Chronotope II: Prosopography

The Suez Canal had already drained much of Kyakhta's trade by the time the Trans-Siberian Railway was routed twenty miles to the west in the 1890s. The last of the merchants moved on, leaving their mansions and clubhouses to the learned societies of orientalists that had colonised the city. The Hun antiquities that the archaeologists discovered in the sands of the steppe may be the pure expression of Eurasian 'passionarity', but the Kyakhta Museum which they founded to preserve them--the last viable institution in this beautiful, dead city--is the creative work of traders' money, which mixes and scatters people--Gumilev's anthropofauna--without regard. And people are also scattered by the force and movement of ideas, like the ideas that brought a Jewish Bolshevik and a proto-Nazi Baltic baron face to face in a theatre in Siberia. History does not move forward. It moves not in a straight line, or a circle, but in an arabesque, which is not always a line of beauty.
- Rachel Polonsky, Molotov's Magic Lantern

I was impressed by Polonsky's book, and I was not expecting to be. Popular books about Russia, especially ones written by Brits, tend to be half flatulent pseudo-mysticism and half weepy encomia for the eternally oppressed liberal (or "socialist-with-a-human face") intelligentsia. Though Molotov's Magic Lantern features an appreciable amount of both, they are far from overwhelming the narrative. Instead, Polonsky treats us with many, many gorgeous and lushly empirical passages full of travelogue detail and historical anecdotes, nearly all of which are interesting and enjoyable to read.

It is this lushness in her world that leads me to the other chronotope I wanted to highlight, which I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, "prosopography." But the paradigmatic prosopographic work is the oeuvre of James Michener (whose novels, I'll admit, are essentially just porn for history buffs). In contrast to the chronotope of claustrophobia, the chronotope of prosopography relies on the gradual, stately advance of generations, the linkage between history and human time, the openness and transformability of the world. The two are not opposites; they sit side by side in our experience of books, and like claustrophobia, prosopography is more a sense one gets from reading than a genuine and integral feature of a work on its own terms.

The ideal of prosopography, then, is a kind of Naturphilosophical vis creativa, a capacity of human life to burgeon, evolve, and produce future generations. In computer game terms, the characteristic genre of claustrophobia is the first-person shooter, in which one is trapped in an endlessly different but fundamentally similar series of spaces. The prosopographic equivalent is the real-time strategy game, whose laws are open-ended and are governed above all by the variable pulse of expansion, production, and absorption of space. A truly prosopographic narrative, in other words, cannot be circular even in the Bakhtinian sense: its changes are irreversible and its spaces are fluid and shifting.

Prosopographic works are more satisfying, undeniably, on a visceral level; this accounts for the popularity of The Godfather as well as of Hegel and Auerbach. But it would be too easy to forget its fatal weakness, which is the fundamental absence of any solid external point of reference. Whereas one can be sure that a claustrophobic work will be about what it is about, a prosopographic one inevitably substitutes the passion and drama of its own evolutionary drive for any broader claims it seems to make on the surface. A classic example is the Old Testament: even if it is supposed to be about the relationship between human beings and God, the reality is that the historical development of the Jewish people, as it is represented in this book, in a narrative sense overwhelms any strictly theological concerns.

Happily, the same happens with Molotov's Magic Lantern. It is difficult to imagine this book being actually about Stalinism and the Terror in any consistent way without it also being horribly tedious, for the author's ideas about Stalin and his court are neither novel nor compelling. Instead, the book is about the burgeoning vitality of several other things--Molotov's monumental career, his library, the travels of Polonsky herself--and it therefore relentlessly marginalizes the author's
tendencies toward didacticism. We are left with a lush book, but certainly not a "politically meaningful" one.

