Stalin's Meteorologist Read online

  also by olivier rolin in english translation

  Hotel Crystal

  Paper Tiger

  Devise a way

  That the eye not shut

  And yet the world vanish

  Since drowning is inevitable

  Never trust the boat

  But do

  Trust the river.

  —Kailash Vajpeyi

  Trans. from the Hindi by Ananya Vajpeyi

  For Masha

  And I thought and I read

  According to the Bible of the breezes

  —sergei yesenin, “Soil, Soil Soil” in The Collected Poems

  1

  he was an expert on clouds. The long cirrus ice quills, the swollen, towering cumulonimbi, the torn ragged strati, the stratocumuli that ruffle the sky like wavelets left in the sand by the receding tide, the altostrati that veil the sun, and all the vast, drifting shapes rimmed with light, the fluffy giants that produce rain and snow and lightning. But he didn’t have his head in the clouds—or at least I don’t think he did. From what I know of him, there is nothing to suggest he was an eccentric. He represented the USSR at the International Commission on Clouds, he spoke at pan-Soviet congresses on the formation of fog, and in 1930 he set up the Weather Bureau. But these lyrical names didn’t set him dreaming. As a scientist doing his job in the interests—of course—of building socialism he took it all seriously; he was no comic-strip Professor Nimbus.

  Clouds were not his excuse to dream, there was nothing nebulous about him; I suspect him even of a certain starchiness. Appointed the first director of the USSR’s Hydrometeorological Centre in 1929, he set out to establish a water registry as well as a wind and a sunshine registry. He probably saw nothing romantic in that, no invitation to reverie in mapping the intangible. It was the concrete that interested him, measurable realities, the collision of huge masses of air, the low-water levels of rivers, ice-dammed rivers and meltdowns, rainfall, and the effect of these phenomena on farming and on the lives of Soviet citizens. Socialism was being built in the sky too.

  He was born in 1881 in Krapivno, a village in Ukraine . . .

  2

  before chronicling the life and death of this man dedicated to the peaceful observation of nature who was crushed by the fury of history, I shall say a few words about the circumstances that led me to cross his path, long after his disappearance (here the word takes on its full significance, as we shall see). Stories don’t appear out of the blue or from the clouds, so it seems a good idea for them to present their credentials. In 2010, I’d been invited to speak at the University of Arkhangelsk. I was greeted with the warmth that is typical of Russian life, alongside a great deal of indifference and even roughness. A Welcome banner was unfurled and people brought out photos from an earlier trip (I’m a regular visitor there). The only downside was that the photos showed how much time had gone by, but it was touching all the same. I was treated perhaps not like a president, but let’s say a subprefect. I love Arkhangelsk because its name means Archangel, because of the wide estuary on which it stands, and which, in winter, you traverse on planks laid on the ice festooned at night with pale lights, because of the wooden houses that were still quite common when I first used to visit (few, since, have withstood the property developers), and because it seems to me that girls are particularly beautiful here (I remember girls gliding on roller skates on the embankment along the Dvina one May, their bare, tanned legs, hair flying in the wind, escorted by dragonflies—my equivalent of Proust’s girls on bicycles. I vaguely recall that Blaise Cendrars talks somewhere of the golden bells (or golden belfries?) of Arkhangelsk, but I can’t find it anywhere. It doesn’t matter: writers are not only what they have written, but what we think they have written.

  Then I took the small plane (an Antonov An-24, to be precise), which twice a week flies between Arkhangelsk and the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea. When the sea is frozen, as it is six months of the year, there is no other way of getting there. The man sitting next to me on the plane was a young Orthodox priest with a mop of frizzy hair who looked like Georges Perec (I’m not sure whether Perec would have welcomed the comparison, or the priest, had he known who Perec was, but I found that there was a strong resemblance). The holy man was holding an e-reader that I then thought to be the pinnacle of a modernity that I had not yet attained, and that seemed incongruous in a priest, especially Russian Orthodox. The hi-tech object had a leather cover decorated with an icon of the Virgin Mary on which he bestowed profuse kisses. I covertly peeked at his screen, hoping that it was an erotic novel, but I have to admit that it wasn’t.

