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.
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| 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.
