To The Other Shore: A Visit to the Soviet Union
Bell, Daniel
We are pleased to print below two excerpts from a journal that Daniel Bell wrote after his trip to the Soviet Union last spring. The first excerpt describes a lecture he gave at the Leningrad...
...I remarked that the Greek poet Hesiod (in the story repeated later in the play by Sophocles) had told the tale of two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus...
...I asked Grushin what the institute proposed to do...
...and various schemes were put forward for the reshaping of the official views...
...With difficulty," he said...
...Who...
...Just a hush...
...Some years later, when Rutkevich was proposed for full membership in the Soviet Academy of Science—no higher title or prestige is available to a Soviet scientist or scholar—Zaslayskaya rose at the meeting and declared that it would be a disgrace if someone like Rutkevich were given the title of Academician...
...At the same time, there were shortages in construction workers and in transport drivers, even though the wages were considerably higher than average...
...It was, I thought, the most unexpected and astonishing statement, and question...
...In the back, however, a dumpy woman stood up and said in a somewhat strident tone (one did not need a translation to recognize the bristle): "And have you read anything else on Marx's Capital besides Trotsky...
...For a short period, time had been suspended...
...There was an awkward pause...
...Many before them had been pushed down and drowned...
...I also felt an odd turbulence in myself...
...so she has been ordered back to the rest house...
...An apparatchik, M.N...
...I am Boris Grushin," he said, "the deputy director of the Institute...
...Whether out of a cynical need for legitimation or as an act of true belief, he had returned to the Lenin of the 1920s...
...The New Economic Program (NEP) had introduced some private enterprise and some markets...
...The proposal, which he gave me, stated badly that bureaucracy impedes innovation, "is a factor present at all levels of the social hierarchy and the hierarchy of power," and is a factor not "only in the sphere of administration but in all other spheres of modern society," and as such "has long been one of the real threats to the survival of humanity...
...We took the elevator to the third floor of the concert hall annex and entered some offices whose equipment was still being assembled, as desks and chairs were piled high or next to one another...
...The new views on stratification and the possibility of a new kind of interest (i.e., class) conflicts paralleled even stronger views that had been stated at the same time more publicly in Czechoslovakia by a group from the Czech Academy of Science under the direction of Radovan Richta in a book that had begun to attract considerable attention in the West...
...But come, let us sit and talk...
...I never dreamed that I would meet you, especially here in Moscow...
...The problem was not only the skewed prices, wasteful use of resources, and the lack of an adequate cost-accounting scheme...
...I smiled with some relief, having felt guilty at what might have been the unintended consequences of my work...
...One was from V. I. Lenin...
...These were the golden days of the party, and then came the disastrous turns...
...Prometheus, I pointed out, not only stole fire from the Gods, but his name meant foresight, and without foresight, we would be helpless...
...The events of 1968 brought an abrupt halt to these inquiries and discussions...
...Some were given fleetness, others strength...
...He took out an "organization chart," and said that they planned to set up twenty-five centers in different parts of the Soviet Union to try to raise questions with groups of people about what they felt they could do about things that needed to be done...
...You had under the Czar a patrimonial bureaucracy, to use Weber's term, and after that the party began to occupy all social space out of its self-declared intention of mobilizing the society to bring it out of its FALL • 1988 411 Glasnost Watch sloth...
...A wave of laughter swept through the room...
...Her new institute, the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion of Socio-Economic Problems, had been bruited about for weeks, but the official announcement had only just been made public the day before in a long, half-page laudatory article in Pravda...
...The conversation was not as formal or didactic as this reconstruction tends to convey...
...Decisions like that," he said, "were always taken under duress...
...That is the secret skin of the bureaucracy...
...And I published that...
...I can only note it here...
...Zaslayskaya had, in the last few years, quickly acquired the status of a legend...
...The young woman looked at me with a composed smile...
...A man spoke out...
...The doors were opened, the crowd made way, and we entered, followed by the throng...
...I told him, naturally, that I was very saddened to hear the news and asked him to convey to her my best wishes for her health...
...Did that mean," I asked, "that the party would surrender partiinost...
...who has a question...
...The hush returned...
...The laughter stopped...
...What this meant was that three clerks were doing the job of two...
...What Grushin thought about its Alice-in-Wonderland quality I do not know...
