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Writers had borne up the Soviet Union; writers, too, had let it fall. Imagine Maxim Gorky’s bitterness had he known that the liriki would one day rise up against the fiziki.

In 1954, at the start of the second plenary conference in the history of the Union of Soviet Writers, nothing looks to have changed. At Stalin’s death in 1953 the people mourned ecstatically; the ‘Beloved Master’ was laid in state beside Lenin in his mausoleum. There was as yet no sign of his imminent fall from grace, despite the execution that year of Stalin’s most faithful deputy, NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, and his deletion from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia; subscribers at home and abroad were sent an insert dealing with the Bering Strait and asked to paste it over the entry ‘Beria’.

The conference opens with two minutes of silence in honour of Comrade Stalin. Like a tight-knit collective, the thousands of writers and poets climb to their feet and stand with their heads bowed, each thinking his own thoughts. ‘Each of us writes as his heart commands,’ Mikhail Sholokhov tells the delegates. ‘But our hearts belong to the Party.’

Paustovsky, dressed in a three-piece suit, is in one of the front rows. ‘Let us speak freely!’ begins the speech he wrote for the occasion. Then he rounds on ‘begrudging critics’ abroad: ‘In the West, it is widely claimed that we Soviet writers groan beneath the burden of a host of prohibitions and obstructions; that we do not have the liberty to choose our subjects, and that our thoughts do not develop freely. I am an average Soviet writer. Never, in the choice of my themes or in the manner in which I treat them, has any pressure been exerted on me.’

Since his sojourn along the Volga-Don Canal, Paustovsky has applied himself to producing even more hydraulics-engineering prose. In the wake of The Birth of the Sea he has written a dozen stories with titles such as ‘The Force of Great Rivers’, ‘Newborn Blessings’ and ‘The Course of New Rivers’. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia describes Paustovsky as the ‘romantic of socialist construction’.

Now that he and his family have exchanged their one-room flat on Gorky Street for the apartment in Stalin’s tower, Paustovsky’s career has truly taken off. He resigns his lectureship at the Literature Institute in 1955, but not before arranging the admission of his stepdaughter Galya – who has just turned eighteen – as a student of ‘literary criticism’.

That year the family even has enough money for a dacha. Tatyana goes looking in the villages along the Oka, one of the central Russian rivers dearest to her husband. At Tarusa she finds a wooden holiday cottage they can acquire from the director of the local sanatorium. It turns out to be a real find: the quiet, spacious surroundings provide Paustovsky at last with the ideal workplace.

On a still October afternoon, I drove out for a visit. Galya, who inherited both apartment and dacha, had told me how to get there. The address was 3 Proletarian Street, but once I found Tarusa the best thing would be to ask for the ‘Paustovsky house’. She and her husband Volodya had been at the dacha themselves for several days already, ‘getting it ready for the winter’.

Proletarian Street turned out to be a bumpy, sandy road beside which a ragged farmer was sleeping off his hangover. He lay curled up on the verge like a shrimp. With the low sun in my eyes, I saw him only at the last moment; I was barely able to swerve around his bent legs. When I finally stopped at the end of the road, opposite number 3, my hands were still shaking.

‘Tarusa is notorious for its drunkards,’ said Volodya, who was busy burning the piles of leaves he’d raked together.

‘And for its thieves,’ Galya added. ‘There are eight living in the neighbourhood behind the sanatorium alone.’

‘Eight thieves?’ That sounded far-fetched. In any event, it didn’t seem in keeping with the peaceful air of Tarusa: a spa town of brick apartment buildings along a wooded riverbank, surrounded by little farms. The town also bore the wonderful aroma of wet leaves and mushrooms.

But Galya was sure of herself: ‘Tarusa is a dumping ground for criminals.’ The Soviet penal code, her husband explained, had a ‘hundred-kilometre injunction’. Convicted criminals were banned for life from settling within one hundred kilometres of Moscow. ‘And because Tarusa is just outside that radius, they often move out here.’

Pointing at the blue-and-white fairy-tale dacha, Galya told me they would be fixing shutters on the windows this winter to discourage Tarusa’s burgling guild. Taking off her gloves, she showed me around the garden, where she had been busy covering the flowerbeds with mats of straw and reeds. ‘If you don’t do that, the bulbs freeze to death,’ she said. A natural stone path led to a latrine and a shed full of blocks of firewood. Further along, amid the apple trees, stood the little summer house where Paustovsky had worked during the final twelve summers of his life. The hexagonal shelter was locked; when I tried to peer in through a window, my face was immediately covered in cobwebs.

Like all Russians, Galya and her husband revelled in country living. In the blink of an eye the kitchen table was covered in bread, sausage, cheese and fresh cream. ‘Help yourself,’ the lady of the house urged. ‘Around here we eat with our hands.’ Then, raising a slice of liverwurst to her lips, she said plaintively: ‘Oh, I used to be so slender… I was so happy…’

I told her that, in all of Paustovsky’s oeuvre, I hadn’t been able to find more than two phrases about her. ‘Somewhere he refers to you as “a young woman with a tendency to act on impulse”.’

