Russian Spring (49 page)

The Soviet Union now had six Cosmograds in orbit and two more under construction. There was a permanent lunar base, and talk of establishing one on Mars. There were three launch facilities for heavy freight boosters, factories all over the Soviet Union building the hardware, satellite ground stations, data-processing facilities, development labs, and design centers.

The number of actual cosmonauts needed for this effort—Cosmonaut Pilots, Cosmonaut Flight Engineers, Cosmonaut Explorers—was only a few hundred. But the number of engineers, technicians, skilled workers, and assorted support personnel required to do the scut work was up there in the tens of thousands, and Gagarin University’s task was to turn them out on a production-line basis.

For the first two years, everyone took the same basic courses, after which the top 5 percent, as determined by secret equation factoring in academic standing, physical condition, kharakteristika, and, of course, connections, was admitted into the Cosmonaut school.

Everyone else received a final year’s training in some less exalted specialty—equipment maintenance, manufacturing, communications, ground control, computer programming, construction, data analysis
and processing. After graduation, about 10 percent of the student body went on to graduate-level scientific studies, and the rest became the working class of the Soviet space program.

As a result, the competition was utterly ruthless. Classes ran six hours a day five days a week, and while the homework load was officially set at three hours a day, anyone who didn’t put in at least four or five hours after class was not going to make it. Saturdays and Sundays were officially free time, but anyone who didn’t volunteer his time for Komsomol activities was not considered motivated.

Students were required to live in the dorms, big ugly concrete housing blocks set up to “psychologically prepare students for Cosmograd life.” Each student had a bed, a locker, a table, a chair, and a computer console in a large communal room divided by thin cardboard partitions. Bathrooms were communal and spartan. There were communal kitchens and commissaries, and students were required to do kitchen duty as well as keep the building shipshape. The dorms were co-ed, but what love-making took place had to be conducted quietly so as not to disturb the studies of the more diligent—apparently more “psychological training” in Cosmograd etiquette.

The work was the most intellectually demanding Franja had ever experienced, the hours seemed endless, but she had never been one to be afraid of hard work. Her fellow students might be dour obsessive grinds for the most part, but then so was she. What little dating she found time and inclination for consisted mostly of tours of the facilities, museums, and displays of Star City, a whole little metropolis given over almost entirely to the Soviet space program. What sex she indulged in was mostly quick, functional, and, of course, quiet, a matter of obtaining sufficient erotic exercise to keep one’s mind clear for one’s studies, a common attitude at Gagarin, where one’s lover was also one’s competitor.

All in all, she probably would have been happy at Gagarin, or at least too preoccupied to have any time to feel unhappy, were it not for the politics.

The President of the Soviet Union, as well as the Presidents of the constituent republics, were chosen by universal suffrage in multicandidate elections, as were the Delegates to the Supreme Soviet. But the politics of the Russian Spring had turned the Supreme Soviet into an unseemly bear pit of savage factional controversy.

“
The
Communist Party” did not exactly exist anymore. It had devolved into an uneasy confederation of factions and national communist parties, each one competing for votes on a local level with at least one overtly nationalist party, and each one, therefore, representing the chauvinistic interests of its constituency far more avidly than any central ideology.

The Russians themselves had become just another national minority, though still the largest by far and still in control of the central government, the central Party machinery, the economic apparatus, and the Red Army, to the point where the distinction between “Soviet Federalism” and “Great Russian Nationalism” was entirely lost on the Confederalists, aka the “Ethnic Nationalists.”

The Ethnic Nationalists were a loose alliance of convenience of every national grouping with its own republic or even autonomous region. Nothing seemed to appease their appetite for independence—not popular election of their own national Presidents and Parliaments, not control of local taxes and national budgets, not even the formation of their own independent internal security forces, the so-called national militias.

The more they got, the more they wanted. Every concession, every step away from “Federalism” and toward “Confederation” was taken as a victory over “chauvinistic Russian hegemony.” Ethnic Nationalist candidates won elections by outdoing each other in demanding greater and greater autonomy and lately even direct membership in Common Europe as sovereign national states.

Nor were the Russians themselves united. The so-called Eurorussians still dominated the Russian delegation in the Supreme Soviet, but in the Russian Republic, and even more so among Russian minorities in the other republics, an ominous sense of Russian nationalism had surfaced from the lower depths of society into the higher circles.

It could be as seemingly benign as the craze for neo-Czarist nostalgia or all the Russian Orthodox TV extravaganzas, as troubling as the profusion of mystics and faith healers in peasant blouses or the filth churned out by the Pamyat hard core, or as silly as the attempt to purge Western chord progressions from Russian rock ’n’ roll, or as terrifying as the rhetoric of demagogues who proclaimed that the Soviet Union needed the strong hand of the Slavic master race in firm control of the “Asiatics.”

Crude or subtle, it was all part of a Russian chauvinism that associated the threatened loss of Russian hegemony within the USSR with the entry of the Soviet Union into “degenerate bourgeois Common Europe.”

These so-called Mother Russians might be a minority movement, but they were very much in evidence. On the streets of Moscow, this meant Uncle Joes—Pamyat street hooligans in Stalin T-shirts with mustaches to match—smashing the windows of foreign shops and fast-food stands, terrorizing crowds outside theaters and movie houses showing films and plays from the West, gang-raping “Westernized” girls, and roughing up people whose “Russian purity” they called into
question. In the media, it meant things like an endless TV series idolizing Peter the Great, max-metal renditions of traditional Russian folk music, and gory comic books obsessed with the Great Patriotic War. In the Supreme Soviet, it meant Delegates in peasant blouses, cossack pants, and jackboots, foaming at the mouth for the benefit of the TV cameras and mercilessly heckling non-Russian speakers.

