In 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, the Soviets present themselves as masters of hydraulic engineering. The fair’s theme – ‘The World of Tomorrow’ – suits them to a tee: during two successive Five-Year Plans, from 1928 to 1937, they have concerned themselves with little else. At the Flushing Meadows fairgrounds, therefore, the Bolsheviks willingly take on all comers. Facing the Americans’ triangular obelisk, the ‘Trylon’, and its ironwork cocoon containing the model metropolis of ‘Democra-city’, they erect a gigantic worker, a sturdy-necked, burly-armed proletarian raising a red star like an athlete holding aloft the Olympic flame.
Visitors to the Soviet pavilion descend into the catacombs of the Moscow metropolitan railway system. A full-scale replica of a section of a metro station has been constructed, complete with candelabras, marble pillars and tile mosaics. Along the platform Russian dancers perform their repertoire, while the brightly lit niches serve as display cases for a utopia still under construction. One contains a model of the impressive arch dam on the Dnieper, admittedly not as high as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado, but definitely broader and more ingenious in its construction.
‘The Dnieper hydroelectric power station,’ the prospectus says, ‘with its 558,000-kilowatt capacity, produces more power than all the sources of electricity in tsarist Russia put together.’
Ever mindful of the holy trinity of ‘navigation – electrification – irrigation’, Soviet scientists have set about manipulating increasingly large bodies of water. Stalin plans to turn Moscow into a seaport: a blue-veined heart linked directly to the oceans of the world. Moscow’s merchant fleet, he has decreed, must be able to set sail in all directions: to the Baltic, the White Sea, the Black Sea and the Caspian. On a panel captioned ‘Waterways of the USSR’, visitors to the fair are treated to a bird’s-eye view of the hand-dug shipping network. By 1939, both the Belomor and Moscow-Volga canals are already operational; the missing link is the waterway between the Volga and the Don, a channel 101 kilometres long, the course of which has already been staked out. One day soon, the Soviet brochure predicts, the hammer and sickle will fly ‘over all the oceans and in every harbour of the world’.
But if one believed that the Soviet hydrographers are laying all their cards on the table, one would be sorely mistaken. What the presentation does not include is the hydraulic master plan of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, a mathematician and physicist with a passion for hydrodynamics who would become widely known as the ‘electrifier’ of the workers’ paradise.
It was Lenin himself in 1921 who launched this ‘campaign of light’ with a mathematical equation: Communism = Soviet power + Nationwide Electrification. On posters and murals of workers stringing power lines from pole to pole this algebraic formula was repeated everywhere ad infinitum – even though its exact meaning remained as mysterious as the workings of the incandescent lamp itself.
Within the space of a few years as head of the state energy company GOELRO, Comrade Krzhizhanovsky had electrified the largest country on earth. But that was not enough for him: from the late 1920s, he had been mulling over an even more audacious plan. Northern Russia was wet and fertile, Krzhizhanovsky reasoned, while the south was dry and warm. Bolshevik science, however, should be up to the task of correcting this ‘flaw of nature’. But how? His answer was simple: by reversing the course of the rivers in Arctic Russia. His plan was called perebroska, which literally means ‘lifting up and hurling down’ (in this case, of bodies of water). In concrete terms it meant that, in the future, water which flowed through the Belomor, by way of the Neva and into the Gulf of Finland, would be pumped into the Volga by means of a ‘hydraulic elevator’. From that moment on, H2O molecules from the Belomor Canal would end up in the Caspian Sea and finally evaporate in the bay at Kara Bogaz. Once siphoned into the Volga basin, the ‘northern waters’ would turn the turbines of some eight projected hydroelectric plants and irrigate three million hectares of steppe along both sides of the Volga delta.
Stalin gave Krzhizhanovsky the mandate to reverse the course of three rivers, thereby giving rise to a line of popular verse: ‘Soviet rivers they do flow/Wherever the Bolsheviks want them to go.’
Wageningen University, September 1984. In my second year as a student of Tropical Agricultural Science, I chose ‘hydraulic engineering for irrigation systems’ as the subject of my undergraduate thesis. In the mist which cloaked the Rhine, my fellow students and I took saturation profiles of artificial ‘desert soils’ which had been protected from the wet Dutch climate by a canopy of arched plastic. When we weren’t doing that, we were measuring the drainage capacity of concrete and earthen conduits that ran from no place to nowhere. Within five years, the understanding was, we would swarm out across the continents as engineers.
When it came to the causes of poverty in the former colonies, most of us entertained neo-Marxist ideas, further encouraged by our contacts with left-wing lecturers at the nearby Leeuwenborch Faculty of Life and Social Sciences. As technically competent engineers-to-be, we prided ourselves on the thought that we could at least do something. We mingled with non-Western sociologists and anthropologists, and attended courses on public information, women’s studies, village analysis and the philosophy of science. Yet none of these classes could hold a candle to the anthropology lectures by Dr Den Ouden, a Leeuwenborch lecturer who, flying in the face of tradition, wore a suit and tie and proclaimed himself a right-wing European liberal.
