In Siberia (9 page)

Space, in the end, may be all you remember of Novosibirsk. It is Siberia's gift. The vacancy of the land seems to infiltrate every town, or license it to sprawl. The flat-blocks carry on for mile after monotonous mile. Railway stations, whose tracks and sidings multiply ten or fourteen abreast, lie far from their town centres. And the rivers wind in enigmatically from nowhere like sky-coloured lakes, and curl out again to nowhere. When you hunt for them on your map, you may find only blue threads, tributaries of a tributary to some distant giant. The eye is met by eternal sameness. It begins to glaze.

 

In the mid-1950s, when the Soviet Union reached middle age, the rise of Khrushchev resurrected the vision of a purpose-built city dedicated to science. This utopian artifice would solve the problems of pure knowledge; but it would also deploy its genius in the service of technology and economics, devoting itself in particular to the vast resources of Siberia, by which Russia would at last outstrip the West.

The embodiment of this awesome concept was planned twenty miles south of Novosibirsk in the Golden Valley by the Ob river. Building began in 1958, and within seven years 40,000 scientists, executives and their families had poured in to fifteen newly opened research academies. A garden city grew up in six micro-regions, with its own schools and supermarkets, an elite university, an artificial beach on the Ob reservoir, even ski-runs illuminated at night.

Here in the taiga, far from the watchful Party apparatus in Moscow, a brief, intoxicating freedom sprang up. Akademgorodok became the brain of Russia. It attracted a host of young, sometimes maverick, scientists, many from Siberia. It opened up fields of study previously forbidden. The Institutes of Nuclear Physics and Economics, of Hydrodynamics and Catalysis, shared the forest with academies devoted to geology, automation, thermophysics (for the tapping of volcanic energy beneath permafrost) and a Physiological Institute working on the adaptation of animals and plants to the Siberian climate. And at the centre of this cerebral spider's-web the Institute of Abstract Mathematics sat like a cool agony aunt, advising on the problems of all the rest. Informal communication between institutes was the touchstone of the place's founder, the mathematician Lavrentiev. There were breakthroughs in physics, biology and computer studies. For a few heady years it seemed as if the science-fiction city could fulfil its promise.

Then, with the fall of Khrushchev, ideological controls began to tighten. Science became yoked to industry and was commandeered to show direct economic returns. The heart went out of
things. But in a sense the clampdown came too late. There were people working in Akademgorodok–the economist Aganbegyan, the sociologist Zaslavskaya–whose thought became seminal to
perestroika
. Yet ironically it was the chaotic results of Gorbachev's revolution that laid waste the power-house whose institutes I tramped for two days.

They rose in mixed styles, prefabricated, sometimes handsome, recessed among their trees along irregular avenues. There were now twenty-three of them, but the only map I found catered for visitors shopping in the town's handful of emporia. I scanned it in bewilderment. In Soviet times, I knew, maps were often falsified or full of blanks. This one featured the smallest bakery and cafe. But the institutes had become nameless ghosts. Were they too important to divulge, I wondered, or were they just forgotten?

I wandered them in ignorance, staring at their nameboards. ‘Institute of Solid-state Chemistry…Cytology and Genetics…Institute of Chemical Kinetics…' We barely shared a language. In between, woodland paths wended among silver birch and pine trees, their trunks intermingled like confused regiments. The earth sent up a damp fragrance. It was obscurely comforting. A few professors strolled between institutes, carrying shapeless bags and satchels, and fell pleasantly into conversation.

One of these chance meetings landed me unprepared in the Akademgorodok Praesidium. The professor who introduced me soon disappeared, and I was left in a passage outside the General Secretary's office, like a schoolboy waiting to be beaten. I thought I knew these interviews. From the far side of his desk a sterile apparatchik would tell me that all was well. The only signs of truth would be chance ones: damp wallpaper or indiscreet secretaries or the way the man's hands wrenched together. But I waited with suppressed hope. I wanted to know the outcome of several key Siberian projects, and sieved my brain for the Russian equivalent of ‘nuclear reaction' or ‘electric light stimulant', then gave up in despondency. I wasn't even dressed right. I was still wearing my Orthodox prayer-belt, and one of my climbing boots had developed a foolish squeak.