Chronotope I: Claustrophobia

It was dark in the room when he woke up. Quinn could not be sure how much time had passed--whether it was the night of that day or the night of the next. It was even possible, he thought, that it was not night at all. Perhaps it was merely dark inside the room, and outside, beyond the window, the sun was shining. For several moments he considered getting up and going to the window to see, but then he decided it did not matter. It it was not night now, he thought, then night would come later. That was certain, and whether he looked out the window or not the answer would be the same. On the other hand, if it was in fact night here in New York, then surely the sun was shining somewhere else. In China, for example, it was no doubt mid-afternoon and the rice farmers were mopping sweat from their brows. Night and day were no more than relative terms; they did not refer to an absolute condition. At any given moment, it was always both. The only reason we did not know it was because we could not be in two places at the same time.

Quinn also considered getting up and going to another room, but then he realized that he was quite happy where he was. It was comfortable here in the spot he had chosen, and he found that he enjoyed lying on his back with his eyes open, looking up at the ceiling--or what would have been the ceiling, had he been able to see it. Only one thing was lacking for him, and that was the sky.
- Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

There are certain books that serve primarily to make the reader feel claustrophobic (or, in an increasingly and happily acceptable usage, "are claustrophobic"). This is not a function, necessarily, of their subject matter: a book about New York City can just as easily suggest wide-open spaces and an infinity of possible possibilities as closed rooms and devouring nighttime streets. Nor is it a question of tone--or even artistic intent. A book can sink into claustrophobia without the writer's apparent knowledge, feeding off the deliberate and accidental features that are introduced into the narrative as a result of other concerns. Literary claustrophobia can coexist on a book's pages with the most sincere professions of belief in open spaces and alternative futures.

I would go even further: claustrophobia is not dependent on genre. It is not simply that a poem or a play can be claustrophobic as well as a novel. It is that a textbook, a technical manual, a work of history can too. One gasps for air while reading Richard Pipes's Russia Under the Old Regime, as with many other studies of Russian history. Habermas's late and Descartes's early writings produce a not dissimilar effect. In the case of such books it is even more difficult to attribute the feeling to deliberate intention, since an apparent hostility to style itself is not uncommon among the writers. (Too long spent in their company, however, is just as psychically dangerous as any sanity-threatening Lovecraftian tome.)

The feeling of claustrophobia is not always an unpleasant one, and in certain cases it can be remarkably effective. What is interesting about it, however, is not its utility but its structure. The reader-response of claustrophobia is of course a purely subjective feeling, enmeshed in the external context of the reading perhaps even more than in the book itself--but it is still possible to identify in it certain strands that give the experience a pattern. First, of course, there is the spatial aspect. The distribution in space of the book's sources and themes, its descriptions of movement, its suggestions about other places and contexts together produce a kind of biome that, in the case of truly claustrophobic books, becomes a living and immediately present world. (Think about an IKEA assembly instruction sheet. The vague feeling of discontent one gets from seeing that a hammer or screwdriver (not included) is listed among the requirements is in part due to the implicit violation of the rules of the self-enclosed, brightly delineated IKEA world, in which language is rudimentary, people are simple, and only furniture has concealed complexities.)

The other aspect may be just as signicant: it is the temporal. Time in the claustrophobic book is almost always either static or circular, Sisyphean. The kinds of circular time Bakhtin described in his essay on chronotopes were evocations of nature and of the circular natural process of regeneration--but there is usually no such connotation here. The feeling is more generalized, a sense that structures are recurrent and eternal, that durées can pass while temps will always stand still. (It is unsurprising, then, that books on Russia so often produce this effect). Limits to movement and the unlimitedness of unchanging time are, not accidentally, the components of the physical experience of being trapped: how long will I be here before they find me?

Claustrophobia is uncertain and slippery. No academic book can ever give the concept sufficient breadth--it is too subjective, too immediate. Yet it seems undeniable that anyone who has read a certain number of books has felt something like I have described here, and no less certain that this has shaped their encounters with the work. It is something one simply lives with.