Dr Den Ouden had no first name, only initials (J.H.B.). He enjoyed polemics and provocation, and invariably one of us would rise to the bait, however timidly.
One day, during a two-hour lecture, Den Ouden sketched for us the developmental stages of human society. Scratching his outline on the board in the form of overlapping circles, he then drew a line beneath that ran from ‘primitive’ to ‘complex’. At the designation ‘primitive’, squeals of protest arose from the auditorium. ‘Don’t you feel it’s arrogant to speak of other peoples as “primitive”?’
Patting clouds of chalk dust from his hands, he turned to the dictionary he had ready beside the lectern. ‘Primitive,’ he articulated loudly, ‘according to the lexicographers, means… “simple; belonging to the earliest stages in a development, particularly with regard to society”.’ The second meaning (‘defective; inadequate’) he left unmentioned, for reasons of rhetorical impact.
Unruffled, Den Ouden then replaced the circles on the board with the contours of Europe and the Middle East. Drawing on Spengler’s theory, he showed us how the vortex of civilisation had travelled across the globe like the eye of a slow-moving hurricane. Five or six thousand years ago, the earliest civilisations had taken root between the Tigris and the Euphrates. There, in paradisal Mesopotamia, arable farming with the aid of irrigation produced such copious harvests that a portion of the population, freed from the responsibilities of primary food production, were able to address themselves to administrative and ceremonial tasks. ‘This event marked the birth of the state,’ Den Ouden said. ‘Or, to be more precise: the strong state.’
Two millennia later, thanks to irrigated agriculture in the Nile valley, the Egyptian pharaohs could divert an even larger army of workers to built their sphinxes and pyramids. There followed a thick arrow to Alexandria, with its papyrus scrolls destroyed by fire, to Crete and from there to Athens and Rome; the vector along which the centre of civilisation had moved. From Rome it was only a small step to Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and London, where the colonial powers had hoarded the riches obtained from plantation farming. Industrial society arose only in the 19th century, whereupon technological developments followed at such breakneck speed that the most highly developed form of society had actually leapt the Atlantic and nestled in the United States.
‘But what about the Soviet Union?’ one of us had the temerity to ask. It was 1984, Orwell’s year, and the Cold War was still raging.
‘Ah yes, the Soviet Union.’ As though he had been waiting for this question, Den Ouden drew an eastbound branch line which strongly resembled a blind alley. He had no objections to characterising the USSR as ‘technologically highly developed’. ‘But,’ he hastened to add, ‘the structure of Soviet society has always remained underdeveloped.’
‘What do you mean, underdeveloped?’
‘In the Soviet Union there are only two classes,’ Den Ouden replied. ‘The rulers and the ruled.’
The auditorium broke into an uproar; there was whistling and hissing. Unmoved, our professor let the tumult roll over him. He turned to the board and began erasing Spengler’s arrows. Only when his audience had calmed did he turn around. ‘Are there any future irrigation engineers among you?’
I was the only one to raise a timorous hand, upon which Den Ouden advised the class, and me in particular, to read the writings of Karl Marx. ‘Look at what he has to say about Asiatic or Oriental forms of society,’ he urged, leaning forward like a preacher. I remember seeing his knuckles whiten as he grasped the lectern. ‘And if you then become interested, be sure to read Oriental Despotism by Karl Wittfogel.’
That study, our anthropology lecturer assured us, supported the claim that irrigation leads to tyranny. ‘That was one of Marx’s insights,’ Den Ouden said. ‘The more colossal the waterworks a state undertakes, the more despotic its rulers.’
It must have been around that time that I became acquainted with the stories of Andrey Platonov. It was not really a coincidence: Platonov, born in 1899 in a town on the Don, had once worked as an irrigation engineer. His professional experiences he had distilled in ‘The Epifan Locks’ and other stories, and so recognisably that we irrigation students gave each other collections of his short stories on our birthdays, with inscriptions like: ‘Here’s what’s in store for you. Read, tremble and enjoy.’
Awaiting us was a fate like that which befell the first-person narrator of ‘The Motherland of Electricity’. In that story, Platonov portrays himself as a ‘worker with practical experience’ who comes to the aid of a tiny village of twenty farmhouses during the punishingly hot summer of 1921. All that is left in the fields are a few measly stalks of millet; the vegetable greens are badly wilted. An Orthodox priest passes and waves his censer at the silent plants, followed by women in black who wail as they pray for rain. But the young irrigation engineer, only twenty-two at the time, finds in the village a dilapidated ‘two-stroke motorbike of the make Indian’ and a fully operational vodka still. Ignoring the villagers’ lamentations, he converts the motorbike into a halting, vodka-driven irrigation mill. Sputtering and roaring, the contraption drives a makeshift paddlewheel that causes water from the nearby brook to flow into the ‘the widows’ and Red Army field’: a ‘proletarian kitchen garden’ cultivated using community-owned horses.
