Holding "Iron Felix" in Her Hands

Once again I sit in an airplane, getting ready to fly.  Today's destination?  New Delhi for a conference on cyber security that I had no expectation I would be going to until three weeks ago.  Such is the Foreign Service.

By rights I should say "last night's" destination.  I was to fly out of Astana at 00:30 this morning, but Motorpool picked me up only at 23:50.  I had already been standing and waiting in the cold for an hour and twenty minutes, making increasingly frantic calls to ask, "Where's my driver?"  It turns out my assistant had given Motorpool the right time but the wrong date.  When we finally reached the airport, it was too late to board.  By the time I was home and in bed it was after 3:00 am.

At 7:30 I simply got up and went to the Embassy to find out what could be done.  I had thought and was even looking forward to being told it was impossible to get to Delhi in reasonable time.  I'm not sure I was actually thrilled when I was told I could be re-routed through Tashkent, arriving in Delhi at midnight and only missing a half day of my training.  So here I am, about to take off, some thirty hours without sleep and eight hours of flights and transit lounges ahead of me.  This is all getting a bit old, and I'm getting a bit old for it.

But that was not what I wanted to write about.  Rather, my mind is turning back to my last trip, my first extended, one-week stay in Almaty, Kazakhstan's old southern capital city known in Soviet times as Alma-Ata.  Alma, by the way, means apple, Central Asia being reputed to be the place from where all apples that cover the world today come.  For me, however, it is the city where I held Iron Felix in the palm of my hand.

Felix Dzerzhinsky

Iron Felix, Zhelezny Feliks in Russian, was the legendary founder and first chief of the Cheka, the Chresvychayny komitet or Extraordinary Committee for Battle with Counterrevolution.  In other words, he founded what later became known as the NKVD, then the KGB, and today the FSB – i.e., the secret police.  His real name was Feliks Dzerzhinsky.  Of Polish roots, he was an ascetic, almost saint-like figure to those who idealistically thought they were starting to build a new socialist order.  He was the mastermind who was going to protect the new Soviet state from counterrevolutionaries and foreign capitalist agents who, so the doctrine went, sought at any cost to destroy the communist ideal and save the world for the rich and powerful.  In fact, he succeeded.  During his years at the head of the Cheka, the Soviet Union fought off foreign interventionist forces and numerous clandestine efforts to destabilize the new Soviet state.  He ran rings around White Russians and others who had fled the country after the 1917 Revolution and Civil War.  The émigré Russians, still incredulous at their defeat, were certain the regime of Lenin and Trotsky could not and would not last.  They plotted and schemed, but it was Iron Felix who played them for fools, turning them against each other and luring the most important ones back to the Soviet Union, prison, and execution.

I must admit to a bit of romance about the period.  I'm not apologist for the regime.  Far from it.  Rather, I remember watching the BBC series Reilly, Ace of Spies on PBS in the 1980s.  Each week I followed the handsome, daring, and always successful British agent from the days of the Great Game between Russia and Britain for power and influence in Central Asia through World War I and then to his support of émigré Russian attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime.  He was always successful, that is, until he, too, allowed himself to be lured to Moscow.  In the final two episodes he and Dzerzhinsky face each other for the first time, two masters of intelligence and covert operations finally together in an interrogation room in the Lyubyanka Prison, the headquarters of the Cheka.  As portrayed in the series, they have a respect, almost a liking for each other.  Their final walk together on Sparrow Hills, the site today of Moscow State University, cements that relationship even as Dzerzhinsky tells Reilly he will need to go alone from that point . . . taking his final steps before falling to an executioner's bullet in the winter snow.  The BBC series being, after all, a British production, leaves open the question of who duped whom, hinting at a possible deeper game played by Reilly in which he sacrificed himself in order to disclose the depths to which the Cheka had infiltrated foreign organizations.  History, however, does not share that nostalgic, patriotic view.

If I ever did have a strange romance for the period, it was shaken out of me in just a few words spoken by a young woman in 2004.  I had purchased a few T-shirts in Moscow, and one of them had a picture of Dzerzhinsky on the front and an all seeing eye on the back together with the slogan Будьте бдительны – Be vigilant.  Seeing me in this T-shirt, the young woman came up to me, looked me in the eye, and said, "That man killed my grandparents."  It wasn't funny anymore.  I never wore the T-shirt again.