The Impossibility of Contradiction

And Dionysodorus said: "Are you constructing your argument, Ctesippus, as if contradiction existed?"
"Yes, completely," he said, "absolutely so. But what about you, Dionysodorus, don't you think that contradiction exists?"
"Well," he said, "you certainly couldn't demonstrate that you've ever heard anyone contradicting someone else."
"Oh really?" he said, "Well, if I am to demonstrate it to you, let's now listen to Ctesippus contradicting Dionysodorus."
"And would you be held to account for this?"
"Certainly," he said.
"Well then," he said, "Are there descriptions for each of the things which are?"
"Certainly."
"So, of each thing as it is or as it is not?"
"As it is."
"Yes, for if you recall, Ctesippus," he said, "just a moment ago we showed that nobody says 'how it is not'; for it was clear that nobody says what is not."
"So, what's that got to do with this?" replied Ctesippus. "Are you and I contradicting each other any the less?"
"Well," he said, "would we be contradicting each other if we both gave the description of the same thing? Presumably, we'd actually be saying the same thing?"
He agreed.
"But when neither of us gave the description of a thing," he said, "is it then that we'd be contradicting each other? Surely, in this case, neither of us would have mentioned anything at all?"
He also agreed to this.
"Well, then, when I give the description of a thing, but you give a different description of a different thing; is it then that we contradict each other? Or then am I saying the thing, but you're not saying it at all? But how could someone who doesn't say something contradict someone who does?"
Then Ctesippus went silent, but I was astounded by this argument, and said:
"What do you mean, Dionysodorus? Really, this argument always astounds me, even though I've heard it many times and from many people--for the followers of Protagoras also used to use it al lot, as well as others before them. For to me it always seems an astounding thing, as it overturns not just others, but even itself. And I think we'll ascertain the truth about this most admirably from you. Is it impossible to say something false? That's what your argument indicates, isn't it? That, when somebody speaks, they either say what is true or they say nothing?"
He agreed.
"So it is impossible to say something false, but possible to believe it?"
"Not even to believe it," he said.
- from Plato's Euthydemus, in John Dillon, ed., The Greek Sophists

In other words, what Dionysodorus (what a fantastic name!) is saying is that when we say something false, we're actually giving a "true" description of another thing entirely, and it is therefore impossible to contradict anyone else. This view is attributed to Protagoras the Sophist (who is also responsible for the famous line "Man is the measure of all things") and to the Cynic Antisthenes, who seems to have gone around using it quite frequently. But it is also not a stretch, I'd venture to say, to apply this same principle and argumentation to contemporary scholarly disagreements in the humanities, which are only seemingly constructed on an agonistic model. It is possible, I submit, to do this without any overarching theories of knowledge beyond the ones that are implicitly assumed in all scholarly practice today.

The idea that humanities scholarship (philosophy--perhaps--excepted) needs above all to make a clear argument and defend it is not very old. In fact, it seems to have arisen on the wreckage of the nineteenth-century encyclopedist and positivist project to build an edifice of knowledge brick by minute brick. When it became clear, well before "postmodernism," that this project was not going to yield the kind of results it had claimed to offer, the agonistic model was accepted essentially by default as the only remaining mode of articulating the scholarly enterprise that could be externally justified. It seems to me that this was intimately linked to the decreasing proportion of independently wealthy scholars.

Giving a sustained and critical argument consistently, however, in the form of a point-by-point rebuttal, is strongly frowned upon in the humanities, since it seems to indicate a petty and ungenteel mode of scholarly comportment. Essays that take this form produce surprisingly visceral reactions in most humanists. The only acceptable form for truly agonistic scholarly debate is to summarize the position of one's opponent in a single sentence (or better yet, to allude to it obliquely in one's introduction) and then provide an account of something relevant to this position. But because scholars are also expected to fill some kind of "hole in the research" (a notion which itself derives from an encyclopedistic idea of research which no scholar would now defend if asked about it directly), the thing one is giving an account of--whether it's economic concepts in eighteenth-century thought or the role of the New World in Elizabethan drama--must also be a different thing from that described by one's opponent.