...Frankly, I do not recall, at least not consciously...
...The people I had met here had learned to live under water...
...The Catholic priest had called his parishioners to mass and final confession...
...But this was Moscow and it was still an open question whether glasnost, which for people like Grushin had become fresh air to fill their lungs and allow them to breathe, would continue or be stifled...
...Again, what was the answer...
...Ironically, in recent months the Western news media have been under attack in the official press for daring to suggest that such deep divisions existed...
...It was a muted, rectangular room, its walls of plaster with wood panels, stucco, and some faded gold paint breaking up the space at intervals...
...I have an answer...
...perhaps they were right—or wrong...
...This kind of acrobatics had become a high, abstract art...
...It had been, I was told, the major government ministry building initiated by Peter, and was for many years the largest administrative building in Russia...
...Stratification theory had begun to rear its head in a society whose official views, proposed by such official Communist theoreticians as V. Afanasyev, were that a socially homogenous society was the characteristic of the Soviet Union and that "the Soviet intelligentsia . . . is a genuine people's intelligentsia with its roots in the working class and the peasantry...
...Marxists had always thought, of course, that this applied to capitalism...
...This was, I thought, the essence of Gorbachev...
...Bureaucracy fills every pore of our society and it is not clear that we will ever be able to get rid of it, yet we cannot continue to function with such a bureaucracy for it is throttling our life...
...Yes," I replied...
...But it had taken Pravda three weeks to run an answer...
...At times one could feel sighs emerging from the audience, as if a common release of breath had merged into a wave that moved back towards us, as our voices rose and fell in the slow steady singspiel...
...But Gorbachev has shown that this applied as well to Soviet society, where there was a contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations—the bureaucracy...
...This is," he said, "our conception of 412 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch democratization, of awakening consciousness and promoting initiative...
...Grushin took a copy of his book, published, I noticed, in 1987, and wrote on the title page: "To Prof...
...There were two quotations, as epigrams...
...Grushin said: "You make me smile, in a Russian way...
...Gorbachev, it seems quite clear, had been spotted by Andropov, brought to Moscow, and promoted by him to the Politburo...
...No one moved...
...I had been scheduled to speak to the faculty and staff of the schools of social sciences, but when some posters had gone up advertising the talk, graduate students and research students had clamored to be invited and the talk had been moved to a larger hall to accommodate the audience...
...She has had to return to the sanatorium...
...As we prepared to leave the Soviet Union, I thought of the story of the town deep in the valley that had been cut off by rising flood waters...
...Something deeper was driving the current of expectation, something religious or political...
...I asked Grushin the question that had been asked of me all week, in Leningrad and Moscow: "Can perestroika work...
...I asked him if he had discovered any new theories about stages of development in Marxist theory, having told him of a conversation many years ago in Warsaw with Eduard Lipinski, the grand old man of Polish socialism, who had said: "We have learned—feudalism was the age of wood, and capitalism the age of iron, and socialism— it is the age of paper...
...Yes," he said, "this is somewhat true, but I do not think it is, in our situation, entirely the fault of the party...
...Some people frowned or looked embarrassed, but the audience turned expectantly to my answer...
...Grushin took the comment as a matter of course: here we were, of an older generation, he a Bolshevik, I a Menshevik, seeking the wrong turns in "social development," yet I could not but think of the irony of my conducting such a discussion, begun almost fifty years ago in the City College alcoves, now in Moscow...
...But if we looked not at God but at nature, it was clear that, left to our own strengths, man could not easily survive in the world...
...the Protestant minister had suggested the congregation gather in the church to await the end...
...As I said, we talked for about three hours...
...The building itself, as we approached it, displayed a long, imposing façade with hundreds of windows in serried rank on each level...
...He moved over to his desk and picked up a newspaper, the Sovietskaya Rossiya (the paper of the Russian Federation), and pointed to an article whose title was "I cannot forget my principles...
...From what I know of literature and culture, the first technological revolution gave us Balzac and Zola...
...A few years before, an extraordinary document, the Novosibirsk Report, had been written during the Brezhnev period, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in full in Survey in London...
...Quite a difference, I thought, between writing Kolyma Tales* and Czech Humor—the distance, I suppose, between Stalin and Brezhnev...
...You know, of course," I replied, "that for Marx the crux of all social development is the contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations of production...