Iron Felix

To see how genuinely popular Dzerzhinsky was in the Soviet Union, however, one only needs to look at the mechanical adding machine that was mass-produced and named Iron Felix in his honor.  In astronomy it was the machine that, together with logarithms, was used at observatories and institutes to calculate orbits and carry out all sorts of complex computations.  Much of that computing work was carried out by women, many of them the wives or daughters of astronomers in a science that at that time was almost the exclusive realm of men.  In observatory staffing reports from the period, they were referred to as computers.  At the time no one could foresee the day when these human computers, most of them women, would be replaced by the electronic computers in all their myriad forms that rule our lives today.

Now my story returns to Almaty.  I spent a week visiting and becoming acquainted with more institutes than I had ever encountered in such a short period before.  I visited the biology faculty at KazNU.  I was at the Institute of Genetics, the Zoology Institute, the techno-park, the Botanical Institute, and KazNTU.  I even stood right up next to the research reactor and two cyclotrons at the Institute for Nuclear Physics.  As wonderful as this all was, however, my heart was intent on another visit that I suspect no one else in my position had ever made.

Fesenkov Institute, Main Building

It was a snowy Thursday when we slowly climbed on slippery roads onto the Kamenskoye Plateau to the south of Almaty.  The road narrowed, and then we passed through a gate.  We were at the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute.  Some thirty years ago, Academician V. G. Fesenkov was one of the central figures in my research on the 1936-37 purges in Soviet astronomy.  He survived the purges largely due to geography and a strong personality.  The purge of astronomers was most devastating in Leningrad, but Fesenkov was in Moscow as director of the Shternberg Institute.  He is reputed to have stopped cold the cry to root out wreckers among Moscow astronomers, and as a result the astronomers at Shternberg largely escaped with their lives and careers.

In 1941 Fesenkov led an expedition of Moscow astronomers to observe the total solar eclipse in the southern regions of the Soviet Union.  They chose their site near Almaty and successfully observed the eclipse only to find they could not return to Moscow.  Germany invaded on June 22 and rapidly advanced on the capital.  There could be no question of returning to Moscow.  The astronomers stayed in Almaty, and the equipment they brought for the eclipse became the seed for a new observatory that eventually carried the name of its founder, the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute.

At the Fesenkov Institute

On that snowy Thursday I sat in the director's office as one astronomer after another told me of his or her research.  For once I was at a meeting where, unlike with geneticists or zoologists, I have some background and understanding.  I was in my element.  Even the main building looked and felt familiar.  One of the senior astronomers asked if I noticed a similarity with another building.  I had indeed.  The main building at the Fesenkov Institute, or at least its circular hall, was modeled on the main building at Pulkovo Observatory outside Petersburg where I spent many months in 1987-88.

We must have talked for two hours, and I was taken on a quick tour of several of the observatory domes.  Back in the director's office, however, one of the women astronomers, remarking on my interest in the history of astronomy, went to a cabinet and brought down an impressive looking mechanical device.  She asked me if I knew what it was.  I did.  For the first time in my life, I was seeing an Iron Felix.  A moment later I was holding Iron Felix in my hands, an electric moment of camaraderie will all the women who, in the rough conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, laboriously carried out their computations, in the process sometimes being the ones to make the discoveries for which others, more senior and almost always male, took the credit.  Along the way they drank their tea, shared their joys and sorrows with their friends also hard at work, and in the process tamed and bent Iron Felix to their will.

Holding Iron Felix in My Hands

It was a short moment followed by handshakes, a group photo, and goodbyes.  Soon the main building of the Fesenkov Institute was just a reflection in the rear view mirror as we started our descent back into Almaty.  The memories of that day now mix with the memories of my own past spent in archives and observatories as I carried out research on the fate of Soviet astronomers in the 1930s.  As Russia today embarks on a glorification of its Soviet past, I choose to leave the Dzerzhinsky T-shirt in the back corner of a rarely-opened drawer . . . and treasure the moment when I held Iron Felix in my hands.