Galya laughed heartily. ‘Yes, that’s right, but that says more about him than it does about me. He was always so cautious and so, how shall I put it… so proper.’

I knew the stories about his faultless appearance, his neckties as broad as a man’s hand, his shirts buttoned all the way to the collar. But during the period of thaw under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev, none of that had kept him from performing acts both spontaneous and brave. I mentioned his ‘Drozdov address’ – a renowned speech, the title of which referred to the anti-hero, the flabby official Drozdov, of the novel Not by Bread Alone. In that work from 1956, the satirist Vladimir Dudintsev had ridiculed the archetypal Soviet bureaucrat. The shock of recognition was so great that Party leader Khrushchev labelled the book ‘libellous’. Although he had made a radical break with the Stalinist past earlier that year by condemning his predecessor’s misdeeds, Khrushchev felt the author had abused the new liberties. Against that background, Paustovsky had spoken out publicly against ‘the inertia and complacency of the Drozdovs’, the ‘good-for-nothings and boot-lickers we see around us every day’.

‘In view of the risk he was taking,’ I posited, ‘I’d hardly call that “cautious”. It seems more like bold to me.’

After a few moments’ silence, Volodya looked at his wife. ‘Tell him what really happened,’ he said at last.

Galya dabbed at her lips with an embroidered napkin. ‘That Drozdov address was courageous,’ she said in a level voice. ‘But it was us, the students of literary criticism, who put him up to it.’

At the Gorky Institute, she told me, she had seen the announcement of a debate about Not by Bread Alone. The venue: the restaurant on the first floor of the Writers’ House. The date: 22 October 1956. Below that were the names of four literary heavyweights who would attack the controversial novel. Its only defender was the youthful poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

‘Yevgeny can never stand up to that!’ Galya and her classmates cried. Yevtushenko was very brave, true enough, but still only a student; how could he hold his own against four literary lions? One of Galya’s female friends took her aside and said: ‘He needs a supporter. We have to convince your stepfather to help.’

Paustovsky’s reaction was guarded. ‘I don’t like speaking in public, you people know that, don’t you?’ But when he read the names of the attackers, he put his head in his hands in pure exasperation. Why were these men allowing themselves to be rolled in like cannon against one tiny spark of literary resistance? ‘All right,’ he promised. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

The news that Paustovsky was going to defend Not by Bread Alone raced ahead of him, from Tarusa to Moscow.

‘The street outside the Writers’ House was packed,’ Volodya remembered. ‘Every seat was taken; we had to stand against the back wall, all wedged together.’

The audience fell silent as soon as Paustovsky took the floor. Galya had regretted, she said, that his speaking voice was so brittle and hard to understand. His words could have been more spirited, as far as she was concerned, could have had more fire. ‘The problem,’ her stepfather contended, ‘is that a new social stratum has been allowed to develop in our country. A party-caste of the new rich…’ Galya had felt like stamping her feet in impatience: why didn’t he just speak his mind? ‘This caste of carnivores has nothing in common with the Revolution or with socialism. They are cynics, grim obscurantists who do not even shrink from reviving anti-Semitic blather. Where do these Drozdovs come from?

‘They have appropriated the right to speak on the people’s behalf, while in fact it is the people they despise. Every day we see these figures around us; they all dress the same, express themselves in the same disgusting fashion. They wield a dead language, a language of bureaucrats, with which they plainly show their total contempt for Russian.’

Paustovsky ended with the prediction (or was it a summons?) that the people would soon ‘rid themselves of the Drozdovs’.

‘That final sentence took on a life of its own,’ Galya said. The next morning at the Maxim Gorky Institute, complete strangers approached her, hugged her and congratulated her. Under the title ‘The people will rid themselves of the Drozdovs’, handwritten copies of Paustovsky’s speech began appearing here and there all over the Soviet Union. At the University of Warsaw, disciplinary sanctions were imposed for the possession and distribution of the Drozdov text, but that did not prevent a copy from making its way to Paris, where it was promptly translated into French and published in the magazine L’Express.

From that day on, Galya concluded, Paustovsky unexpectedly found himself in the ranks of the dissidents. ‘And I was the instigator,’ she said, beaming.

No disciplinary measures were taken against Paustovsky himself. The Literaturnaya Gazeta did, however, rap him on the knuckles by summarising his role in the Not by Bread Alone debate as follows: ‘Comrade K. Paustovsky drew a series of erroneous conclusions, to the effect that the existence of Drozdovs was a widespread phenomenon.’

That was all. Paustovsky was allowed to spend the rest of that year working quietly on his Collected Works, which appeared in instalments between 1957 and 1958. The six volumes – bound in brown imitation leather – contained one notable omission: The Birth of the Sea. That this text was missing came as no surprise to me; it supported what Galya had said earlier: Paustovsky did not wish to be remembered for that particular example of writing by superior order. Along with the 1935 film of Kara Bogaz, no reference to which is found in his hand, he evidently wished to banish his Volga-Don narrative from his life as well.