Contradiction in most humanities scholarship is therefore impossible on a broad level because we're all giving accounts of different things. It's possible, however, to be even more radical than this. What do we today think a historical or literary argument is? In general terms, it is the conjunction of sources, interpretations, and certain innuendoes related to some big problem. It is, of course, the latter that usually form the actual "argument," in the sense in which this word is used in practice. But the innuendoes are, just as obviously, only admissible if they are made on the basis of the conjunction of sources and interpretations. Now, it is no big deal to claim that interpretations are specific to each individual scholar; and it is just as clear that the selection of sources is also individual. We would moreover all agree, being good non-positivists, that scholarly accounts are about this conjunction of sources and interpretations, not some individual brick in some tower of knowledge. It is possible to say that such-and-such a book's selection of sources or method of interpretation is biased, distorted, or incomplete, but every such claim is--and this is, again, a matter of general consensus--another proposal based on an idea of sources and an interpretation.

This means, naturally, that on the terms in which the humanities think about themselves, contradiction is impossible because each contending position is about something different (usually on both the level of sources and of interpretations). The innuendoes that arise from this conjunction are nominally in contradiction, but since their object is determined by their components, there are as many objects as there are interpretations. Is it surprising, then, that in practice so many scholars simply choose the position that is most flattering, pleasant, or convenient to them? How could they be expected to do otherwise?

The Banality of Utopia and the Utopia of Banality

Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that culture is indeed mediating the economy than to establish in any given case how such mediation works. In Valences of the Dialectic, at any rate, one of the most striking suggestions made in the introductory essay is that Hegel, who articulated his omnivorous philosophical logic at a time when industrial capitalism was hardly more than a local English affair, may have been seized by an intimation of the ultimately global logic of capitalism: capitalism too is forever enlarging itself, and bringing under one rule the most disparate people and places. So does creative destruction on the economic plane resemble the dialectic’s refusal to freeze or reify its concepts and stand pat. Dialectical thought, then, would be at once the mirror of capitalism and (in Marxist hands) its rival: the totalising imperative that is the dialectic confronting the totality that is capitalism. From this it follows that the dialectic, despite the musty air of the word, may be set to come into its own only today, with the universal installation of capitalism. The thought may be less outrageous than it appears. After all, it was an explicitly Hegelian formulation – the end of history – that captured for the public imagination the meaning of the collapse of Communism in Europe. Jameson’s reiterated Marxist reply is simply that the disappearance of the Second World and the elimination of pre-capitalist arrangements in the Third marks in fact the beginning of a universal history: ‘History, which was once multiple, is now more than ever unified into a single History.’ In characteristic Jamesonian fashion, the stray hints and speculations gather themselves, towards the end of Valences, into a stark and audacious proposition: ‘The worldwide triumph of capitalism … secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time.’ How’s that for dialectical? ...

Jameson has often written of a given stage of capitalism setting the ‘conditions of possibility’ within which a writer or artist has to work. It might equally be said of his own work as a critic that it established the conditions of possibility for a Marxist cultural criticism at least as often as it offered an example of such a thing. Here, then, is another of Jameson’s contradictions: sighing with cultural belatedness, his essays have also seemed like preludes, prolegomena, to work yet to be done. Whether this work will use the word ‘postmodernism’ doesn’t seem very important. In fact it’s probably worth remembering Jameson’s ‘therapeutic’ recommendation, at the end of A Singular Modernity (2002), that capitalism might be substituted ‘for modernity in all the contexts in which the latter appears’, and extending the suggestion to postmodernity too. That would place us squarely in the midst of a capitalist or (to periodise a bit more) neoliberal culture, waiting to see what comes next. It would also place us in Jameson’s debt.