Modest as this accomplishment was, Platonov states that it served to fulfil ‘one of his goals in life’ – precisely that for which our idealistic Dutch hearts were yearning. The final sentence read: ‘I walked alone across the darkened field – young, penniless and calm.’
Andrey Platonov, I learned from the translator’s epilogue, believed in reason and technology. He had been instilled with a love of machinery from an early age and at thirteen actually believed he had invented a perpetual-motion machine. His father was an engineer on a steam locomotive in Voronezh, a provincial town at the junction of three railway lines in central Russia. During the civil war young Andrey had served the nascent Soviet government as his father’s right-hand man, on an ironclad train used to keep the Red Army’s supply lines free of snow.
As soon as he had the chance, Andrey began attending classes in electrical engineering. Around then he also published his first essays – dealing with rational man’s power to tame nature by means of technological devices – in the local Voronezh newspaper. In the face of widespread hunger and scarcity, however, Platonov decided that his literary ambitions must wait. ‘Big words have no effect on the starving,’ he wrote in 1921, before heading off into the countryside to make himself useful as an expert on irrigation and soil improvement. The ultimate rationalist, he even advocated the subjugation of lusts and sexual desire – which, after all, amounted to nothing more than the useless expenditure of energy.
But only now, upon rereading Platonov’s work, do I taste its melancholy and bitterness as well. In my student days I had barely detected his sneers at Soviet officialdom. In ‘The City of Gradov’, for example, he gives us the bureaucrat Shmakov: the head of a subdirectorate of the Provincial Department of Ground Use who spends his evenings writing a philosophical treatise on the essence of bureaucracy. ‘Civil servants and other officials are the living sleepers beneath the rails leading to socialism,’ this philosopher notes. ‘Before my bleary mind’s eye I see looming up a society in which the people are so bound and constrained by official government directives that, although corrupt at heart, they become virtuous.’
Platonov directs his ridicule not only at others, but also at himself: in reality, he and Shmakov are colleagues. A report from the Provincial Department of Ground Use, issued in 1926, shows that Platonov’s section dug 331 wells, built 763 irrigation reservoirs and drained 970 hectares of swamp in the Don river basin alone. ‘I am capable of a great deal,’ he notes matter-of-factly. ‘But writing and thinking are things I do much more often and have done for a much longer time, and they are an essential part of me.’
As a writer-engineer (lyricist and physicist rolled into one), Platonov is tossed back and forth between the work of the mind and that of the hands. He looks on in dismay as the country’s skilled workers, who have the ability to create something, are supplanted by the Shmakovs of his day. Platonov’s own enthusiasm for rational improvement runs up against a brick wall of incomprehension and ignorance. Inflexible apparatchiks have effectively elbowed out the romantic idealists. ‘The proletariat has struggled, the officials have won the day. Do you catch my drift, comrades?’ he has his model bureaucrat Shmakov crow in triumph.
The dilemma of ‘thinking versus doing’ causes him migraines; he is unable to sleep at night. Sometimes life feels burdensome and senseless, and in the summer of 1926 he writes to his wife in Moscow about a fearsome vision: wide awake, lying on his bed, he saw himself sitting at the table. The second ‘I’ smiled weakly at him and went on in a flurry of writing. Platonov tried to shout out to his ‘writing I’, but his body refused. ‘This is more than mortal fear, Masha. A horrible premonition has hold of me and will not let me go.’
Later that year, acting on impulse, Platonov resigns his position. He plunges headlong into his writing, and his first collection of short stories, The Epifan Locks, is published by Young Guard in 1927. The book catches the eye of Maxim Gorky, no less, on his way back to Moscow from his Italian exile. Without hesitation, he welcomes ‘the promising talent of the new Soviet author Andrey Platonov’.
In 1984, while reading The Epifan Locks, something snapped inside me. It had to do with the book itself, but undoubtedly with the circumstances of reading as well: this was shortly after I had pored over Wittfogel’s Wasserbau thesis.
As a 20-year-old irrigation engineering student in search of a purpose in life, I had allowed Oriental Despotism to throw me for a loop. Before borrowing that hefty tome from the Leeuwenborch library I would never have believed that any harm could come from bringing water to dry areas. It was, after all, an objectively constructive activity to which only social scientists, if anyone, ever took exception. But in the course of those 556 pages, Wittfogel did his best to convince me that irrigation systems give rise to dictatorial regimes. What was I to think? I followed his line of thought with a mixture of repulsion and fascination.
