This prohibition was a sore spot in Pavel Alekseevich’s work: nearly half of all emergency operations were the consequences of underground abortions. Contraceptives were practically nonexistent. Physicians were obliged under pain of criminal penalty to examine each woman brought in by ambulance “to inspect for evidence of an underground abortion.” Pavel Alekseevich avoided such veiled denunciations and entered the condemning words criminal abortion in his patient’s medical history only when the patient was dying. If the life of the woman were spared, such a medical opinion would have put the victim as well as the person who had performed this age-old procedure in the dock. Several hundred thousand women were in labor camps precisely because of this law.
The extensive program Pavel Alekseevich was charged with developing encompassed social as well as medical aspects.
The project reminded him of any one of those papers submitted to his reigning Highness by the best sons of the fatherland, among them both romantics and dimwits, a broad spectrum of interesting characters, from Prince Kurbsky to Chaadaev. His own father, Aleksei Gavrilovich Kukotsky, had been among them.
Pavel Alekseevich foresaw that after the war major changes would shake the very institution of the family; he expected a large number of single mothers and viewed this phenomenon as socially inevitable and even advantageous. He considered it imperative to introduce various benefits for single mothers, yet at the same time believed that the first step had to be the repeal of the resolution of July 1936 prohibiting abortions.
As work progressed, the project expanded and turned into a veritable utopia between the lines of whose fantastic constructions shone serious and very constructive ideas that were far ahead of their time. For example, it presupposed the establishment of social services for parents, sex education for young people, and the creation of a network of children’s homes and sanatoria where the care and upbringing of both physically and mentally healthy children would be practiced based on scientific principles. This in part echoed pedagogical methods forbidden in the 1930s and even smacked slightly of Chernyshevsky. The need for medical genetic consulting also had not been overlooked: Pavel Alekseevich intended to charge his school friend, Ilya Goldberg, doctor of genetics, with organizing this aspect.
The Minister of Health at the time was a woman beyond her prime, an experienced bureaucrat and a party member from the salt-and-pepper top of her head to the stubborn calluses on her feet; she also happened to be the only woman in the government. For years she had been known as Workhorse, partly because it sounded like her surname, and partly owing to her indefatigability and rare ability to plug on, never swerving from the assigned path. She even liked the nickname, and not infrequently, having allowed herself a good bit to drink with close company, was wont to boast: “Yes, it’s true, the Russian woman is a steed with balls. She can tackle anything!”
She was incontestably the number-one woman in the country, a symbol of women’s equality, and International Women’s Day incarnate, after, of course, the mythological Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, and the eternally youthful Liubov Orlova. All of them, Workhorse included, resembled each other in one way: they were all childless . . .
Initially, when the project of reorganizing health care was only just getting under way, Workhorse was a major supporter, but as Pavel Alekseevich’s work increasingly gained scope, her enthusiasm cooled. In fact, she got scared. The project looked too radical, demanded enormous financing and—and this was the main thing—risk. In many respects blind, deaf, and dumb, Workhorse possessed superhuman acuity for the fluctuating moods of those higher up, which she regarded as the interests of the state. Intuition told her that at the moment the state’s interest hardly lay in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, or in maternal care or pediatrics, but in other loftier endeavors.
Academician Oparin, for example, had already explained how organic matter had evolved from inorganic matter through the introduction of electric currents blasted—with a boost from the doctrines of Marx and Engels—into a primary broth of ideologically trustworthy protein molecules. Another academician, Trofim Lysenko, had almost succeeded in subordinating Mother Nature to the wave of his magic wand, and she had already made a firm promise to him to behave as required by the carrot-and-stick method. A third academician, that world-famous woman Olga Lepeshinskaya, was within inches of conquering old age, and a foot from conquering death itself. The atom had already agreed to become peaceful, and rivers were ready to flow wherever needed, instead of where they so desired. Soviet science—medical science, in particular—was in full bloom even without the repeal of that infamous resolution on abortions, while the great leader of all times and peoples, paralyzed left arm stuck in his jacket, used his working right arm to accept an immortal bouquet from the hands of a little blond girl (who subsequently on investigation turned out to be Jewish) and smiled wisely . . .
Still, that bald gynecologist came to the ministry every week to badger the minister with one and the same question: had she sent the project upstairs? No, no, and no! At the present moment there was no way she could take it upstairs. What if they suddenly took it the wrong way? Besides, ideas usually travelled in the opposite direction: not upward from below, but downward from above. For the moment they had forgotten about reorganizing health care, and she was not about to remind them of it. Workhorse stalled the best she could: not a single resolution went any further without first being discussed in the party’s Central Committee, and her acute inner sense said to wait. Pavel Alekseevich insisted. After more than a year of fruitless negotiations with the minister, he committed, ultimately, an act thoroughly unethical by bureaucratic and military standards: he penned a missive over the head of the Minister of Health to the Central Committee, addressed to Politburo member N who oversaw social issues. As required by standard protocol, the letter began with the magical formula “Under the leadership of . . . ,” but it was written in impeccable old-fashioned language, with precise argumentation and devastating—both literally and figuratively—statistics.
THIS TIME PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH LOCALIZED THE PROBLEM: he submitted not the entire project, but only a fragment related to what he saw as the most pressing issues, those concerning the legalization of abortion.
Several months passed, and Pavel Alekseevich had already stopped waiting for an answer when at 9:00 A.M., during a staff briefing, a phone call came in from the Central Committee offices on Staraya Square. Pavel Alekseevich excused himself and walked out of the staff room with a scowl. Someone had violated the rule: no phone calls during briefings. But this was an invitation to an audience at the Central Committee, an urgent one at that.
Ten minutes later the official car was already pulling away from the clinic. Alongside the driver sat a gloomy Pavel Alekseevich. The call had been unexpected—the most ominous kind. He was particularly unhappy about the urgency. Before leaving he managed to do only two things of primary necessity: he drank down a full glass of diluted spirit alcohol and picked up the briefcase he had long ago prepared for this occasion. Still, on the way to Staraya Square he thought that he had been wrong not to drop by the house to say good-bye to his family . . .