- Benjamin Kunkel, "Into the Big Tent," LRB, April 22, 2010

I posted this in part just because I wanted another excuse to link to Kunkel's essay, which is excellent in all the ways a review essay on Jameson can be. The great danger of such essays is that they tend either to ignore or to mystify the aporia at the heart of Jameson's work: the ultimate and ever-more-urgent requirement for praxis it seems to impose (and explicitly demand) and its increasingly limited and trivialized realization. Kunkel, by contrast, addresses this issue directly--and the occasional incoherence of his account should not count against him, given how thorny this issue really is.

My sense, however (and I have not read Valences, so a great deal of salt is appropriate here), is that Jameson is not aware of the implications of his work and Kunkel does not point us in the right direction. The implication one should draw from the fact that capitalism has now won completely and irrevocably (until something different, perhaps more capitalistic than capitalism, comes along instead) is not that "other systems, other spaces, are still possible"; that interpretation is as banal and meaningless as its cliché counterpart, "You could be hit by a car tomorrow and die!". All the critical force of Jameson's first conclusion is blunted by the cowardly attempt to salvage criticism by hiding it in the shameful sock-drawer of "Utopia."

Two decades ago, at the height of the cultural-studies boom, Meaghan Morris attacked the propensity of cultural-studies scholars to read criticism and subversion into everything, and to impose on their helpless "dominated" objects of study a covertly ideological idea of their consumption practices. This kind of language (and the language I've used in describing her) is now largely irrelevant to academic life, as are, most glaringly, the works of Baudrillard. But in many ways Jameson seems to continue to belong to the tribe of scholars for whom every cultural process needs to resolve into the "utopia nexus" or be meaningless. (This is, of course, appropriate, since it was Jameson's article on "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" that started the utopia boom in the first place.)

To put it with the traditional specious cleverness, the work of Jameson provides the all-encompassing cash-nexus logic of a triumphant capitalism with its theoretical counterpart, the logic of utopia. Unfortunately, the parallel seems unlikely to hold--if nothing else, because talking about talking about utopia is distinctly less satisfying from an escape-valve point of view than other utopian practices. I suspect that the word will disappear from academic discussions roughly when Jameson stops publishing.

I'll put it another, starker way. The triumph of capitalism is good because utopia is dead. (This is perhaps not a recent phenomenon. To quote the immortal Jeffrey Lebowski: "Your revolution is over! The bums lost!") Whether or not this actually destroys the possibility of effective political praxis is an open question, of course--but in any case politics today and tomorrow will take place within an environment in which enjoying the fruits of mass culture and informatization (as well as all the properly mediated and commodified human relationships we can get our grubby hands on) is all we have left for joussiance. The end of the road is not Marx or even the Paris Commune or even Richard Stallman, but Google. I still await the theoretical text that confronts, and forces us to confront, these questions with sufficient depth; but in the meantime responses to Jameson will have to do.

Human Factors

The creative nature of programing does not require special proof. Indeed, I may assert that in its creative nature programing goes a little further than most other professions, and comes near to mathematics and creative writing. In the majority of other professions, even when putting the tiger in the tank, we only tame the forces of nature. We simply use physical and biological phenomena, hopefully in a cleverly economical way, but without understanding their innermost principles. In programing, however, we go, in a certain sense, to the root. One of the theses of modern epistemology states that "We understand what we are able to program." This phrase vividly characterizes the maximalism of our profession ...

A second group of aesthetic issues relates programing to its social and public functions. On first meeting and attempting to analyze a social phenomenon of grand scale (and the coming of the computer onto the historical scene is without doubt such a phenomenon) we search for historical analogies broad enough to give us a basis for extrapolation and prognosis. It is in this sense that we speak of the advent of the computer as a second industrial revolution characterized by the industrialization of intellectual work. Another analogy on the same scale may be offered for the profession of programing. The progressive expansion of software is, it seems to me, comparable in many ways to the phenomena set in motion by the invention of printing. The accumulation of books, each one embodying its author's view of the external world, broadened a social process of understanding. In the same way, programs and data banks accumulate informational and operational models of the world, and allow us not only to influence but also to predict the world's evolution, giving us in this way an unheard of power over nature.