...The newspaper itself had not been hostile to Gorbachev, but the fact that they had now printed this long article, presumably by a Leningrad schoolteacher, was disturbing...
...Norton, 1980...
...At that point, I did not, could not, answer any further questions...
...It is one of the mysteries of Soviet life that a future historian, or novelist, will have to unravel...
...A reference to the nineteenth-century Russian novel Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov...
...You have talked," he said, "about technology and the way it has changed our world...
...Andropov has said, he began, that this is a society that does not know itself...
...The second, some lines of poetry in the Russian orthography, from G. Apollinaire...
...About what...
...I did not make notes, still feeling, perhaps without warrant, that it was not wise to do so...
...After a moment, there was a wave of applause and students surged forward, surrounding me, murmuring, thank you, thank you, please come back, please come back...
...Were there status reasons, seventy years after the revolution, for people wanting only white-collar jobs, or was it simply the fact that people did not wish to work outdoors in the Russian winter, or was it that parasitic Russian disease called bureaucracy that filled all the pores of the society...
...and such notes then seem "dead" when re-read...
...Would we have learned to live under water...
...As I spoke, I stopped after each short phrase and Anne translated fluently...
...In the afternoon, we set out for Leningrad State University...
...The audience tensed...
...A small shiver of delight seemed to pass through the audience...
...We talked for about three hours...
...The idea was disturbing to people, and Rutkevich had it suppressed and I was banished—to Prague...
...D. Bell with the best wishes in memory of our Moscow meeting, B. A. Grushin, 18.03.88...
...What an extraordinary point/counterpoint...
...I spoke in English, which Grushin understood quite easily, but he preferred to speak in Russian, which Anne translated...
...Eros...
...tension that has been generated...
...Both Aganbegyan and Zaslayskaya had been summoned to Moscow, where they clearly had begun to function as the spearhead of the Gorbachev program for "reconstruction...
...In what way," he asked...
...how could that be...
...Chernenko had succeeded Andropov and everything was stalled for the while...
...They were easy, cheap, sentimental, lachrymose...
...I had heard that she has a weak heart and had not come to the States for that reason...
...Grushin was a merry man and, given our mutual interest in humor, in my case Yiddish stories, much of the time was spent, intermittently, in trading stories...
...Some even argued that those engaged in professional and administrative functions constitute a separate social group, if not a social stratum...
...I can only say, about everything...
...In Russian there is the phrase na leva, which means not only 'working off the books,' but so acting that the right hand never knows what the left hand (na leva) is doing...
...but when the time had come for man to emerge in the world, Epimetheus had squandered his bag of attributes and man, unshod and unarmed, stood helpless before nature...
...I have read Capital, Volume One, Capital Volume Two [repeating each time, for emphasis, the word Capital], Capital, Volume Three [chortles and laughter began in the audience as the woman, still standing, began to fidget...
...The second technological revolution gave us Heidegger and Sartre, and maybe Herman Hesse...
...Yet it had only been a breathing space...
...I had been carrying on a conversation—jokes, history, sociological references— which I could have and had conducted in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England...
...There is less need for partiinost in culture, and certainly more need for criticism and responsiveness to the actual lives of people...
...I said that as a young man I had read a book by a man whose name, until recently, was taboo in the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky (a sudden stillness in the room), in which Trotsky, expounding Karl Marx's Capital (it was in the book, The Living Thoughts of Marx), had said that under capitalism each man thought for himself, but no one thought for all...
...Some good economists," I said...
...But in Prague I could not do serious work, so I began a book on Czech beer hall humor and went to nine hundred beer halls to collect the jokes...
...I blinked at this mention of Andropov and, courage failing me, perhaps, did not ask why he had invoked his name...
...Yet, against myself the rhythm of that talk, the strophe/antistrophe, had carried me along the waves...
...As I spoke (and experienced teachers have had that feeling), I sensed the audience beginning to move with the rhythm, swaying in their seats, so that I felt that while I was speaking I was seeing a Russian wheat field, golden in the sun, the light streaming in from the windows at the left, the stalks swaying gently in the wind...
...A character in Tolstoy's War and Peace, a peasant representing the virtues of "natural man...
...Having come from the people, it serves them with devotion and dedication...
...Other questions followed hungrily...
...What did I speak about...