In 1957, Karl August Wittfogel, a sinologist who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, published his magnum opus in New York as ‘a comparative study of totalitarian regimes’. He had borrowed the title Oriental Despotism from an article by Karl Marx which had appeared in the New York Tribune on 25 June 1853. In it, Marx had noted that tyrannical regimes tend to arise in areas where the climate and soil are conducive to monumental irrigation projects. ‘Artificial irrigation using canals and other waterworks is the very foundation of Oriental agriculture,’ Marx wrote. In his eyes, the mere maintenance of such systems required ‘the intervention of a centralised state’. Rulers of these ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ societies needed to be able to summon (forced) labour at the drop of a hat; that is why they behaved as despots. Marx had little more to say on the subject, but Wittfogel took up the idea and embroidered further.
As a student of irrigation, I revelled in his overview of hydraulic civilisations. I allowed myself to be carried along by Wittfogel’s claim that river water – because of its agility and manipulability – was essentially different from all other natural resources. To divert huge concentrations of water, an administrative apparatus was needed that could control armies of drones. His archetypal ‘hydraulic empire’ was characterised by a ponderous hierarchy with a population of slaves at its base and a potentate at its lonely summit. This pharaoh, or emperor, or sun god, surrounds himself with a terrified and sycophantic court (sometimes with a eunuch as his only confidant) and resides, for preference, in a Forbidden City. The ruler has at his disposal an army, an intelligence service and a Byzantine network of overseers and inspectors, guards and executioners, bailiffs and census-takers. In the final analysis, only ancient Mesopotamia and the Egypt of the pharaohs complied strictly with his stringent ‘hydraulic criteria’. But, Wittfogel claimed, that in no way undermined his theory; the majority of the world’s potentates had, after all, based their style of government rule on an imitation of these dictatorial model states. His comparative study demonstrated that they had simply copied the pharaonic pattern, albeit in more sophisticated or adapted forms.
Oriental Despotism was, at times, a grotesque work. Wherever tyrants appeared Wittfogel went in search of irrigation systems, and when there were none he nevertheless found a Chinese wall or a Mayan temple built by hordes of unfortunate slaves. Was it really true, I wondered, that irrigation canals or other major (water)works could be built by no other means than the knout or the cat-o’-nine-tails? What mechanism caused the irrigation of fields to automatically bring forth a totalitarian state? Wasn’t it in fact the other way around: didn’t authoritarian regimes bring forth colossal waterworks simply because they were the only ones capable of doing so?
Wittfogel skirted that question and spoke of ‘interaction’. He was interested only in empirical evidence: history simply demonstrated that irrigation provoked coercion and control. He took the communist, one-party systems as his example. The Russian people, he asserted, had missed a unique opportunity to ‘throw off the Asian yoke’. That opportunity had presented itself in 1917 with the fall of the tsar. But what had Lenin and his Bolsheviks done? They had begun to reconstruct the Asiatic social system, albeit in a new guise. Stalin had perfected the process by underlaying it with the classic foundation of waterworks, and the Soviet Union duly assumed the archetypal form of Oriental despotism.
In his epilogue, Wittfogel appears shocked by his own discovery: ‘Do my readers actually realise the responsibility this places on the shoulders of free men?’ It was a tendentious ending, and it annoyed me. Wittfogel was out to stir up public prejudices, I believed in 1984. This was Cold War rhetoric.
But then I read ‘The Epifan Locks’. The affinity with Wittfogel’s Wasserbau thesis struck me head-on. Platonov gave me that little extra shove that made me start doubting my chosen field of study. His story provided me with a literary parable for what, thirty years later, a German theoretician would express in a treatise of more than 500 pages.
‘The Epifan Locks’ deals with an insane hydraulic project which ultimately leads to a beheading at the Kremlin. The plan’s architect is Peter the Great, and the action begins ‘in the spring of 1709, when the ports were again free of ice’, as an engineer by the name of Bertrand Perry from Newcastle-on-Tyne reports to the Institute for Canals in St Petersburg. Tsar Peter hopes to allow the Volga and the Don ‘to communicate’ by means of a permanent shipping route: ‘It is Our intention to connect for all time the major rivers of Our empire in the form of one great waterway.’ The promise expressed is that the Age of Great Building has arrived at last. ‘Instead of the blood-smeared warrior and the fatigued explorer, the time had come for the intelligent engineer.’ For the purposes of this campaign of progress and civilisation (or, specifically, for the surveying and construction of this system of canals) ‘they had summoned Bertrand from Britannia’.