So I supposed. But leafing through his Collected Works again from beginning to end, I stumbled upon a story of a little more than one hundred pages (‘The Heroic South-East’) which bore a striking familiarity. In it I recognised passages from The Birth of the Sea, and realised that this must be an adapted version. Upon closer study, I saw that Paustovsky had discarded about a third of his original text, but retained the rest under a different title.

A comparison could only shed unique light on Paustovsky’s private views and preferences. Which passages had he deleted in embarrassment? And what had he kept of his own free will?

Obviously, all references to Stalin were missing. By the late 1950s, no one would have admitted to being inspired by the ‘brilliance of Comrade Stalin’. Paustovsky would have had to be a political ignoramus to have left intact his odes to ‘the vision, will, dedication and courage of Stalin’. The all-too-hollow promises of ‘dawning communism’ and ‘the golden age of mankind’ had likewise been cut from the abridged version. The characters in ‘The Heroic South-East’ radiate less bliss; in the years that had passed, they had become a good deal more realistic and sober.

But the differences ended there. The song of praise to the achievements of the Soviet engineer remained, from which I deduced that he considered that passage to be worthwhile. Every building site still buzzed unabatedly with harmony and determination, and the worker bees in the revised version had not become German prisoners of war or gulag convicts, but were still volunteers. Paustovsky had seen no reason to tone down his euphoria for the theme of Soviet hydraulic engineering.

In that regard, the 1958 version is even more elated than that from 1952. The rigorous cuts, in fact, make the story more compelling. The main character in The Birth of the Sea, (foreman Basargin), has, in ‘The Heroic South-East’, surrendered pride of place to a secondary figure: the red-headed engineer Starostin. Starostin is a modest man, almost to the point of shyness. But his mission, we are told, is ‘staggering’.

‘Upon my word, if it isn’t Starostin himself,’ Basargin exclaims at their first meeting. ‘Our man from Leningrad, who’s going to turn the Ob and the Irtysh around and make them flow towards the Caspian steppes!’

The gangly Starostin blushes. It’s true, he has been sent to do some surveying for a much grander project: the diversion of the courses of the Siberian rivers. With ‘pumping stations ten times more powerful than what we have today’ and ‘a canal two thousand kilometres long’, engineers like Starostin will use Siberian water to quench the thirst of Central Asia’s cotton industry. To him, the construction of the Volga–Don canal is a mere exercise: a prelude to the real work. As an engineer of the future, he buries his nose so deeply in descriptions of the most advanced excavation techniques that he fails to notice that Klava, the prettiest and most athletic of the dragline operators, has fallen in love with him. Nothing and no one can keep him from accomplishing his goal: perebroska.

‘Everything about that project was daring and grand. Starostin himself had grown accustomed to the figures, but laymen were stunned by them […] Starostin understood that the world’s greatest hydraulic-engineering feat of the future had been born here, on the Volga–Don Canal. Here there had formed an army of accomplished builders, here the skilled workers had searched for and found the best working methods, here was where the most valuable experiences had accumulated.’

In Paustovsky’s words, the Soviet worker was ‘writing the history of the future’ between the Volga and the Don.

*

In 2001, Moscow’s Institute for Hydraulic Affairs was still inhabited by real-life river-benders. They saw themselves as veterans of a lost battle. One, Professor Alexander Velikanov, suggested I visit so that he could ‘disclose the true reason for the failure of perebroska.’ I had barely shaken his hand before he warned me about the ‘thick fog of myths’ surrounding the project’s failure, for which he held the liriki accountable.

The Institute for Hydraulic Affairs had obviously seen better days; the building, both inside and out, was in sore need of a lick of paint. Exhaust from the traffic tearing past had covered the facade in a layer of soot. Somewhere on the third floor the professor led me into a classroom with half-erased mathematic formulae still on the board. ‘Better here than in my office. Today is payday, and I never get a moment’s rest then.’

Velikanov, hair tousled and features lined, was somewhere in his sixties. In the 1970s he had worked his way up from lecturer in hydraulics to Deputy Director of Hydraulic Affairs. ‘Perebroska was under way then,’ he said in a contemplative tone. ‘It would have been a logical step in the evolution of our civilisation.’ He skilfully rolled a piece of chalk back and forth between his fingers, then made a well-timed pause for effect. ‘After all, we transport oil and gas over large distances. So why not transfer water from one river to the next?’

The Americans did the same thing, he said. They called it ‘inter-basin water transfer’. There was nothing remarkable about that; they’d been doing it for years. I had heard of the Colorado River, hadn’t I? Or the Tagus in Spain? ‘The only difference with our plan was its scale; that struck people with awe. And sometimes with fear.’

