embodiment of this awesome concept was planned twenty miles south of Novosibirsk in the Golden Valley by the Ob river. Building began in 1958, and within seven years 40,000 scientists, executives and their families had poured in to fifteen newly opened research academies. A garden city grew up in six micro-regions, with its own schools and supermarkets, an elite university, an artificial beach on the Ob reservoir, even ski-runs illuminated at night.
Here in the taiga, far from the watchful Party apparatus in Moscow, a brief, intoxicating freedom sprang up. Akademgorodok became the brain of Russia. It attracted a host of young, sometimes maverick, scientists, many from Siberia. It opened up fields of study previously forbidden. The Institutes of Nuclear Physics and Economics, of Hydrodynamics and Catalysis, shared the forest with academies devoted to geology, automation, thermophysics (for the tapping of volcanic energy beneath permafrost) and a Physiological Institute working on the adaptation of animals and plants to the Siberian climate. And at the centre of this cerebral spiderâs-web the Institute of Abstract Mathematics sat like a cool agony aunt, advising on the problems of all the rest. Informal communication between institutes was the touchstone of the placeâs founder, the mathematician Lavrentiev. There were breakthroughs in physics, biology and computer studies. For a few heady years it seemed as if the science-fiction city could fulfil its promise.
Then, with the fall of Khrushchev, ideological controls began to tighten. Science became yoked to industry and was commandeered to show direct economic returns. The heart went out ofthings. But in a sense the clampdown came too late. There were people working in Akademgorodokâthe economist Aganbegyan, the sociologist Zaslavskayaâwhose thought became seminal to perestroika . Yet ironically it was the chaotic results of Gorbachevâs revolution that laid waste the power-house whose institutes I tramped for two days.
They rose in mixed styles, prefabricated, sometimes handsome, recessed among their trees along irregular avenues. There were now twenty-three of them, but the only map I found catered for visitors shopping in the townâs handful of emporia. I scanned it in bewilderment. In Soviet times, I knew, maps were often falsified or full of blanks. This one featured the smallest bakery and cafe. But the institutes had become nameless ghosts. Were they too important to divulge, I wondered, or were they just forgotten?
I wandered them in ignorance, staring at their nameboards. âInstitute of Solid-state Chemistryâ¦Cytology and Geneticsâ¦Institute of Chemical Kineticsâ¦â We barely shared a language. In between, woodland paths wended among silver birch and pine trees, their trunks intermingled like confused regiments. The earth sent up a damp fragrance. It was obscurely comforting. A few professors strolled between institutes, carrying shapeless bags and satchels, and fell pleasantly into conversation.
One of these chance meetings landed me unprepared in the Akademgorodok Praesidium. The professor who introduced me soon disappeared, and I was left in a passage outside the General Secretaryâs office, like a schoolboy waiting to be beaten. I thought I knew these interviews. From the far side of his desk a sterile apparatchik would tell me that all was well. The only signs of truth would be chance ones: damp wallpaper or indiscreet secretaries or the way the manâs hands wrenched together. But I waited with suppressed hope. I wanted to know the outcome of several key Siberian projects, and sieved my brain for the Russian equivalent of ânuclear reactionâ or âelectric light stimulantâ, then gave up in despondency. I wasnât even dressed right. I was still wearing my Orthodox prayer-belt, and one of my climbing boots had developed a foolish squeak.
When the General Secretaryâs door opened, my
Here in the taiga, far from the watchful Party apparatus in Moscow, a brief, intoxicating freedom sprang up. Akademgorodok became the brain of Russia. It attracted a host of young, sometimes maverick, scientists, many from Siberia. It opened up fields of study previously forbidden. The Institutes of Nuclear Physics and Economics, of Hydrodynamics and Catalysis, shared the forest with academies devoted to geology, automation, thermophysics (for the tapping of volcanic energy beneath permafrost) and a Physiological Institute working on the adaptation of animals and plants to the Siberian climate. And at the centre of this cerebral spiderâs-web the Institute of Abstract Mathematics sat like a cool agony aunt, advising on the problems of all the rest. Informal communication between institutes was the touchstone of the placeâs founder, the mathematician Lavrentiev. There were breakthroughs in physics, biology and computer studies. For a few heady years it seemed as if the science-fiction city could fulfil its promise.
Then, with the fall of Khrushchev, ideological controls began to tighten. Science became yoked to industry and was commandeered to show direct economic returns. The heart went out ofthings. But in a sense the clampdown came too late. There were people working in Akademgorodokâthe economist Aganbegyan, the sociologist Zaslavskayaâwhose thought became seminal to perestroika . Yet ironically it was the chaotic results of Gorbachevâs revolution that laid waste the power-house whose institutes I tramped for two days.
They rose in mixed styles, prefabricated, sometimes handsome, recessed among their trees along irregular avenues. There were now twenty-three of them, but the only map I found catered for visitors shopping in the townâs handful of emporia. I scanned it in bewilderment. In Soviet times, I knew, maps were often falsified or full of blanks. This one featured the smallest bakery and cafe. But the institutes had become nameless ghosts. Were they too important to divulge, I wondered, or were they just forgotten?
I wandered them in ignorance, staring at their nameboards. âInstitute of Solid-state Chemistryâ¦Cytology and Geneticsâ¦Institute of Chemical Kineticsâ¦â We barely shared a language. In between, woodland paths wended among silver birch and pine trees, their trunks intermingled like confused regiments. The earth sent up a damp fragrance. It was obscurely comforting. A few professors strolled between institutes, carrying shapeless bags and satchels, and fell pleasantly into conversation.
One of these chance meetings landed me unprepared in the Akademgorodok Praesidium. The professor who introduced me soon disappeared, and I was left in a passage outside the General Secretaryâs office, like a schoolboy waiting to be beaten. I thought I knew these interviews. From the far side of his desk a sterile apparatchik would tell me that all was well. The only signs of truth would be chance ones: damp wallpaper or indiscreet secretaries or the way the manâs hands wrenched together. But I waited with suppressed hope. I wanted to know the outcome of several key Siberian projects, and sieved my brain for the Russian equivalent of ânuclear reactionâ or âelectric light stimulantâ, then gave up in despondency. I wasnât even dressed right. I was still wearing my Orthodox prayer-belt, and one of my climbing boots had developed a foolish squeak.
When the General Secretaryâs door opened, my
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