The British engineer is invested with all the powers of a general, including the authority to raise an army of labourers for the excavation work. In the Russian heartland, however, he is ‘dogged by disaster’. Bertrand’s most loyal deputies die of swamp fever. He is deserted by those he relies on most. The progress made during the first summer is washed away by the first rains of spring. And then, as soon as the meltwater has dispersed, the level of the Don decreases alarmingly. The spring turns out to be too dry, the river too low to fill the connecting canal. To add insult to injury, a letter then arrives for Bertrand from his sweetheart in Newcastle: she is pregnant, but he is not the father. In an attempt to shake off his melancholy he plunges headlong into his work. By dredging out a spring at the bottom of Lake Ivan he hopes to increase the flow of the Don; but while Bertrand’s men are drilling from a raft, this pocket of water suddenly sinks away into deeper, inaccessible layers of the earth.
When an inspector arrives to assess the commissioned waterworks, it turns out that not even a rowing boat can pass from the Don to the Volga. The British engineer is taken to Moscow in chains, where he hears the tsar’s verdict: death by beheading.
An officer of the court hands him over to ‘a scabby fellow of enormous girth’ in the Kremlin’s dungeon.
‘Where is your axe?’ Bertrand asks him.
‘My axe?’ says the executioner. ‘I don’t need an axe to deal with the likes of you!’
*
‘The Epifan Locks’, published in 1927, proved prophetic. And not only in a figurative sense: seven years after it appeared, the Kremlin once again began recruiting foreign engineers for the construction of a Volga-Don Canal.
Stalin set out to beat Peter the Great at his own game. The tsar who had given Russia its fleet could only dream of a connection between his new capital and the White Sea, but Stalin had built his Belomor Canal in twenty months. His newest project began at the village of Petrov Val, where Peter’s project had run aground in 1711, the historic failure on which Platonov based his story.
This time, in addition to England and the United States, recruitment took place in the Netherlands as well. On 12 January 1934 the Delft-based magazine The Engineer carried an advertisement: Hydraulic engineers wanted for Volga-Don canalisation in the USSR. ‘No one need be Bolshevised to apply,’ read the commentary given by the special Dutch trade envoy.
Fourteen candidates submitted an application; four were found suitable. But their deployment was postponed again and again until finally, with the onset of the Second World War, it was cancelled altogether.
Platonov’s decision to abandon fieldwork and devote himself to his art does not mean that his public-spiritedness has diminished. On the contrary: he rolls his ‘literary I’ into position in order to save socialism from defeat. In writing drenched in satire and coarse humour he pounds away at the advancing apparatchiks.
In 1928 he takes aim at the administrative redivision of his home town of Voronezh. According to a recent announcement, this minor city at the railways’ confluence was to become the administrative seat of a new ‘super-province’: the Central Black Earth economic region, abbreviated phonetically as ‘Tse-Che-O’.
Platonov, not long ago a Soviet official himself, goes to assess the situation in the company of his writer friend Boris Pilnyak. The son of a veterinarian, this Volga German (Pilnyak’s real surname was Vogau) is at least as familiar with pastoral Russia as Platonov. Back in 1920 Boris had established his literary reputation with an unorthodox novel about the Revolution (The Naked Year), in which he ascribed a cathartic influence to the violence applied by the Bolsheviks (‘tanned figures in tanned leather jackets’). Pilnyak saw that naked year as an orgiastic climax (the Revolution, he said, ‘smelled of genitals’) during which a spiritual, ‘Asiatic’ Russia shook off the morality foisted upon it by the West. Expanding upon Spengler’s theory of the onward-sweeping vortex of world civilisation, he predicted that human society would reach its pinnacle not in the United States, not even in Japan, but in Soviet Russia.
In terms of personality the two writers could not be more different: stocky Pilnyak is an outgoing celebrity who moves freely within the uppermost circles of Soviet power; Platonov – with his friendly, deep-set eyes – is modest to the point of incommunicativeness, a retiring thinker who avoids receptions and banquets. These outward and inner differences, though, do not keep the writers from deeply admiring each other’s work, or from sharing an equally ardent dislike of bureaucracy.
After returning from their dreary journey to Voronezh they collaborate on a pamphlet opposing the merger of four existing provinces into the super-region Tse-Che-O. ‘Even as one stepped down onto the platform one sensed an excitement which transcended the provincial,’ the duo sneer. ‘Where two ears of corn had once grown there now grew fewer than three, yet the people laid their energy on the table as a down payment, in the hope of swelling the granaries even further with the fusion of four provinces.’ Platonov and Pilnyak’s barbs are aimed in particular at Party officials, who dedicate themselves heart and soul to ‘the wielding of administrative violence’.