Alexander Velikanov was a water-transfer man from the word go. In the year that he graduated, 1955, the Central Committee had ordered preparations for reversing five rivers, three in European Russia and two in Siberia. The Institute for Hydraulic Affairs was charged with supervising the preliminary research. ‘We had unlimited means at our disposal,’ he said with a hint of nostalgia. ‘We had our own fleet, a network of measuring stations, helicopters for our field expeditions, whatever we needed.’ Before long, 68,000 staff assistants from some seventy scientific institutes were engaged in studying the plans from various angles.

‘But there is, mind you, a difference between a project and a prozject.’ This final word he pronounced as affectedly as possible, in the French style. In its mannered variation, he explained, Nikolay Gogol – his favourite writer – had long ago reserved the word for grandiose initiatives. ‘Perebroska, in itself, was a normal project. Useful, feasible. But some of us let it go to our heads. There were those who dreamed, for example, of digging canals by means of controlled nuclear explosions.’

‘A prozject?’

‘Yes,’ Velikanov said. ‘But the sad thing about it was that nuclear explosions of that magnitude were actually carried out in the Urals, within the context of the “Peaceful Atom” campaign. As part of a study into peaceful applications of nuclear explosions in hydraulic engineering.’

It was the Soviet writers, the professor said, who were responsible for that ‘prozject mindset’: they had goaded the fiziki on to increasingly grand and – in the long run – senseless enterprises. Writers in Gogol’s day, under the strict regime of the tsars no less, had at least provided social criticism. ‘But we were smothered beneath an avalanche of praise. The dams and pumping stations we designed were invariably spoken of as “more monumental than the pyramids of Egypt”. That’s how the newspapers described our work. Try keeping a level head then!’

There were absolutely no restraints on Soviet hydraulic engineering. The Ministry of Water Management (abbreviated as MinVodChoz) had expanded into a Moloch with a million officials spread across fifteen republics. MinVodChoz applied its own system for classifying sensitive documents, so that every duty rota and every receipt ended up bearing the stamp ‘secret’, if not ‘top secret’. With its powerful lobby within the political establishment, MinVodChoz became the most influential department in the Union, second only to Defence. There arose (‘almost of necessity’, the professor emphasised) a hunger for conspicuous exploits. Drip irrigation, the economical method by which the Israelis had caused their citrus orchards to blossom, was too bland for the Soviet water bureaucracy. Canals had a more convincing ring to them.

‘All that could justify the existence of such a huge apparatus were water projects that defied the imagination.’ Velikanov spoke of the ‘gigantomania’ that had taken possession of the administrators – and while I listened to him, I saw the contours of Karl August Wittfogel’s Wasserbau society emerging. I began to see, more clearly than ever, the mechanism by which large-scale hydro-projects tend to provoke totalitarian structures. Without order, discipline, rigid lines of command and cheap labour, public works such as perebroska were unthinkable. Conversely, totalitarian regimes depended upon such massive construction projects in order to justify their own existence.

Velikanov agreed that Stalin had been able to carry out his canal- and dam-building only on the back of an inexhaustible supply of slave labour. Accordingly, it was with the nuts and bolts of perebroska that Stalin’s successors had struggled, not its technical or economic feasibility. Or, to put it another way: as the Gulag dwindled, so did the chances of realising the water-transfer plan. In order to continue building on a Stalinist scale, new reserves of labour had to be tapped into. Recommendations were made for the use of the Red Army, or the establishment of a separate programme of ‘public-works conscription’, or an anti-alcohol campaign whereby the country’s drunkards could be sentenced to ‘labour therapy for a maximum term of three years’ canal-building’.

Yet the mobilisation of labour on such a grand scale never got off the ground. After the wave of amnesties under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union seemed to be losing its clout. Officials aplenty, that was not the problem, and no shortage of engineers or construction foremen either. But with the mass release of more than a million prisoners (on 27 March 1953; three weeks after Stalin’s death) the Soviet hierarchy had undermined its own foundation of tractable ‘slaves’.

Pending the green light for perebroska, the Soviet Union began exporting its hydraulic-engineering expertise. Between 1955 and 1970, Soviet engineers supervised a working colony of 35,000 Egyptians as they laboured near the Nile town of Aswan on a dam that was to be 111 metres high and three kilometres across. In the very cradle of Oriental despotism, Soviet hydro-scientists showed the world what they could do.

In his own country, Khrushchev – as if to cover up for his own inability to get perebroska rolling – began demanding more and more impact studies. Professor Velikanov had been unable to shake the feeling that all those additional studies were being used to keep him and his colleagues on hold. In the end, he said, so many reports about perebroska appeared that it would have taken more than a single human lifetime to read them all.

More oppressive to me than that, however, was the idea that all those millions of hours of human cognitive power had finally led nowhere.

‘Oh, but I wouldn’t say that,’ the professor exclaimed. ‘Perebroska proved very useful in the development of mathematics. Linear programming in particular profited from it enormously.’