  It was the beauty of the place, seen in photographs, that had prompted me to undertake this journey. And I’d barely stepped out of the little air terminal built of blue-painted planks when the sight of the high walls, the squat towers and (golden . . .) belfries of the monastery-stronghold stretching along an isthmus between a bay and a lake shrouded in snow convinced me I’d been right to come here. The same beauty as Mont Saint-Michel except that it was completely the opposite: a monastic and military monument, and a prison, in the middle of the sea, which extends horizontally, whereas Mont Saint-Michel soars vertically. Here, no crowds, no tourist kitsch. I hiked around the island, a black-and-white landscape of frozen lakes and coniferous forests that glowed blood red at sunset. I found sanctuary in a tiny hotel called Priyut—“the shelter.” Katia, the owner, was charming, extremely cheerful (admittedly, despite my Russophilia—which friends tease me about—this is quite unusual), pretty (perhaps the rather outmoded adjective “buxom” would be more apt), and her kindness stretched to telling me that I spoke her language very well. From my room in the evening I could see the walls and the scaly onion domes blazing across the ice. I had no idea that the first seeds of a book were being planted inside me—but that’s always the way, it creeps up on you.

  The monastery, founded in the fifteenth century by hermit monks, is one of the oldest in Russia. Each era has left its stamp, and from 1923, the monastery housed (if that is the word) the first camp of what was to become the Main Directorate for Camps and Detention Facilities, the Glavnoye upravlenie ispravitelno-trudovykh lagerey, sadly known by its notorious acronym, the Gulag. On my return, I set about reading all the books I could find on its history. That was how I learned that in the camp there had been a library of 30,000 volumes, made up directly or indirectly of books belonging to the deportees, many of whom were nobles or intellectuals (byvshy intelligentny chelovek or bich—“ex-intellectual” in the language of the secret police). Gradually the idea of making a film was born, and in April 2012 I returned to the Solovetsky Islands to scout locations.

  I was welcomed by Antonina Sochina, one of the island’s human memories. She was a delightful, lively, elderly lady, with reddish blonde hair and blue eyes, dressed in jeans and a roll-neck sweater. Her house was full of books and plants, she made wonderful jams with the berries that all Russians love—bilberries, cranberries, and another, whose English name I don’t know, a sort of orange-colored raspberry called moroshka—which grows in marshy areas and is so delicious that Pushkin is said to have asked for some on his deathbed (berries and mushrooms are a staple of the Russian diet and of its folklore; curiously the generic word for berries, yagoda, was also the surname of the head of the intelligence service and secret police, the Gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravlenie (GPU), later the NKVD, from 1934 to 1936: Genrikh Yagoda, who is to play a role in the next part of this story). Among the books that Antonina showed me there was one that had a cover with a picture of clouds, an album not for general sale, published by the daughter of a deportee in memory of her father. Alexey Feodosi
evich Wangenheim, the meteorologist, had been deported to the Solovetsky Islands in 1934. Half of the book comprised reproductions of letters he had sent from the camp to his daughter, Eleonora, who was not yet four at the time of his arrest. There were pressed flowers and colored illustrations of plants, drawn with a confident hand in crayon or watercolor, simple and clear. There were pictures of the aurora borealis, frozen seas, an Arctic fox, a hen, a watermelon, a samovar, an airplane, boats, a cat, a fly, a candle, and birds. The dried flowers and the drawings were beautiful, but they had not been composed solely to be visually pleasing: they had an educational purpose. The father was using plants to teach his daughter the basics of arithmetic and geometry. The lobes of a leaf represented the elementary numbers, its shape symmetry and asymmetry, while a pine cone illustrated the spiral. The drawings were answers to riddles.