...Much of this was familiar to serious Western students of the Soviet economy, but what marked this document was the candor and even harshness of its tone and the fact that it had been written and circulated in Novosibirsk...
...I had tried that afternoon to speak simply and directly...
...He seemed to be in his early thirties and spoke, as I sensed it, rather awkwardly...
...Oblomov is an indolent if also lovable character, symbolic, perhaps, of certain aspects of Russian life...
...What authors have arisen or what can we expect from the third technological revolution...
...There were not even murmurs or FALL • 1988 • 407 Glasnost Watch the usual shifting of weight in the seats...
...But if you return to the 1920s," I said, "what do you make of the Tenth Party Congress and Lenin's attack on Shliapnikov and the Worker's Opposition group...
...What 408 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch they were I can no longer recall except the sad, last one...
...The first excerpt describes a lecture he gave at the Leningrad State University...
...what, in effect, did it mean to study "public opinion" in a society such as the Soviet Union...
...You may not know why, of course," he 410 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch continued...
...As I continued, my voice became steadier, more resonant, and quickly a sing-song rhythm developed between us and the waves of sound lapped out over the hushed audience, in a duet, baritone and soprano, strophe and antistrophe, a rising and falling steady beat...
...I could not even face up to the long sessions of Shoah, though Claude Lanzmann himself had sought understatement and terseness...
...None of the theories we have, including that of Weber, are of any use to us...
...the Rabbi had called together the shtetl and said: "Rebeysai, we have twenty-four hours to learn how to live under water...
...q 414 • DISSENT...
...But I did not voice these questions.] "How does one make a large portion of the population unemployed when the Revolution had promised everyone a job...
...I had also read an essay by Grushin, in the Moscow News (in English), that a Harvard colleague had sent me earlier, which berated the new fad of newspaper opinionpolling and the publication of such results, on the ground that they were bound to be spurious...
...Often in listening to individuals speaking of the Holocaust, I would cringe or tense myself to hold back the contradictory feelings I had—the urge to weep and the resentment at the speaker's manipulation of the emotion, even if unintended...
...Moreover, no one laughed or hooted...
...I stopped, said spassiba to the audience, and stepped off the stage...
...I have read Tugan-Baranowsky and even Bukharin...
...Rutkevich, had been brought in to reorganize the Institutes of Sociological Research and many of the individuals concerned had been silenced, forbidden to publish, banished, or limited to bland and meaningless projects...
...Up front I could see a man, his head rocking slowly back and forth, crooning dreamily, in delight, as his lips formed the words, "Tugan-Baranowsky, TuganBaranowsky, " like a tom-tom...
...Clearly a portion of the audience had a classical education...
...The article said that perestroika could be a "threat to socialism," and that whatever wrongs might have been done in the past, the party has been set on some fundamental paths that had to be maintained...
...What we do not understand," said Grushin, "is bureaucracy...
...And then he walked to a bookcase, withdrew a volume that he held in his hand and said, thrusting it at me: "Because of you, I was banished from work and sent into exile...
...As for the goals of the society, this remained the historic task of the party—to set the goals, he emphasized, but not necessarily to dictate all means...
...In 1966 a conference of Soviet sociologists had been held in Minsk in which a number of individuals had declared that Lenin's definition of class did not apply to present-day Soviet society...
...And I have more often trusted my memory to single out the important elements in a conversation, for I have found that the act of immediately writing down notes (often a means of allaying anxieties) robs one of the emotional * Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov (New York: W.W...
...and no clear direction actually followed from it...
...We both left unsaid the names of Stalin and the Yezhovschina...
...There was no lectern and apparently Anne, the young lady who was to translate, and Copyright © Daniel Bell I were simply expected to stand there and talk...
...Now, with our passports and business-class tickets, we were leaving with ease...
...I have read, also, the Theoreien fiber der Mehrwert, the unfinished and posthumous collection on surplus value edited by Karl Kautsky, and," I continued, "I have even read other Russians on Capital besides Trotsky...
...Clearly, too, the lines were drawn and each side knew where it stood...
...The Russian bureaucracy, I believe, is unique in the history of sociology...
...Grushin replied that there was a sociological counterpart to these stages of economic development: in the beginning we have the theory of socialism as the international form of the human race, then the idea of socialism in a single country, and now, with Romania, socialism in a single family...
