As the protocols from the Lubyanka confirm with all the legalistic rancour of class struggle, Nina’s father’s origins were bourgeois. Indeed, by 1917, his mother Vera Balandina was a self-made millionairess who owned railroads, coal mines and steamboats that plied the great Yenisei River, from Krasnoyarsk to the Arctic seas. Nina is free now to celebrate this Siberian matriarch for all that her enlightened capitalism was able to catalyse in the peasant lands of her native region. Against her father’s wishes, Vera Balandina had gone to St Petersburg to enrol in the Bestuzhev Higher Courses for Women, graduating in 1893 with a Master’s degree in chemistry. She socialised with revolutionary-democratic kursistki like Olga Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, whom she greatly admired, and Zinaida Nevzorova, wife of the Bolshevik Gleb Krzhizhanovsky (who worked with Molotov in the Party secretariat on Vozdvizhenka in 1922, and was later one of his deputies in the Council of People’s Commissars). Vera married another natural scientist and travelled with him to Paris, where she attended lectures at the Sorbonne and worked at the Institut Pasteur. Back in Siberia, true to the progressive convictions that had formed in her student days, Balandina founded a non-fee-paying girls’ school, a ‘people’s library’, a theatre, and a bookshop which stocked the latest publications in the arts and sciences. She set up chemistry laboratories and organised prospecting expeditions. She discovered diamonds in eastern Siberia, and rich seams of coal on the wide Abakansky steppe. There she founded mines and a town, naming it Chernogorsk, Black Mountain. Her mines were electrified above and below ground, connected by canal and rail with wharfs on the Yenisei River. She built a hospital, a grain mill, a school, a library for the miners, and mutual credit associations that soon spread over all parts of Siberia. In 1912, Vera Balandina was the only woman to serve on the railway-building committee of the Ministry of Finance. Poor babushka, Nina lamented one spring afternoon as we stood on the back verandah of the dacha looking out at the lily of the valley blooming among the resurgent nettles, what would she have said if she knew that under Comrade Stalin the town she created had become a Gulag, with prisoners working the mines?
For her own children, Vera set up a chemistry laboratory at home. Alexei Balandin later reflected that, although intellectual life was sparse in Siberia, it offered a rich natural environment which he hoped to understand and turn to the use of his people. He had completed his education in Moscow, in a liberal gymnasium on Znamenka, the first mixed school of its kind in Russia, a serious and exciting institution in which he was confirmed in his scientific vocation. In one lesson, an eccentric geography teacher, forgetting that he was addressing schoolchildren, had agitatedly tried to explain Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the structure of the atom: ‘a remarkable event, an event of the highest significance, my dear gentlemen …’ The ‘philosophy of chemistry’ is the ‘foundation of the contemplation of the world’, the eighteen-year-old Balandin wrote, as he prepared to enter Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine. Chemistry is a ‘penetration into the secrets of nature’ which will ‘broaden our understanding of the mysterious phenomena associated with radioactive substances’.
Some minds penetrate further into the secrets of nature than others, achieving hard understanding as well as delight. The people for whom the Lutsino dachas were built in the late 1940s have theories and natural effects named after them. Though Academician Rebinder, father of Nina’s neighbour Mariana at dacha No. 2, is more fondly remembered in Lutsino for his love of mushroom-hunting, his style on the tennis courts, and for the rare and decorative trees that he planted in the colony, a certain process of reduction in the solidity of heavy bodies is still known as the ‘Rebinder effect’. When I was told that the first enquiries into the influence of atmospheric turbulence on the diffusion of light rays were conducted close by, in the laboratories of the Zvenigorod Research Centre, I could think only of the brilliance of the rainbow over the cemetery last spring. The description of the ‘intensification of falling light dispersed by objects in its path’ evokes in my mind nothing more than the sunshine finding its way through this dense forest, moving from tree to tree, flushing the snow balanced on the branches, and coming to rest at midday in radiant hoops in the tops of the pines.
The Lutsino colony lies along a hill above the Moscow River. We often took the hour-long walk through the colony, down a narrow path to the riverbank and back along the opushka, as the edge of the forest is called, under the steepening slope. Light and matter often changed roles here. In late summer the river water would look glazed, exhausted in the last heat, in some places no colour at all, just a surface of light with a dull beaten sheen. Downriver, a rowing boat lay motionless on the water, its fisherman a silhouette in the haze. After the violent rainstorms of the night, the earth still steamed. Thousands of spider-spun threads webbed the grass, trembling. The lush clover was weighted with large globes of rainwater. Vapour hung in the rushes on the opposite bank. The villages across the dark ploughed fields were lost in mist.
Andrei Sakharov, who looked deeply into the mysterious workings of the material world, spent long summers in the villages around the ancient town of Zvenigorod during his childhood, first at Dunino with a ‘large, warm-hearted family of Russified Germans’, the Ulmers, doctors, engineers and lawyers, most of whom were arrested and killed in the 1930s. Later at Lutsino, he would wander for hours alone on the opushka by the river. Summers in this serene lyrical countryside left deep impressions on him, he wrote in his memoirs. All his life, his greatest joy was to lie on his back and look up through the branches at the sky, listening to the hum of insects, or to roll over on his stomach the way he had as a suntanned child, and observe their tiny life in the grass and the sand. His glancing memories of childhood summers include a recollection of newspaper reports of the Zinoviev–Kamenev trial, and Vyshinsky’s summation for the prosecution, ‘filled, as always, with cruel and affected rhetoric’. Sakharov grew up to become an atomic physicist. In 1948, when German prisoners of war were still building the dacha colony at Lutsino, he joined an elite Academy of Sciences research team, under the supervision of Beria (who had taken over the project from Molotov, who was not up to the subtleties of the task), investigating the possibility of creating thermonuclear weapons.
Five years later, Sakharov found himself lying on his stomach again, far from Lutsino, near the settlement of Kara-Aul in Kazakhstan, watching in awe as the Soviet H-bomb was tested. He tore off his goggles to see better the streamers of purple dust that were sucked up into the stem of a vast and shimmering mushroom cloud, as the earth rumbled and the sky turned a sinister blue-black. Working on the project, Sakharov said, he suddenly became old and grey.
‘For seven years or so, the Soviet Union had to live with the fact that America had the capability of inflicting very great destruction on Russian cities, without the Soviet Union being able to reply in kind,’ the reader underlined in thick hard pencil, with a firm tick in the margin, in P. M. S. Blackett’s Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional (London, 1962), one of the more heavily annotated books in the Molotov library. ‘To justify to the tender consciences of Western peoples the deliberate plan, in certain military circumstances, to annihilate tens of millions of Russian men, women, and children,’ he marked with a double line in the margin, ‘it was necessary to believe the USSR to be innately aggressive and wicked. Once a nation pledges its safety to an absolute weapon, it becomes emotionally essential to believe in an absolute enemy.’