The family estate on the long island in the Ros where Paustovsky spent his youth has been swallowed up by the waters of a reservoir, along with his Uncle Ilko’s beehives. Even this relatively minor tributary of the Dnieper, which had once ‘broken in fury through the Avratinsky Hills’, has been dammed in the name of progress.

For Paustovsky, who would have liked to show Tatyana and Galya this ‘most mysterious spot on earth’, that comes as a disappointment. During their trip to the Ukrainian countryside in the summer of 1954, however, countless other childhood memories are still intact. He points out houses where uncles and aunts had lived, his primary school and the church where his half-Polish mother had gone to pray.

Galya had been surprised at how many ‘Paustovkys’ lived there. ‘It was as though the scenes from Distant Years sprang to life before our eyes,’ she said of that memorable journey. ‘A world opened up to me. Even the children there still ran around in traditional costume.’

Mother and daughter are urging him to resume work on his autobiography. Now that zhdanovschina was over, Soviet publishers would no longer object to its ‘apolitical’ nature.

The limits of what can and may be written are shifting dramatically. The first generation of dissidents after Stalin’s death spurn the lakirovka (literally: ‘eyewash’) that had once been demanded of Soviet writers. In 1954, Ilya Ehrenburg publishes a novella featuring an artist who ‘just like everyone else, connives, schemes and lies’. The title is The Thaw, a word which will come to characterise the Khrushchev era.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko calls for words ‘to be given back their original sounds’. Factory sirens at morning do not ‘sing’, they squeal. And the steelworker for whom that squealing is intended does not jump out of bed enthusiastically; he groans and rolls over. Paustovsky joins in by criticising the stiltedness of Soviet literature: too many books, he feels, radiate ‘impotence’; they are redolent with a ‘false cheer intended to suggest real joy, especially the joy of working’.

Sick and tired of GlavLit’s obstruction, a handful of writers seek out ways to evade the censor. Boris Pasternak, who has worked for years in silence on his novel Doctor Zhivago, is unable to have the manuscript accepted by any Soviet publisher. And according to the Literaturnaya Gazeta, rightly so: the book deals unfavourably with the October Revolution. When, out of the blue, the novel is published in Italy in 1957, and when the writer then receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, a political-literary riot breaks out into which all Soviet writers are drawn, whether they like it or not. Pasternak is guilty of tamizdat: the publication (izdat) of his work abroad (tam, meaning ‘over there’).

Party-loyal students from the Gorky Literature Institute are sent into the streets to protest against this ‘Judas’. GET OUT OF THE SOVIET UNION one of their signs reads. Meanwhile, young Komsomol members threaten to burn down his dacha at Peredelkino. The Union of Soviet Writers gets in on the act as well: Pasternak is expelled from its ranks. The Moscow chapter asks the Soviet government to revoke the citizenship of ‘the traitor Pasternak’. And, as if that weren’t enough, well-known Soviet writers are called upon to publicly condemn Pasternak’s foul deed. One by one, in a series of evening speeches in the restaurant of the Writers’ House, they rail against him.

Paustovsky, too, was approached for the role of hostile witness. ‘We were here at the dacha when they came to fetch him,’ Galya told me at the table in Tarusa. ‘An apparatchik from the Writers’ Union, with his driver.’

‘It was around eleven in the morning,’ Volodya added. ‘I saw a black car pull up, here in Proletarian Street.’

The secretary of the Moscow chapter, a man by the name of Smirnov, climbed out. ‘Well-groomed gentleman. Very distinguished-looking.’

It was a sunny autumn day; after breakfast, Paustovsky had taken his boat out to go fishing on the Oka.

‘What?’ Smirnov had cried. He couldn’t believe that Paustovsky would leave for the whole day like that. ‘It’s urgent,’ he insisted. But Galya and Volodya could not be of any help to him.

‘So he went to the regional Party committee here in the village. And they went out searching for him in a motorboat.’

They found him. From his little metal launch, beneath the overhanging branch of a willow, Smirnov urged Paustovsky to speak out against Pasternak. ‘We need a man of your calibre.’

Paustovsky had asked for time to think about it. He didn’t dare offend the Writers’ Union envoy with a blunt refusal, but he did remark that he had not read Doctor Zhivago. The book, after all, was banned in the Soviet Union, so how could he have? ‘You’re asking me to denounce a book I haven’t even read?’ Paustovsky exclaimed. ‘Do you think anyone outside this country would actually believe me?’

Smirnov and his acolytes never brought up the matter again.

Not an easy man to pin down – that was also how Tatyana had thought of her husband. According to her, he had exercised the same ‘cunning’ within their marriage. To Dima Paustovsky she once confessed that his father liked to be ordered around – ‘I was like a dictator to him’ – but that as soon as something happened that didn’t please him, he fled. ‘He would react stubbornly, he would bridle, and his behaviour became almost cruel.’

Although their relationship survived until Paustovsky’s death, Tatyana looked back on it with a certain bitterness. During one of his escapades shortly after the Pasternak affair, her husband had started a romance with a female admirer from Leningrad. It was a largely platonic relationship, an epistolary courtship, but it had saddened Tatyana nonetheless.