...A number of times we were interrupted by telephone calls and Grushin apologized, saying that since the announcement in Pravda he had been bombarded by calls from various sociologists and others who wanted to join the institute...
...In the 1920s, we had vigorous debates about industrialization and collectivization, but it was only when such debates were brutally ended that the atrophy began to set in...
...and I had come home, to the other shore...
...For years I had fought within myself against giving emotional speeches...
...The audience became more and more hushed and I felt that our two voices were chanting some folk or religious melody...
...and he was defeated...
...I replied quietly that I did not believe that technology, or the substructure of society, gives rise to different modes of culture...
...To break the silence, I said what I have sometimes said on finishing speaking as awkward silence had developed (but this time there was no awkwardness): "I feel now like the Rabbi after a lesson...
...I, too, had been caught up in that rhythm and the sense of communion that had gripped the audience, and I spoke almost as if I had been praying in some synagogue stetl, where my grandfather, the melamid after whom I had been named, had been leading the Hallel in a responsive chant...
...Culture, at its most profound, responds to the deepest impulses of individuals to the existential predicaments we all have to face, such as death or tragedy...
...I continued that, as a young man, I had been very impressed by the statement, but as I grew older, I began to reflect: Could any one think for all...
...There was an awkward embrace of two hands on two hands, and I left...
...We got up to go...
...We had been standing during this exchange and as I moved to take a seat, Grushin moved forward and, surprisingly, placed his arms around me in a great hug, beamed, saying: "You have no idea how much of a pleasure this is for me...
...Laughter broke out in the room and suddenly there was an excited buzz of noise as people began talking to their neighbors and grinning at my statement...
...My conversation with Grushin took place on March 18th...
...Three weeks later, Pravda ran a front-page editorial attacking Sovietskaya Rossiya for providing a nostalgic glow to the Stalin era and declared that "hushing up the painful issues of our history is tantamount to neglecting the truth, [and] displaying a disrespectful memory of those who were innocent victims of lawlessness and arbitrary rule...
...And some went so far as to view the party not in the original Leninist terms as the vanguard of the working class but as an instrument for resolving conflicts of interests among different social groups...
...Andropov, according to many reports and surmises, had begun the process of "reform," but had fallen ill so quickly that there was nothing to verify those stories...
...I was leaving, and going back to places FALL • 1988 • 413 Glasnost Watch where they could still be carried on...
...A few months before, Zaslayskaya had given an interview to a Yugoslav paper in which she had declared that the Soviet worker was crippled as a human being because of the shackles on him and that perestroika could not be successful until the Soviet worker had been given more of a voice...
...Clearly Grushin and his friends had immediately recognized the meaning and the significance of that article...
...I asked...
...Little wonder that I looked forward to meeting her...
...I pointed out that in the poem Epimetheus had been given the task of equipping all species for living in the world...
...But Zaslayskaya, as other stories emerged, was more than just a new ideologue replacing the old...
...At the end of the room was a raised platform that was bare but looked as if a piano could have stood there if a recital were being given...
...A Marxist analysis, I said, could not account for the persistence of the great historic religions across millennia, while empires had crumbled, modes of production had disappeared, and political systems dissolved...
...Did I have an answer to that question...
...As the Moscow correspondent of the London Times reported: "The bitterness of the commentary was seen as evidence of the arguments now wrecking party unity in closeddoor discussions...
...I did not feel elated, only drained...
...There were other, more prosaic questions about technology, and then someone asked, did not foresight mean planning, and in that respect what did I think of perestroika...
...You see," he said, opening the book entitled Massovoe Sozhnane, "in 1966 I began to write about the idea of mass society, a concept that puzzled many of my colleagues, and I drew much of my classification from your book The End of Ideology...
...In its old form," he said, "I hope so...
...We both stood quietly, almost holding hands...
...It later appeared that the individual who had inspired the report was Abel Aganbegyan, also at Novosibirsk, who had emerged as Gorbachev's principal adviser on the reform of the economy and whose book, The Economic Challenge of Perestroika (1988), maps out in detail a program for the encouragement of markets without capitalism—a daring theoretical move in relation to Soviet economic theory of the past fifty years...
...and sad, sad that the hunger for such a talk was so palpable and so unfulfilled...
...I turned to the next page...
...How does one deal with such precious naïvet...
...He shrugged...
