 at the Kuntsevo airfield. The crew of three, Pavel Fedoseenko, Andrey Vasenko, and Ilya Usyskin, were ready. Their goal was to set a new world record to mark the Seventeenth Party Congress, which would open in Moscow on January 26. But Alexey Feodosievich already knew all that.