When the reviewers murder ‘Tse-Che-O’, Platonov parries the criticism with a handful of aptly chosen quotes from Lenin. Had the very founder of the Soviet Union not characterised slumbering bureaucracy as ‘the greatest threat to the Revolution’? So the writers of ‘Tse-Che-O’ are able to dodge all reprimands from irritated apparatchiks; behind the scenes, however, invisible to the outside world, a black mark is put beside their names.
Platonov is prudent enough not to present his novel The Foundation Pit for publication. The authorities would not, to say the least, have appreciated his parody of rigid plan-o-mania. And what publisher would dare release a book in which the characters, amid a cacophony of Soviet-speak, do nothing but dig a vast pit?
It is in 1929, however, that Platonov encounters official obstruction for the first time. At the very last moment – the text has already been typeset – the publication of his novel Chevengur is blocked by the censor. An observant GlavLit editor has noticed that the main characters in Chevengur bear a striking resemblance to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The intrepid Kopenkin rides a steed by the name of ‘Proletarian Strength’; along with his page Dvanov, an uninhibited orphan boy, he wanders the Russian steppes in search of ‘true socialism’.
To Maxim Gorky, Platonov swears that his novel is not counter-revolutionary. But the man who discovered his talent is unable to agree. He praises Platonov’s style, but refers to his protagonists as ‘semi-idiotic oddballs’ – and no worthy addition to Soviet literature.
Chevengur remains unpublished. Platonov is disappointed, but the truly serious collision with Soviet authority does not come until 1931, with the publication by the magazine New Red Earth of his story about the sensitive issue of agricultural collectivisation.
Platonov is deeply worried about the future of the Russian countryside and wishes he could save the small farmer, so typical of Russian rural life, from his state of near-slavery. Serfdom had officially been abolished in 1861, but in practice the farmers had not been freed; Lenin saw to it that they remained indentured to the state. His reforms under the motto ‘land belongs to the whole of the working people who till it’, however, had not made the soil any more productive, so Stalin took a more radical tack: the expropriation of the farming classes. To break resistance to his plans he divided the rural population into three categories: the poor (bednyak), the medium-poor (serednyak) and the ‘rich’ (kulak). This latter category, consisting of farmers who by means of hard work had accumulated a little property, did their best to prevent the seizure of their livestock and land: they often slaughtered their animals rather than hand them over to the kolkhoz. Dissatisfied with the pace of collectivisation, Stalin, in a speech given on 27 December 1929, mooted the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.
Andrey Platonov visited half a dozen kolkhozes in the region around the upper Don. His story ‘To the Benefit Of’ remained in the offices of GlavLit for almost nine months but finally appeared unchanged in New Red Earth. The story has no first-person narrator, but tells of an inspector specially selected for his mission because he possesses a unique trait: ‘He was able to err, but not to lie.’
And what does he find?
A smoothly running tractor garage at a collective named ‘The Independent Farmstead’. Hard-working field hands at ‘Kulak-Free’. But also a settlement with overly fanatical inhabitants who want to install an ‘electric sun’ so that they can work on through the night.
What Platonov certainly cannot dwell upon are the executions by firing squad and the arrests that have wiped out hundreds of thousands, but he does succeed in skewering the authorities’ capriciousness. As always, Platonov’s characters garble serious-minded directives into a conceptual mishmash. In the course of ‘dekulakisation’, for example, the occasional bednyak or serednyak is mistaken for a sub-kulak, with all the consequences one might imagine.
‘To the Benefit Of’ is as chaotic as the upended countryside itself. The author takes the then-fashionable adjective ‘correlative’ and turns it inside out, applying the concept of ‘noncor-relation’ to the world, to nature, to the workings of the human mind. His account is at complete loggerheads with the front-page article that had appeared in Pravda on 2 March 1930 under the headline ‘Dizzy from Success’, in which Comrade Stalin congratulated himself on crushing the kulak class. It is with this very newspaper, rolled up but with the headline ‘Dizzy from Success’ clearly visible on the front page, that an angry kolkhoz chairman in Platonov’s story thrashes an opponent. With hindsight, it might have been wiser for the author to have cut that particular passage.
Stalin, the ultimate arbiter of good taste, reads ‘To the Benefit Of’ and summons the writer Alexander Fadeyev, ordering him to come down so hard on Platonov ‘that he will understand what the words “to the benefit of” really mean.’ On the back cover of the guilty edition of New Red Earth, tradition has it, the Father of the People had scrawled the word svoloch (‘scum’).
Fadeyev complies by writing an article in Pravda in which he refers to Platonov as a ‘kulak’ – the worst stigma imaginable and the green light for a pack of critics to pounce on Platonov’s work. With retrospective effect the reviewers also condemn The Epifan Locks, calling it a veiled attempt to ‘ridicule’ socialism. No newspaper or magazine now dares to run a letter from Platonov; he cannot come to his own defence. The editors of New Red Earth apologise to their readers for ever having printed work by this ‘enemy agent’.
