Читать книгу Stalin's Meteorologist - Olivier Rolin - Страница 12

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ten years passed, and now we are at the beginning of the 1930s. He has divorced his first wife and married Varvara Kurguzova, whom he met in Dmitriev where she was director of School Number 40. He was living in Petrograd, where he was in charge of long-range weather forecasting for the main Geophysical Observatory, but now he lives in Moscow, where he has just been appointed head of the USSR’s newly established unified Hydrometeorological Service. He is a Party member. A bourgeois Communist, he sits on countless committees and subcommittees, presidiums, and scientific advisory boards. He knows Maxim Gorky and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow; Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar of Education; and the great scientist and Arctic explorer Otto Yulyevich Schmidt, who is only at the start of his illustrious career. In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Wangenheim is listed alongside Van Gogh. It looks as if he is well on the way to becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences and being decorated with the Order of Lenin, etc. In a contemporary photo, his face looks much fuller than in his Dmitriev days. He has shaved off his goatee, keeping only a pencil moustache, and he has his father’s wavy hair. He is wearing a white shirt beneath a dark jacket, and a knitted tie with a tie pin. He really looks like a big shot, but did Lenin himself ever look unkempt? With Vladimir Ilyich too, it was always tie and pin, waistcoat and watch chain. In this garb, in a three-piece suit of bronze or stone, Lenin has continued to rouse phantom crowds in every square in Russia, into the present day.

Establishing a unified hydrology and meteorology service over the entire territory of the USSR is no small matter; that territory, as was trumpeted in Soviet propaganda—and for once it was true—covering “a sixth of the Earth’s land surface.” A vast continent—wild, semidesert, almost without roads, bounded in the north by the Arctic Ocean, running from Poland to Alaska, and bordering Japan, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, furrowed by the Pamir, Altai, and Caucasus mountains, scorching hot in the steppes of central Asia, covered in snow and ice for a good part of the year, striated with great rivers, from the Volga to the Amur . . . Twenty-two and a half million square kilometers . . . Eleven time zones in those days (now there are only nine). Russia is “that land that does not care to do things by halves, but has spread a vast plain over half the world,” wrote Nikolai Gogol (exaggerating somewhat) of Wangenheim’s country. This is a different scale altogether, compared with Uyutnoye or even the Dmitriev region . . . Today, as I write, it is −39 degrees centigrade in Yakutsk, +17 degrees centigrade in Sochi, while a deep depression of 968 millibars is approaching the Kamchatka Peninsula. Thousands of kilometers from there another is developing in the Barents Sea to the west of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, whereas there is high pressure of 1034 millibars over the center of Siberia. Building a system capable of taking the temperature of this colossus each day and producing forecasts is a crushing task, especially since it involves overcoming the resistance of tangled bureaucracies each jealous of its territory, and we know that administrative inertia is one of the legacies from the Tsarist era that the Soviet regime managed splendidly to turn to advantage.

Alexey Feodosievich sets to work with energy, and even passion. Curiously, later, in his letters, he often refers to the unified Hydrometeorological Service as “my dear/beloved Soviet child.” He battles officialdom, forces the hand of the republics and shakes up the narkoms—the various People’s Commissars—making them all delegate the sections of sky and water that they believe belong to them. He extends his network of forecasting stations, he receives news of the winds in Sakhalin, the thousands of cubic meters of water per second flowing down the Yenisey River, the ice blocking the Northern Sea Route—which we in western Europe call the Northeast Passage, and the millimeters of rain that have or have not fallen on the Ukraine plains. Just as Genrikh Yagoda, head of the GPU, is supposed to know everything about Soviet citizens’ declared opinions and even more their secret thoughts, so he, Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, is the spymaster who probes, collects, and records the continent’s moods. Aircraft need his intelligence to land, ships to navigate a passage across the Kara Sea, tractors to plough their furrows in the chernozem (black earth). On January 1, 1930, the first weather forecast is broadcast on the radio, on a 3350-meter-long wave. Naturally these forecasts aren’t for the benefit of holidaymakers or weekenders, who are few at the time in the land of the international proletariat, but for the construction of socialism, and more specifically of socialist agriculture.

And, God knows, socialist agriculture needs help. Stalin’s insane policy combining the elimination of rich or supposedly affluent peasant farmers (sometimes owning one cow was enough to be decreed a kulak and to be deported or shot), with forced collectivization and the requisitioning of grain, results in a terrible famine in Ukraine. Some three million people will die between 1932 and 1933 in the region where Alexey Feodosievich spent his childhood and youth. When people have eaten all the cats, dogs, and insects, gnawed the bones of dead animals, chewed grasses, roots, and leather, they sometimes eat the dead, and on occasion even help them to die. In Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman describes these terrible times when entire villages, silent and pestilential, house nothing but dead bodies, where, every morning, carts collect the corpses of children come to beg in the streets of Kiev. Then, of course, it is not weather forecasts that the rural areas need, but simply a little humanity. But does he know that? Does he know it more than the others, the millions of others who are unaware, or who choose to be unaware, that the famous “construction of socialism” leaves so much suffering in its wake, who continue to believe that in the Soviet Union a new humanity is being born, freed from its chains? Who ignore or accept the famine (believing it is the price to be paid, and after all the victims are backward, reactionary peasants), as they will ignore or accept the mass deportations and deaths in the Gulag? Stalin knows of course that the Ukraine countryside is dying, yet persists with his fatal policy because it cannot be said that he is wrong, and also to crush a peasantry he considers to be a class enemy; the high-ranking officials in the Kremlin know, the Kaganoviches, the Voroshilovs, the Molotovs, who are no more than senior lackeys, but even supposing they do not share Stalin’s views, they would never dare oppose him. But Alexey Feodosievich is not a high-ranking official. The hydrometeorological department isn’t the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, he probably doesn’t know that the cobs being harvested in the fields of his youth are human heads. He believes that the rumors he has heard—if he did hear any—the quickly hushed-up rumors, because people repeating them risk their lives, are slander cooked up by the inexhaustibly destructive imagination of the enemies of the Revolution. The formidable killing machine is also a machine for obliterating death, which makes it all the more formidable. He continues to perfect his network of weather stations, refine his forecasts, and broadcast his bulletins on long wave, quietly certain that he is helping with the construction of socialism and in particular improving the farming yield.

And he takes a broad and ambitious view. In his field, he is a visionary, or perhaps a utopian. Not 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 women in white spacesuits. At 8:40, the cables are released and this time the balloon rises. Fast, even: at 9:17, 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.