When the General Secretary's door opened, my heart sank. He
loomed big and surly behind his desk, in shirtsleeves. His features were obscure oases in the blank of his face: pin-prick eyes, a tiny, pouting mouth. I squeaked across the room to shake his hand. It was soft and wary. It motioned me to sit down.

Where could I tactfully begin? He wasn't going to help. He was gazing at me in passive suspicion. So I asked after the institute's recent successes.

He went on staring. All his answers came slowly, pronounced in the gravelly bass of authority. Progress had been made in the climatic adaptation of livestock, especially sheep, he said, and in a biochemical substance to stimulate the growth of wheat and rice…. But he did not enlarge on this. I thought he looked faintly angry.

Then I hunted for projects safely past, and alighted on the perilous Soviet scheme for steering Siberian rivers away from the Arctic to irrigate Central Asia and replenish the Aral Sea. He said: ‘It was a useless scheme, horrible. It would have been an ecological disaster for both Siberia and Kazakhstan. Our scientists here were categorically against it, and the project was scrapped.'

I shifted nervously in the face of his morose stillness. There had been a project, I continued, in which artificial daylight was used to increase fertility in mink, fox, pigs…. It had something to do with the effect of the retina on the pituitary gland, I remembered, and sounded faintly repellent; but the General Secretary might approve.

He said: ‘I only know they breed different coloured Arctic fox-furs now.' He tossed a batch of imagined stoles dismissively over his shoulder. ‘Blue, navy blue, green. Any colour.'

But the remembered words of Soviet apologists, of Lavrentiev himself, were crowding back into my head. Some thirty years ago they promised that nuclear power would by now be centrally heating enormous tracts of Siberia and flooding Arctic towns with artificial sunlight. ‘
Dramatic changes in Siberia will astound the world, changes that will make Siberia ideally suitable for human habitation.
'

I said: ‘There was an idea for melting permafrost by controlled nuclear power….'

The Secretary was unmoved. ‘That was just an idea,' he said.

I felt grateful for this honesty. But the voices of the old enthusiasts went on clamouring in me. ‘It was proposed to fire coal underground,' I continued, ‘to feed hydro-electric stations from underground funnels.'

A cigarette waggled unlit between the Secretary's fingers. ‘It didn't work. It was impossible.'

‘Then what about the scheme for fuelling power-stations with steam, using the Kamchatka volcanoes?'

He shrugged. ‘I haven't even heard of it. And it doesn't fall within the province of this institution….' He was slumped deeper behind his desk, huge in the slope of his beer-gut. His eyes were ice-pale. I imagined they had no pupils. I felt at sea. My jacket had fallen open on my prayer-belt, which guaranteed me immunity from pestilence and the cockatrice's den. I hid it with my arm. I was unsure what a cockatrice was, but the General Secretary might know.

By now my questions, his answers, and the voices from the still-recent past seemed to be interlocked in a formal dance. I lit despairingly on an old success story. ‘The hydrodynamic cannon…'

‘
It slices off whole layers of hard earth
,' Lavrentiev had said, ‘
and opens coal deposits in a matter of hours
.'

‘They were discontinued years ago,' answered the General Secretary. ‘They couldn't really do the job. The principle is now used only to press matter, not cut it open. The cannon could only drill a small hole….'

We had reached a strange impasse. It was I who was believing in a future, it seemed, and he who was denying it. But I floated out a last fantasy, something I had childishly hoped to see. Twenty years ago plans were afoot for a whole Arctic town enjoying its own micro-climate. Named Udachny, ‘Fortunate', it would either rise in a transparent pyramid or shelter beneath a glass dome or spread along a sealed web of avenues and gardens. It had been promised within ten years. (Lavrentiev: ‘
Siberia will become the science centre not only of the Soviet Union, but of the world
.')

I asked: ‘Where is this town? Wasn't there a scheme?'

‘There was a scheme,' said the General Secretary remorselessly. ‘But there is no town.'