To be a good programer today is as much a privilege as it was to be a literate man in the 16th century.
-Andrei Ershov, "Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programing," May 1972

I'm becoming more and more interested in the history of computing, a neat side effect of writing a paper that deals with Ershov, software development, and the Cold War. In a way, however, this interest is actually a return. Sometime in tenth grade I discovered the Jargon File; being, at that moment, holed up hermitlike in a Los Angeles apartment, I read the whole thing. This excited me so much that I decided to teach myself programming--but unfortunately, being cocky and overenamored of my intellectual powers, I started with C. I got through maybe the sixth chapter of the textbook and quit (It was Quicksort defeated me, I'm pretty sure). Since then I have written many shell scripts, but anything in a "real" programming language fills me with terror and paralysis.

I can see now what it was that excited me so much about the culture the Jargon File describes. Like many children of the '90s, I experienced the entry of the computer into my life as a definite but completely irreversible event. All through the second half of the decade, the computer was there to play with or to work on--but it was not, as it was in the '80s, something that encouraged technical exploration. It was, purely and simply, an object of consumption, a glorified television. So the very malleability and creative energy of software engineering in the '60s and '70s--Unix, VMS, C itself--seemed to suggest the possibility of joining a priesthood of people who were "gurus" and "demigods" and who engaged with computing as sculptors with marble.

And then, of course, it wasn't just my failure as a programmer that drove me away from that path. It was what it had turned into: "geek culture" as it existed in 2002-2003, not yet on the verge of achieving complete triumph (as it did by the end of the decade), a suspicious, self-enclosed, self-infatuated, and elitist community that could never quite separate its contingent obsessions (anime, Joss Whedon) from its defining characteristics (say, curiosity). For a young humanities type, the relentless two-culturism was especially unbearable.

But now, as I read through the materials for this paper, I find out things I did not know at the time. John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN, says that programmers in the '50s were just as elitist and self-enclosed; they were angry and incredulous that anyone could try to make programming into something other than pure machine-code hacking.
In retrospect, of course, the Jargon File itself contains more than enough of this: the references to "mundanes" and the elevation of Chinese food (Chinese food!) into a cultural archetype are not as far from Slashdot as I would have liked to think.

And then, on the other hand, there are texts like Ershov's, with their expansive and broad-minded view of what programming implies. It would be wrong to suggest that they point to the existence of a different path that the history of computing culture might have taken. In fact, this one was popular enough at the time that it was reprinted in several American electronics journals and cited in The Mythical Man-Month--if anything, it was part of the mainstream. Rather, a text like this shows the variety of self-definitions that were once available to participants in this barely adolescent field, some much more utopian than others. After the mid-'70s, it seems, roles became concrete and tacitly acknowledged. (Perhaps the Jargon File itself, codified as it was in the '80s, is a monument to this stage of the process.) It remains to be seen whether the complete commodification of programming now under way will reinforce this ossification--or undermine it.

Myths and Legends of the Cold War

I begin this sad tale with a heavy heart. Being of sound mind and firm memory, I sense that it would be safer to yell "Intel forever!" in front of a crowd of AMD fans on a Friday evening than it would be to get into the thick of things and make sense of the subject that interests me. Up till now I was aware of the possible consequences and thus tried to pretend that I didn't know of any such question, as if it did not exist; I made it clear that everything that will be discussed below was but an insignificant episode in our history, which should be mentioned in passing, if at all.

Just to describe it in two or three sentences, half made up of interjections and punctuation marks. And yet... An evil fate leads me onward, and I cannot delay much longer. I hereby inform everyone that, if my breathless body is found in the near future at the bottom of the Reichenbach waterfall, this will be no accident, and I had no thoughts of leaving this vain world. But enough vague hints. At last I am embarking on an attempt to make sense of the question of how and why the USSR introduced the "Single System" of computers. The Rubicon is crossed, the bridges are burned. All rise; court is in session.
- "Ликбез," UPgrade magazine (Russia), May 1o, 2006

I don't blame you for being confused. What is this piece doing on this blog? What is with the columnist's mock-portentous tone? And what in God's name could he possibly be talking about?