  I was moved by this long-distance conversation between a father and his very young daughter, whom he would never see again, his determination to play a part in her education despite being far away. And I was moved by the daughter’s steadfast love for the father she had known so fleetingly, to which the commemorative book I leafed through at Antonina’s bore witness. He was, Eleonora said, an accomplished pianist, and she remembered hearing him play the Appassionata, the Moonlight Sonata and Schubert’s impromptus. He was fond of Pushkin and Lermontov. Until 1956, the year of his posthumous rehabilitation, she wrote, my mother waited for him to come back. When I misbehaved, she added, my mother would tell me that I’d be ashamed when my father came home. Judging myself through his eyes became the rule by which I lived. The idea of writing the story of this man, one of the millions of victims of Stalin’s madness, began to stir in me. Later, in Moscow, meeting people who had known Eleonora at the end of her life did the rest. She became a renowned paleontologist. I never had the opportunity to meet her: she had died not long before, in circumstances I shall describe. I regret that she didn’t live long enough to know that the album she dedicated to her father’s memory had the unforeseeable consequence of sparking another book, far away, in another country, in another language.

  3

  he was born in 1881, in Krapivno, a village in Ukraine whose name means “the place where nettles grow.” There are a lot of nettles in South Russia and in Ukraine and consequently there are a lot of Krapivnos (the name appears in the third line of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry). His village was on the outskirts of the little town of Nizhyn, whose high school has the honor of counting Gogol as an alumnus. His father, Feodosy Petrovich Wangenheim, was a barin, a minor nobleman, a deputy at the zemstvo, the regional council set up by Alexander II. The family’s very un-Russian name suggests a distant Dutch origin, possibly a ship’s carpenter who came to build Peter the Great’s fleet and was rewarded by being given a piece of land in Ukraine. A photograph shows Feodosy Petrovich as a man with a pleasant face framed by waves of grey hair and a bushy beard, and perhaps a slightly lecherous look. I imagine him like a character out of Chekhov—idealistic, loquacious, full of woolly ideas about social progress, a womanizer, a gambler, weak. He prided himself on his knowledge of agronomy and he planted an experimental field in the village of Uyutnoye, which lay on the railway line from Moscow and Kiev to Voronezh. On summer evenings in Uyutnoye, after inspecting his black currants, gooseberry bushes, and raspberry canes and watching the sun turn red beyond the rye fields, he would sit beneath the veranda in the company of women in light, swishing dresses, chatting with the doctor and the investigating magistrate over a cigar and brandy, discussing the education of the masses and criticizing the Tsar’s authoritarianism. One of the girls, sitting at the piano, plays a little piece by Schubert, or maybe Chopin. Pure conjecture. Daughters, on the other hand, it is a known fact that he had four with his wife Maria Kuvshinnikova, and three boys, including Alexey, the cloud enthusiast. In any case, it was certain he was not reactionary because after the Revolution he refused to emigrate like one of his sons, Nikolay, and became an advisor to the People’s Commissariat of Land Cultivation. And he allowed all his children—even the girls!—to study the sciences.

  I’d like to think that watching the clouds rolling above the infinite plain sparked off Alexey Feodosievich’s curiosity about meteors. Painters and writers have depicted this Russian or Ukrainian rural landscape countless times. A dizzying profundity of space, a vastness where everything seems immobile, a silence broken only by the cries of birds—quails, cuckoos, hoopoes, crows. Wheat or barley fields, expanses of blue grass dotted with yellow wormwood flowers, bounded by a rutted path. Birch and slender poplar groves, the golden domes of a church gleam in the distance, the roofs of a village, the occasional thin glint of a river: it is the landscape of The Steppe (which is set in this borderland between Ukraine and Russia), “At Home” and many other short stories by Chekhov, who was writing during those years. It is the landscape of Yesenin’s poetry, of Ivan Shishkin’s and Isaac Levitan’s paintings. Sometimes, far off in the immense distance, the funnel of a steam engine is a reminder that in the heart of this apparently frozen time something new is happening, which could possibly be progress but might also be a threat. And, overhead, in a sky exalted by the vast flatness of the land, the clouds “irregular and marvelously rotund” that the young narrator contemplates dreamily in The Life of Arsenyev by Ivan Bunin, the menacing clouds that the landscape artist Savrasov painted in 1881, the year Alexey Feodosievich was born, cast giant shadows over the shimmering fields.