And in Gagarin University, it meant that someone like Franja Yurievna Gagarin
Reed
was constantly required to prove her Russian-ness.

Her light French accent might be considered chic among most of her fellow students, who fancied themselves modern Eurorussians and contemptuously referred to the Mother Russians as muzhiks, Bears, or worse, but there was a scattering of such unenlightened creatures on the faculty who tormented her for it.

“In
Russian
, please, Franja Yurievna,” they would tell her, pretending they didn’t understand her correct answers to their questions.

Being a Eurorussian repatriate with an effete French accent was bad enough, but when they found out that her father was an
American
, their attitude degenerated to a naked hostility that all too many of her classmates came to share.

And since marks were determined by a combination of grades and subjective evaluation of classroom performance, the disfavor of these miserable nikulturni reactionary Bears was enough to pull her overall average down to only a few points above the mean.

Worse still, she knew all too well that her kharakteristika, upon which her Parisian upbringing and her father’s nationality were black marks enough already, and upon which any hope of getting into the Cosmonaut school also depended, was
also
being unjustly blackened by the Mother Russians among her teachers.

It was the bitterest of ironies. Franja was being discriminated against as an
American!

Mother too, to judge from her letters, was suffering unjustly for the misdeeds of the American imperialists, not to mention Bobby’s selfish insistence on attending college in the United States.

After the Great Stock Market Coup it had seemed that Mother must surely be due for a promotion to department head of something. Instead, after Bobby had entered the University of California at the same time that the Americans were invading Mexico, the Party had called her on the carpet for a political review, and only the intercession of her good friend Ilya Pashikov had saved her Party card and with it her lowly position as his assistant.

Yet Franja also found herself empathizing with her American father, even though it was he who was the unwitting source of her torment. Just as he had turned his back on America in the pursuit of
his dreams of space only to find himself unjustly shunted off into a dead-end job anyway because of his American birth, so was
she
being unfairly robbed of her chance to go to Cosmonaut school by an American birthright she had never wanted any part of.

By the time the results were in on her first year at Gagarin University, it was all too apparent that she had no chance of getting into the Cosmonaut school no matter what she did in the second year, and by the time she went home to Paris for the summer recess, she was seriously thinking of giving up and quitting.

Matters at home were not exactly conducive to lightening her despairing mood.

Father had grown quite bitter with the way things were going with his career at
ESA
. And it was all too painfully clear that Mother and Father were not getting along at all.

They still slept in the same bed, but what went on behind the bedroom door was something that Franja did her best not to imagine. They fought often in front of her, and frequently over the most stupid and trivial things, and when they weren’t fighting, they seemed distantly polite but cold to each other, manifestly attempting to put on a good face for her benefit, which only made things worse.

The only bright spot was that the Americans had imposed extremely restrictive entrance visas as part of yet another tightening of their loathsome National Security Act, meaning that if Bobby wanted to come to Paris for the summer as planned, the chances were excellent that he would not get back in, something she was certain he would not risk, meaning that Franja was at least spared
his
presence at this tense and depressing family reunion.

But that was hardly enough. She spent two weeks moping fecklessly about the city, pondering her own problems without really being able to discuss them fully, without it degenerating into another of Father’s anti-Russian tirades, and bearing horrified and helpless witness to the degeneration of her parents’ marriage.

She found herself longing for the spartan dorms of Gagarin University, where she at least had more than enough hard work to keep her distracted, and once she found herself waxing nostalgic for
that
venue of torment, she knew she had to leave. Where she would go was something else again, but she had to get out. The Midi, maybe, or the Black Sea, anywhere where she could lie on a beach during the day, engage in meaningless sex at night, and try to sort out what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

It took her several days to get up the courage to tell her parents, but finally one night at dinner, when the entrecôte béarnaise had come out right, and the Bordeaux had been excellent, and they all had managed to get through the salad course and into a good chocolate
gâteau and perfect coffee without any untoward event, she managed to ease into it.

“I think it would be a good idea for me to get away by myself for a while and find someplace quiet and sunny to think,” she said. “I’ll come back through Paris to see you for a week or so before I go back to Gagarin . . . if I go back. . . .”

“
If
you go back?” Mother said. “All this talking about quitting isn’t really
serious?
So you haven’t had such a good year academically, it’s just a matter of getting down to work and trying harder.”

“I
told
you a thousand times, Mother, I’ve been working as hard as I can, but I just can’t fight the politics.”

“You’re
sure
you’re not just using that as an excuse?”

“You know me well enough,” Franja shot back in exasperation. “Am I a shirker? Have I ever been afraid of hard work?”

“No, but—”

“I’ve been right all along, Sonya,” Father said bitterly. “First they do it to me, and now they—”

“Enough, Jerry! The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“What
can
we do about it?”

“I can talk to Ilya—”

“The Golden Boy!”

“Ilya’s well connected, he’s certainly proven—”

“Far be it from me to deny that your
colleague
Pashikov is well connected with the shits in Moscow,” Father shot back contemptuously. “But might I point out that a good word from
Ilya
would be the last thing in the world to improve Franja’s situation?”

“Oh really?”

“Imagine how kindly these Bears or Mother Russia Fuckers or whatever they call themselves would feel toward our daughter if they get dragged onto the carpet on the word of some Westernized degenerate in an Yves Saint-Laurent suit like
Ilya Pashikov!
” Father exclaimed. “It’d be almost as useful as a personal letter of recommendation from the President of the United States!”

Mother glared at him silently. Franja wished she were somewhere on the Black Sea already.

“So what do
you
suggest, Jerry?” Sonya finally said.

“I could talk to Emile Lourade—”

“You can’t even get him on the phone!”