I went quiet, foolishly dispirited. The voices of the failed future mewed faintly, faded away. Suddenly the Secretary leant forward. ‘Look,' he growled. ‘Look….' I had no idea what to expect. His face was heavy with anger. ‘We have one overriding problem here.
Money
. We receive no money for new equipment, hardly enough for our salaries. There are people who haven't been paid for six months.' Then his anger overflowed. He was barking like a drill-sergeant. ‘This year we requested funds for six or seven different programmes! And not one has been accepted by the government! Not one!'

I stared at him, astonished. I realised that all this time his bitterness had been directed not at me, but at Moscow. Far from being a passive mouthpiece, he was furious with his masters. ‘I don't know what policy drives our government, or even if it has one! Science is now as cut off from the State as the Church used to be. As far as I can see everything's run by mafia!'

He delved into a box and found me a book about the past achievements of Akademgorodok. It was illustrated with bursting corn-heads and fattened sheep. ‘We used to accomplish things,' he said, as I got up to go. Then, as if a boil had been lanced, his anger evaporated. All his face's features, which had seemed numb or absent before, creased and wrinkled into sad life. How curious, I thought, bewildered. He was almost charming.

‘The future?' he said. ‘When we have a government that realises no country can do without science, Akademgorodok will flourish again.'

He accompanied me to the Praesidium steps, perhaps reluctant to stay in his gaunt office. I started, too late, to like him. As I shook his hand I could no longer sense the brooding menace of the apparatchik; in its place was an ageing caretaker, dreaming of other times.

 

I walk along the Ob Sea with a young scientist from the Institute of Physics. This is not truly a sea but a giant reservoir, which sparkles tidelessly. And he is not quite a scientist (although he
calls himself one) but a research student from the once-prestigious university. He is wondering what to do with his life. The sand under our feet is not naturally there either, but was imported–two and a half million cubic yards of it–to complete the town's amenities.

And now everything is in ruins, he says. ‘The younger scientists are leaving in droves, mostly for business. In business you can earn five times the salary you're offered here. Others have emigrated to the States and Germany. All the bright ones have gone.'

Gone to the countries their parents feared, I thought. ‘And you?'

A stammer surfaces in his speech, like some distress-signal. ‘I'll go too.'

‘To work in science?'

‘No. Most of us can't use our scientific expertise. We just want a decently paid job, and a future.'

Our feet drag in the sand. The enormous beach is dotted with sunbathers, and some women are walking their dogs along the shallows. He says: ‘A few years ago, you know, when people left university, there was terrible competition to get into the institutes. But now they'll take anyone. They'll give you a flat, of course, but what's the point of that if you can hardly afford to eat?' The question is not quite rhetorical. He wants to be a scientist still. But he doesn't see how. ‘Only the dim ones stay. They do laboratory work for a pittance. The equipment's getting old. And nobody's working properly.'

We stop by the water's edge. For miles it is fringed by a flotsam of logs, broken loose from their booms somewhere upriver. For a heady moment their resinous smell returns me to my childhood by a Canadian river, where the stray logs became the playthings of a small, naked boy, years before Akademgorodok was even conceived.

The tree-trunks lie beached at our feet, polished by the water. The student is saying without conviction, without love: ‘I'll go into business.'

 

He was an only child. Reclusive, almost biblically innocent.
During the war his mother had escaped with him from the siege of Leningrad; his father had been killed. I had been given his telephone number by chance, and when he clattered up in his institute's car–a professional perk–I had no idea what to expect.

Where did Sasha belong? Not with Russia's troubled present, I think, but with the dreamers who scatter its nineteenth-century novels. His work consumed him. Many evenings he toiled through the night in a big, bleak building called the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine. Even now, during the August break, the receptionist acknowledged him with pert familiarity. He studied in the basement, in a chain of dim grottoes–their electricity had failed–poring over data on magnetic fields. Beside his desk stood a rusty stove and an exercise bike, and two or three enigmatic machines loomed against the walls in a fretwork of tubes and wires. But there must have been electricity somewhere because a fridge wheezed in one corner, and after a while Sasha disappeared to make tea. I waited, as in the den of some harmless wizard. The walls were hung with prints by the mystic painter Nikolai Roerich–grainy mountains inhabited by hermits or traversed by pilgrims.