The truth is, I didn't need to pick this particular article. There are any number of them with a similar message. And they all boil down to something like this: "In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union sold out its native computer industry in order to copy IBM's System 360 computers, and this constituted an enormous moral and technological defeat in the context of the Cold War. This is why we lost the computer race!" They all quote Edsger Dijkstra--and the quote seems to vary from publication to publication--saying something like "The Soviet Union's adoption of IBM's System 360 was the United States's greatest victory in the Cold War."

The backstory is this. In 1950, the Soviets built the first stored-program computer in Europe; many new types of computers were developed throughout the next two decades, and software development was occasionally on a highly advanced level. But by 1969 it was crystal-clear that the Soviet Union was falling further and further behind the United States. Computer utilization was low where it needed to be high and high where it needed to be low; reliability was poor; there were not enough programmers; the transition to integrated circuits was far from complete. So the Soviet government decided, together with the Warsaw Pact countries, to cancel all new development on its native-born computers and transition to clones of the landmark IBM 360 machines, which would consolidate all hardware and software development in the Eastern Bloc. Needless to say, despite the vast quantities of Soviet cash that flowed into the coffers of European and American technology companies, it didn't work: by 1983 leading computer scientists were explicitly announcing that the USSR would never catch up.

In and of itself, the story doesn't matter much. But it's part of a much broader complex of such stories, all of which, in the end, have a similar moral. The AK-47 was a superior weapon to the M-16 because it was cheaper and didn't jam when you breathed on it; those good old MiGs and T-series tanks were always superior to equivalent US equipment; Soviet doctors dreamed up therapies that are still considered bleeding-edge in the West. The moral, of course, is "We did so much with so little, and we still lost"; by extension, it's also "we deserved to win, and it's all the fucking government's fault." With the Single Series, it's even more poignant: "we were great with computers, and the fucking government sold us out to the Americans."

Are the stories true? The one about computers probably isn't. The Ural series (which the above columnist eulogizes with great tenderness as a superior native alternative to IBM) never cracked 100,000 operations per second, and never, as far as I can tell, transitioned to integrated circuits; at any rate, by the early 70s there were still a couple hundred Urals left in operation, and presumably they could have demonstrated their superiority, but failed. The BESM-6, the finest Soviet machine before the Single Series, was two years behind its American equivalent. Either way, it would have made little difference: the Soviets simply could not match the manufacturing and personnel-training rate of the United States. The Soviet economy was held together with toothpicks and gum; this worked okay for tanks and tractors, which have a limited number of components, but the high-precision fabrication needed for modern computing was simply not consistently available.

That isn't very romantic--but the USSR did gproduce something unique in this field: the world's only (I think) ternary computer, the Setun. Alas, like the native computer industry, it was not long for this world. It wasn't an intriguing evolutionary path with great, but wasted, potential; it just didn't work very well.

The point, I think, is that it doesn't matter if these stories are true. They are not made up with reference to the facts. No amount of technical documentation is likely to convince a Russian that they are false; the semi-mythical secret defense sector is always there to be cited as a source of mislaid innovations. These stories are simply myths, tinted, perhaps, with a great deal of defensive projection.

Of course, one need only look at all the movies and video games about supposed secret Nazi projects for raising the dead or colonizing Mars to see that such myths are not unique to the Russians. (Although maybe the Americans are unique in making them up about other countries.) In fact, the endless mythological churn of losers who try to explain away their loss goes back deep into history, at least back to King Arthur, maybe to Lascaux. What The Romance of the Single Series can teach us is that modernity--or even postmodernity--is no prophylactic against them. Alligators still inhabit New York City's sewers, just as third-generation Ural-32s still gather dust somewhere in the labs of Omsk-9.