Platonov turns again to Gorky, this time with an urgent cry for help. But his literary patron refuses to intervene. He sticks to his view of Platonov as a talented writer, but opines that the man’s mind has been ‘poisoned’. In private correspondence he blames this on the influence of Pilnyak: ‘Platonov’s collaboration with Pilnyak has ruined him.’
*
One year earlier, the Soviet press had launched an even more vicious assault on Pilnyak. And because his readership was so much larger, the Pilnyak affair was dealt with at greater length as well. His enemies – most of them envious colleagues – had found the perfect weapon with which to give him a public hanging: his non-authorised publication of the novella Red Wood in 1929, through an émigré publishing house in Berlin.
The verdict: ‘literary treason’.
The exegetes descended upon his earlier writings and uncovered a host of ideological shortcomings. From his debut to his collaboration with Platonov on ‘Tse-Che-O’, they found fault with everything.
In 1929, Pilnyak’s writing career seemed to be over. Throughout that summer the periodicals rang with the term ‘Pilnyakism’: a popular expletive for anything that undermined socialism. At the height of this smear campaign one commentator actually suggested that Pilnyak had worked as an agent for the exiled Leon Trotsky. Forced at last to resign his position on the board of the Russian Association for Proletarian Writers, he found himself more and more isolated. Finally, however, in an article in Izvestia, Gorky unexpectedly announced that enough was enough. To go on kicking the man while he was down would only be ‘a waste of energy’, the arbiter said; the nation was young, what was needed were constructive contributions, from writers as well. ‘Let the case of Pilnyak be a warning to all Soviet writers,’ was how one Moscow evening paper put an end to the mud-slinging.
Unlike Platonov, however, Pilnyak was able to clear his name within six months. His tactic was to change his spots. Composing hastily, he embarked on a Socialist Realist novel, The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea; the book is, in fact, one long act of contrition. Throughout that entire production epic Pilnyak never strayed a millimetre from the Party line, and played it safe thematically as well: dam-building, navigation, irrigation, the superhuman struggle of a Soviet engineer against the machinations of a saboteur – a royal flush.
Pilnyak’s despair – he had, according to the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, been considering suicide – turned to euphoria when he stumbled upon the plot of The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea: he would base his novel on the work of Comrade Krzhizhanovsky, the nation’s electrifier who planned to reverse the course of the great rivers. Pilnyak devised a stalwart Bolshevik by the name of Poletika – a professor who, like Krzhizhanovsky, is working on a project involving hydrodynamic transformation. In the novel, this model scientist pitches his tents close to the town of Kolomna, bringing in his wake thousands of surveyors, excavators and masons. The project Professor Poletika has in mind will ‘change both history and geology’: at the confluence of the Oka and the Moskva he builds a ‘monolith’, a dam that will raise the water level by 25 metres, thereby reversing the natural, eastward course of the Moskva. For, after all: ‘Soviet rivers they do flow/ Wherever the Bolsheviks want them to go.’
In order to regain acceptance as a Soviet writer, Pilnyak set aside his convictions. In his book, for example, the inhabitants of a village beside the Oka rejoice at the news that their hovels will be drowned by the rising river. And why shouldn’t they? They will be given new homes, ‘of the kind one sees in Europe’.
Out of the blue, one of Pilnyak’s characters suddenly shouts in German: ‘Weisst du, ich denke dass Leo Trotsky unrecht hat.’ (‘Do you know, I think Trotsky was wrong.’) The engineer-saboteur who schemes to dynamite the monolith is unmasked, and finally all the baddies drown in a green whirlpool behind the dam.
On the day of the dam’s inauguration, Professor Poletika’s eyes are already trained upon the horizon. Before long he hopes to deflect the course of the Volga in the direction of the sandy plains of Central Asia. ‘Such are the opportunities offered by socialism,’ the professor preaches. ‘We shall transform the desert into an antique Mesopotamia.’
*
With The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, Pilnyak achieves his objective: he is allowed to return to the fold of the literary elite. With this display of loyalty, Gorky feels, the writer has more than made up for former indiscretions; in 1933 he invites him to take part in the excursion to the Belomor Canal.
Within only a few years, the grand old man of Soviet letters has succeeded in making the writers toe the line; his interventions put an end to their infighting and dissident behaviour. In literary-political terms one could characterise 1934 as Gorky’s triumphal year, beginning in January with the publication of the collective Belomor account. The celebratory print run of 4,000 gift editions rolls from the presses just in time for the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party. General print runs of 80,000 and 30,000 copies appear shortly afterwards, and are quickly sold out. Building upon the success of Belomor, Gorky precipitates a boom in literature dealing with Stalin’s canals.