Later, when Dima gained access to that correspondence, he discovered that his father had used phrases and expressions identical to those written to his first wife, Katya, half a century earlier.

By cautious manoeuvring, Paustovsky succeeded in keeping himself out of the line of fire. He never offended anyone publicly, and as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned he remained a loyal writer. In 1962, on his seventieth birthday, the state honoured him with the Order of the Red Banner: a decoration befitting a man of his stature. Even more importantly, he was considered reliable enough to travel to the West. In 1962, at the invitation of his French publisher, who had commissioned a translation of his autobiography, he spent a month in Paris. He placed flowers on Ivan Bunin’s grave, met Pablo Picasso (who signed a book of reproductions with the words ‘Pour Constantine Paustovski’) and during a signing session at the Globus bookshop allowed himself to be mobbed by young Françaises.

Political comment he avoided meticulously. Students at the Sorbonne questioned him fruitlessly about his opinions on this definitive phase of de-Stalinisation; the embalmed corpse of ‘the Glorious Sun’ had recently been removed from the mausoleum and interred among the silver firs at the foot of the Kremlin wall. Stalin became the object of blame for all the Soviet system’s shortcomings. In order to lend credibility to that message, however, his crimes had to be made public: a task Khrushchev gladly left to the literati. Under his personal supervision, a novella dealing with the Gulag appeared in December 1962. That was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an unknown mathematician who had given literary form to his camp experiences in Kazakhstan. His chilling catalogue of everyday cruelties, from morning to evening roll call in one of Stalin’s penal colonies, would prove the high-water mark of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’: for the conservative members of the Politburo, the publication of this shocking account was taking things too far. Less than two years later, during the Party’s plenary assembly on 14 October 1964, the mineworker’s son Khrushchev was forced to make way for Leonid Brezhnev.

It is at Tarusa that Paustovsky suffers his first asthma attacks. They usually start at around four in the morning and continue until dawn. Galya recalled that his coughing even upset the cockerels along Proletarian Street. As a celebrated Soviet writer, Paustovsky is allowed to take a brief cure on the island of Capri. But it is not only his lungs that are slowly collapsing; his coronary arteries are wearing out as well.

‘Between 1962 and 1968 he had at least eight minor heart attacks,’ his stepdaughter recalled.

At the intercession of the Writers’ Union, he is admitted again and again to the elite Kremlin Hospital; each time that he is discharged, the doctors prescribe rest. But with the passing of time Paustovsky becomes increasingly irritated, particularly by the rigidity of Brezhnev and his faithful coterie.

Like so many others, Paustovsky had grown accustomed to the more liberal and mild climate under Khrushchev. When the prosecution of dissenters starts anew, Paustovsky stops complying with the authorities’ wishes. He refuses to surrender his new-won freedoms. Old and ailing as he is, and enjoying a huge reputation at home and abroad, he knows he is more or less immune to reprimand. With no fear of assuming the martyr’s role, he now comes to the assistance of hounded dissidents. Along with like-minded others, he signs a petition in support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who hopes to initiate a dialogue concerning the legality of Soviet censorship, and an appeal for clemency for Daniel and Sinyavski, two writers accused of tamizdat, who eventually receive prison sentences of five and seven years, respectively, in 1966.

Young dissidents come to him with their petitions and open letters. ‘They would sit here at the kitchen table and say: “Konstantin Georgiyevich, we need your signature.”’

Galya said he would then put on his spectacles, hold the sheet of paper under the light and start reading aloud. ‘He always commented on the style. The young people would sit there fidgeting, afraid he would refuse to sign because of a clumsily formulated sentence.’

‘But he signed anyway?’

‘Always,’ Galya said. And if he happened to be ill, her mother would smuggle the letters of protest in her handbag into the Kremlin Hospital. On his sickbed, for instance, Paustovsky had signed an ‘Open Letter to Brezhnev’ in which thirteen public figures, from nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov to prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, warned the Party leader that ‘the people will neither understand nor tolerate a return to Stalinism’.

Paustovsky never ran afoul of the KGB, but Tatyana did.

In connection with the ‘Open Letter to Brezhnev’, Galya told me, her mother was summoned by an intelligence-service colonel versed in literary matters. She was ordered to report to a room in the Writers’ House and to explain in full her role in distributing the letter. But when her interrogator locked the door of his office behind him, Tatyana exploded in a fit of rage.

‘As though I’ve come here to sully my reputation as a woman… The mere suggestion: how dare you!’

The KGB officer allowed her to vent her fury. According to Galya, he then asked her mother in an extremely polite fashion to no longer involve her husband in subversive activities.

‘Will that be all?’ Tatyana snapped, without promising a thing.

‘Yes,’ the colonel said. ‘You may go.’