...And how does one break up that intricate network of connections that bypasses all the formal rules and shuffles all the papers round and round so that decisions are never taken and, when they are, often not implemented...
...I thought of what my son David had written us: almost eighty years ago our parents had left Russia and crossed the ocean in steerage...
...Obviously there was a large degree of camaraderie in the office...
...Did not Lenin declare that 'we' must break the society of Oblomovism* and shake up the Platon Karatayevs** who in their passivity act as a drag on 'progress...
...I told him that Gorbachev was also proving to be a creative Marxist thinker, for he had applied Marx's theory of contradictions fruitfully to the Soviet Union...
...A series of calmly written but terrifying stories about life in the Gulag Archipelago, where the author spent seventeen years as a prisoner...
...We finished, and there was a long hush...
...I asked, first, about the scope of the institute and what they proposed to do...
...All that might, with skillful maneuvering, be managed...
...You will be interested, I think, in a proposal we are making to the International Fund for a Nuclear-Free World for the Survival of Humanity, which has been set up by Armand Hammer, an international research project to study bureaucracy...
...And now...
...A young man in front stood up, groping for words: "You have talked of three technological revolutions...
...But as we look about and see the destruction that technology has created, would it not be better if we had left it as God had given us...
...At this point the translator, for the first time, faltered at the second name, and from at least three or four persons in the audience the name Epimetheus was given to her...
...In the lectures I usually give, more often in recent years on technology or economics, I have tried to be expository, illustrative and, to the extent I could, witty, resenting the cheap jibes of others to get a rise out of the audience...
...Our major appointment that afternoon was with Tatyana Zaslayskaya...
...We read Antigone because of the impulse to give decent burial to her brother and so, if necessary, to defy the state, an impulse that is not erased by time or technology, as we could see in the extraordinary modern version of Antigone, one of the great Russian classics of the Soviet era and one of the great works of "hope," the book of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (the Russian wordplay did not need translation), the search of this extraordinary woman to find the body of her husband who had disappeared in the Stalin purges, in order to give him a decent burial...
...One of the reputed authors of the document was Zaslayskaya...
...I was not giving a technical talk, nor, I felt, did the audience want a technical response...
...The word bureaucracy brought him back to that question...
...I gave an involuntary shudder, thinking grimly of Siberia, or worse...
...Given the pitch of excitement I felt and the extraordinary reception that had greeted me, I felt that I could better trust my feelings to retain the essentials of that conversation even more than a month later, as this is written...
...A secretary led us to a large square room and a short, stocky man with graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard bounded forward to greet me...
...She had been away for a month of rest," Grushin continued, "but then returned to work too soon, and there has been a small relapse...
...It was a devastating indictment of the waste, the inefficiency, the sluggishness of the Soviet economy, an attack on the rigidities of the central planning system, FALL • 1988 • 409 Glasnost Watch and discussion of the low productivity in the economy as a consequence of the workers' resentments at the poor management of the factories...
...Regrettably, Zaslayskaya cannot be here...
...I began by saying that we do not know what God intended of us, though religious teachings counseled love and charity (I deliberately used the Hebrew word tzdukkah...
...Could this not be due," I said, "to the fact that you have never had in Russian history a sense of civil society...
...It also may be the basis of the restoration of Bukharin to an honored place in party history, since many of the themes of perestroika could be traced, to some extent, to Bukharin...
...It was," he said, "a dangerous sign...
...I could barely hold back tears, tears generated by the tension and emotion of that extraordinary afternoon...
...those who were weak had been given fertility, and others cunning...
...The real problem, he said, was "full employment...
...If that were the case, epochs of history would be walled off from one another and it would be difficult for us to respond to culture across time and space...
...The following segment of Daniel Bell's journals describes an experience in Moscow...
...She was a woman in her mid-fifties who had spent most of her life in the Academy of Science at Novosibirsk, a place where the more independent scientists and economists had "retreated" and were given somewhat wider latitude than those at the Center in Moscow...
...she blurted out...
...He apologized for the disarray of his office and asked a colleague to bring in some fruit and cookies and mineral water, which the man did, jocularly, entering with a large tray laden with these and approaching us with measured steps and putting it down with a flourish...
...The important point is that we could not go back later and reconsider...
...The room quickly filled up and there were, I would guess, between 250 and 300 persons present...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