‘Maxim Gorky has come to believe in a pharaonic Russia, where the people sing as they build his pyramids,’ his French friend Romain Rolland notes after a visit to Moscow.
But Gorky is not deterred by such criticism. As the ‘geo-optimist’ (one of the monikers he wears with pride), he expects great good to come from the reshaping of the earth’s surface. He gives the Soviet Union the gift of a matching literature, one which puts behind it the experimentalist urges of the 1920s. Form has been replaced by content; the subject matter of the books that appear under his supervision is concrete, ‘they stand with both feet firmly in materialistic reality’. They deal with a society in transition, and stand out by their forthrightness. Look at the exclamation marks! The exclamation mark rolls unstoppably on to the sea. Under Gorky’s supervision, the Russian language has been spurred into action, it has become more urgent, less timeless. But what about literary aesthetics? Have they not been trampled underfoot, or forgotten in the rush? No, Gorky feels, the aesthetics of the proletariat is the aesthetics of construction and production. Building and producing have a beauty of their own. What, after all, could be more breathtakingly beautiful than a 40-metre-high arch dam on a river!
Inspired by Gorky, the writers produce a ‘waterworks library’ unlike anything outside of Soviet letters.
Fyodor Gladkov, who had already enjoyed public acclaim in 1925 for his production novel Cement, dedicates an ambitious, epic novel to the construction of the hydroelectric station on the Dnieper. That work, Energy, is published in two volumes. Its almost one thousand pages are so dense with technical details that Energy can also be read as a manual for dam-building.
The Polish writer Bruno Jasienski, whose love for the Soviet Union prompts him to write only in ‘the language of Lenin’, travels to Central Asia to document the construction of an irrigation network along the Oxus, or Amu Darya: Man Changes His Skin.
Marietta Shaginyan, known for her thrillers about American spies in Leningrad, goes to her native Soviet Republic of Armenia in order to write The Hydroelectric Plant.
The writer-critic Leopold Averbakh, who had at one point dismissed Pilnyak’s ‘penance’ as hypocritical, realises that he too needs to comply with Stalin and Gorky’s directives. After taking part in Belomor he applies himself to a comparable task of ‘instant history writing’, dealing this time with the excavation of the Moscow-Volga Canal. The resulting work is entitled From Crime to Labour.
Sergey Budantsev, another ‘veteran’ of Gorky’s Belomor project, makes preparations for an encyclopedic work entitled The Great Waterways of the Soviet Union. For this book, intended to appear in 1937 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he approaches a number of contributors. Celebrated authors are each to take one of the Soviet Empire’s waterways as the subject for a literary narrative. The contracted writers include Boris Pilnyak and Konstantin Paustovsky.
Flushed with the success of Kara Bogaz, Paustovsky discovers yet another remote corner of the Soviet Union. Not far from the Turkish border, a subtropical swamp forest is being reclaimed for citrus cultivation. In Colchis: Land of the New Argonauts (1934), he reports on the ‘cheerful rejoicing of engineers, workers and botanists’ as they drain and dyke in a fertile coastal area.
The writer who fails to rebound, however, is Andrey Platonov. In the course of 1933 his letters to Gorky become increasingly desperate. ‘For me, as a “class enemy”, it is not only impossible to go on living in the psychological sense, but also in practical terms. No one trusts me any more. I wish you could believe in me.’
In May he begs Gorky to be allowed to write about the Moscow-Volga Canal. He is casting about for a theme deserving of the literary patriarch’s blessing, the only means for him to be published again and, more importantly, to earn the roubles he needs so badly to support his wife Masha and their young son Platon. To keep the family alive, the writer-technician accepts a job with the Moscow Department of Weights and Measures. There he wins a very welcome bonus for his invention of an electronic scale. But it is not enough.
In November 1933 he writes: ‘My work has not appeared in print for the last two and a half years. Please, if you do not find it necessary to give up on me as a writer, grant me your assistance.’ Gorky does not reply. Platonov’s stories, he feels, ‘border on the insane’. But then he decides to give him one last chance by including him in a writers’ brigade that is going to Central Asia.
In the spring of 1934 Platonov returns from Soviet Turkmenistan with the novella Soul, about the nomads of the Karakum. The book never makes it past the censors. The group outing also results in a quasi-scientific piece entitled ‘Warm Polar Regions’, in which Platonov philosophises about how the desert might blossom if only the polar ice could be melted and allowed to flow to Central Asia. The story, like Pilnyak’s The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, is a clear reference to Stalin’s plan to reverse the course of the great rivers, but Platonov never succeeds in publishing it. The censors perhaps suspected that its slightly absurdist style was poking fun at perebroska, rather than praising it.
In the yearbook issued to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan, Platonov is represented by only one contribution: a story about a Persian slave girl freed by the Soviets.