Paustovsky himself would never have let things come to a confrontation; that was not his way. He preferred instead to try to make the Soviet system – which he did not condemn – more tolerant and open from the inside out. In the final years of his life, as a respected man of letters, he accepted a position on the board of the Writers’ Union and had to endure the privileges that came with it. He was given a car with a driver and a personal secretary. To his friends, Paustovsky apologised for his state-appointed staff. He always stressed that they attended him ‘only once in a while’, and that he could just as easily have managed without them. When his secretary ordered a sheaf of writing paper with the inscription ‘K.G. Paustovsky – Writer’, he shouted in irritation: ‘Get that out of here. Hang it on a peg in the latrine.’

As an executive member of the Union of Soviet Writers, Paustovsky dedicated himself to the republication of Isaak Babel and other victims of Stalin’s terror. When the families of ‘wrongfully accused writers’ received their certificates of rehabilitation in 1956, it had been a pivotal moment; it could not, however, bring back books boiled to a pulp.

It was only in 1964 that Pilnyak’s work was reissued in the Soviet Union, thanks to the unstinting efforts of his widow, Kira. She had been appointed to the rehabilitation commission, which allowed her to have published several excerpts from The Salt Shed, the manuscript that had lain buried for ten years in the garden of their former dacha.

Platonov’s novella Soul saw the light for the very first time in that same year: thirty years after it was drafted, and ten years after the author’s death. Soul met with great critical acclaim.

In 1967, in an issue of Novy Mir with the theme ‘Fifty years of Soviet literature’, Paustovsky wrote: ‘How can it be that we have promoted to the status of masterpiece books of absolutely no artistic value, while the most brilliant of writing has lain hidden and only come to light a quarter of a century later?’

In hindsight, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup is a turning point in the history of Soviet letters. While veterans of Paustovsky’s age are drawing up the balance of five decades of Soviet literature, a younger generation of writers withdraws to remote villages untouched by any Five-Year Plan. In their work they go in search of pure Russian country life, a theme GlavLit considers innocuous.

For the first time since Gorky assigned the Soviet writer the task of praising socialism’s advance with all the talent at his disposal, the liriki begin questioning the work of the fiziki. In his poem ‘Bratsky Station’ (1965), Yevgeny Yevtushenko breaks with the tradition of likening hydroelectric dams to the pyramids of Egypt. After all, aren’t the latter ‘the very symbol of futile and demeaning slavery’? Two years later, one of Paustovsky’s students at the Gorky Institute describes the construction of the Main Turkmen Canal as a ‘senseless enterprise’. At this rate, it will not be long before even the blessings of hydroelectric construction are called into question.

In 1976, when Valentin Rasputin submits a manuscript describing life in a Siberian village, the GlavLit censors are content to make only a few cuts. They do not appreciate that Farewell to Matyora can be read as an indictment of the Soviet engineers’ building projects. The book describes the final summer of the hamlet of Matyora, before it is to be inundated by the new reservoir at Bratsk. The notion that the reader might side with Matyora’s squabbling babushkas, and so against the electrified future for new socialist factory complexes, is beyond the censors’ ken.

Nature conservation, unlike in Gorky’s day, is no longer regarded as an obstruction to socialist progress. It can, rather, be prompted by sincere patriotic feeling – which is why the ‘village writers’ are allowed to extol the glory of an untrammelled Russia. When presenting their statistics in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Party ideologists are not at all alarmed to note that 2,600 villages and 165 towns have been drowned by reservoirs since the start of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. Such observations are not considered criticism. On the contrary: for the time being at least, they fill the Soviet planners with pride, not shame.

MinVodChoz still enjoys the Politburo’s favour and, after a series of harvests ruined by drought in the period 1970–75, the ministry succeeds in converting Party leader Brezhnev to the tenets of perebroska. Under his leadership, after decades of vacillation, the Soviet Union decides to actually implement the turning-about of the great rivers: in 1977, under the name ‘The Southern Strategy’, Brezhnev awards top priority to the diversion of five rivers in European Russia and Siberia. Two years later the water managers present their definitive plan for the yearly transfer of 60 cubic kilometres of water. The first – and easiest – part of this ‘rational redistribution of Soviet water supplies’, the damming of the bay at Kara Bogaz, is completed in February 1980.

But then the chorus of opposition rings out. A savage critique by one of the village writers, rejected by GlavLit, appears in tamizdat in Paris in 1981. The liriki from the villages turn out to be no innocent nostalgists after all, but an angry horde descending on perebroska.

Professor Velikanov was stunned by the ‘herd instinct’ displayed by his opponents. ‘Soviet writers had always applauded our work,’ he said, sounding scandalised. ‘But suddenly these “patriots” performed a complete volte-face.’ Unlike most water managers, he understood why perebroska in particular had been chosen as the target of their wrath: the meddling with the course of the great rivers had become synonymous with the arrogance of Soviet power.

‘Suddenly everyone who called themselves liberal began taking potshots at perebroska,’ Velikanov said. ‘They torpedoed our work out of a vague sense of general frustration.’