  Those landscapes devoured by emptiness can also be seen in some color photographs taken at the beginning of the twentieth century by another noble passionate about science and technology, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who scoured the Empire, from the forests of Karelia to central Asia, to build up a photographic archive—3,500 plates, just under 2,000 of which have been preserved. This photographer-inventor, whose self-portrait beside a river in Georgia shows a long, mournful, bespectacled face with a drooping moustache beneath a soft hat, bears witness, like Chekhov, like his friend Isaac Levitan, like Bunin, like—in their own way—the Wangenheims father and son, to an era when Russian history seemed to be taking a different, more peaceful, more enlightened course than the dark, terrible one to come. The striking thing about his plates is not just the miraculous fidelity of the colors, but the way they give the viewer the feeling of being literally sucked towards the line where the sky and earth meet. What lies beyond, over there? Nothing. The edge of the world, perhaps, or the infinite repetition of the same things. Woods, fields, the steppe, paths, crows’ flights, tiny belltowers beneath the clouds. Russia is a forest, les, and Russia is a plain, pole. And Russia is space, prostor. I do not know much for certain or of significance about my character’s childhood, but I am certain that space played a part in his formative years.

  And so I would like to imagine that, lying in the grass like Bunin’s Arsenyev, Alexey Feodosievich dreamed one day: “What breathtaking beauty! I wish I could climb on to that cloud and float away, drift among those terrifying heights, in the immensity of the sky . . .” Maybe he did dream of doing so. But I think the truth is probably simpler and more prosaic: it was his father who passed on his vocation. Because the decidedly curious Feodosy Petrovich also dabbled in meteorology, having built a small weather station on his land. It was at home that Alexey first learned about the land and the sky, attending regional agricultural conferences with his father, studying the magnetic anomaly of the Kursk region, proposing a new method for calculating the number of plants per square meter (more reminiscent of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet than Chekhov), and, in Uyutnoye, reading the graphs traced by the little styluses of the recording instruments on rolls of graph paper—rainfall, humidity, atmospheric pressure, the strength and direction of the wind. He graduated from the Orel gymnasium with very good or excellent marks in all subjects: Greek, Latin, mathematics, catechism, French—curiously it was only in geography that his marks were merely “satisfactory.” At the turn of the century he gained admission to the mathematic
s department of Moscow University’s faculty of physics and mathematics, and got himself expelled almost immediately for taking part in the student protests of 1901. In Russia, they don’t do things by halves, especially protests, and the minister of public education was assassinated by a Socialist Revolutionary student.

  Alexey certainly didn’t go to such extremes. In reply to the dean who questioned him he stated that in principle he was against violence, but admitted that he had attended meetings and voted, and he was thrown out.

  Next came military service, followed by the Kiev Polytechnic Institute where he earned a diploma (with distinction) in the speed of cyclones. He then enrolled at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, but had not yet chosen between the earth and the sky; he wrote articles comparing the respective merits of natural fertilizers and minerals in the smoking process—again more akin to Bouvard and Pécuchet—then he taught mathematics at the girls’ gymnasium in Dmitriev, a small town north of Kursk. Let us move on quickly, we’re not writing his CV, but all the same, in Dmitriev he did something important: in 1906 he married the history and geography teacher Yuliya Bolotova. They had a daughter together who would become a renowned psychiatrist. His next step was the Caspian hydrometeorological department, in Petrovsk (modern-day Makhachkala) where he researched variations in the level of this landlocked sea—a problem that had fascinated Alexandre Dumas during his voyage to the Caucasus and that led him to come up with the harebrained hypothesis of a sort of valve that would open and shut natural channels between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Then came war and Alexey was called up to head the weather forecasting service of the 8th Army, fighting the Austrians in Galicia. Forecasting which direction the wind would come from and whether rain was on the way was important for gas attacks, and that was how war was waged at the time, both in the East and in the West. Then it was the Revolution, and he was back in Dmitriev. The fronts of civil war shifted; unlike his brother Nikolay he was not on the side of the Whites, who took the town. He hid on a farm; the Reds recaptured it and he was made inspector for the People’s Commissariat for Education. He organized agitprop meetings in the villages, sported a Lenin-style goatee beard and wore boots, a dark peacoat, and a cap. Head agronomist of the oblast (province), he set up little weather stations in various places whose data would help improve the harvests, but he often had difficulty convincing the muzhiks (peasants) that weather vanes, anemometers, and other whirligigs and little dishes were not evil devices to blame for the droughts.