In late 1983, when the news leaks out that flamingoes are rotting away in pink piles on the dry bed of Kara Bogaz, the liriki have a new weapon at their disposal. Under THE HEADING THE FOLLY OF LIEUTENANT ZHEREBTSOV, borrowed from Paustovsky himself, the Literaturnaya Gazeta writes: ‘The tragedy of Kara Bogaz once again illustrates the fatal results of cack-handed intervention in stable ecosystems.’

Velikanov regretted the damming of Kara Bogaz – ‘a blunder in the calculations’. That blunder had immediately exposed the sensible parts of the water-transfer plan to criticism as well. ‘On technical and substantial grounds, no real objection was possible,’ Velikanov told me. ‘The criticism to which we were subjected was aimed from start to finish at the state. But why did that social conflict have to be fought out at the expense of the water managers?’ In his view, the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction: the liriki had first praised Soviet engineering projects to the skies, now they were razing them to the ground.

The village writers adopted a nationalistic tone. Anyone wishing to draw water away from the Siberian taiga in favour of the Asiatic steppes, they said, was a traitor to the Russian people. As their captain, Valentin Rasputin claimed that perebroska was every bit as evil as Stalin’s extermination of the kulaks. In a letter to the Soviet government he threatened to burn himself alive in Red Square if the water-transfer project went ahead.

In the midst of this controversy, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985 as the seventh and final leader of the Soviet Union. This more lenient Party boss, whose career had begun during Khrushchev’s thaw, summoned the most vocal liriki and fiziki to the Kremlin. He listened to their arguments and, on 14 August 1986, ordered an end to perebroska.

MinVodChoz, one of the pillars of Soviet bureaucracy, was tottering. The Byzantine water apparatus had lost its raison d’être. What is more, its most powerful patron, Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law, had been unmasked shortly before as the supreme swindler of the Soviet system. For almost two decades, it turned out, he had led a Mafia-like organisation which specialised in the falsification of government statistics. Year after year, with the assistance of a network of frauds, he had ‘delivered’ gigantic shipments of fictitious cotton. Millions of tons of this non-existent fibre had simply been charged to the state’s purchasing agency; while the cotton fields of Central Asia were becoming salinised and exhausted, Uzbekistan continued to report that it was successfully fulfilling quotas by 100 per cent or more. Within the social experiment that was the Soviet Union, the lie concerning record harvests could flourish more vigorously than the cotton plant itself.

Mikhail Gorbachev had the ‘cotton scandal’ laid bare, and ordered that all those involved be punished. During the massive cotton trials held in the late 1980s, 27,000 Soviet officials were jailed for complicity in the Great Fraud, including Brezhnev’s son-in-law.

Gorbachev’s belief was that he could save the decaying Soviet Empire by reforming it. But tinkering with it was the very cause of its collapse.

Konstantin Paustovsky missed even the beginning of the showdown between liriki and fiziki; he died of a heart attack in the Kremlin Hospital on 14 July 1968, at the age of seventy-six.

As was customary, a summit in the Pamir Range was named after him: Paustovsky Peak is 6,150 metres high and looks up to Revolution Peak (6,974 metres) and Communism Peak (7,495 metres).

Galya showed me photographs of the funeral. Her stepfather had first been laid in state at the Writers’ House, wearing on his lapel the five-pointed star of the Order of Lenin awarded him on his seventy-fifth birthday. After friends and admirers had paid their last respects in Moscow, his body was brought to Tarusa. In an open coffin, his hands folded at the waist, he was carried by a procession of hundreds of mourners. The crowd wound its way through the narrow streets and up the wooded slopes to the village cemetery.

I asked Galya to show me the grave, but she said the climb would be too much for her. Volodya offered to accompany me instead.

The graveyard was located behind the municipal dump, in a forest overlooking the Oka. Like all Russian graves, these were marked with low iron fences, plastic bouquets and polished marble slabs, occasionally etched with a likeness of the deceased. The headstones were alternatively decorated with an Orthodox cross or a red star.

Volodya paused beside the double monument to Tatyana Paustovskaya (1910–1978) and her son Alexey (‘Alyosha’) Paustovsky (1950–1976).

‘Alexey had a tragic life,’ Volodya said. ‘He wanted to be at least as famous as his father, but he had neither the talent nor the patience. At the age of twenty-six, he literally drank himself to death.’

Not far from the twin memorial for mother and son lay a boulder in a little bed of violets: the grave of Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky – writer. A cross almost two metres high stood in the earth.

‘Was Paustovsky religious?’

‘No,’ Volodya said.

‘So why is there a cross on his grave?’

‘To keep the vandals away.’ In addition to drunkards and thieves, it turned out, Tarusa was also home to a gang of grave-desecrators. ‘At night they gather in the cemetery to stamp on the flowerbeds and knock over the fences.’

The ghouls of Tarusa, experience had shown, were put off by Orthodox crosses. But for dead Communists they showed neither fear nor awe.