Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man's Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death

by Olivier Rolin, Ros Schwartz (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 2014 Prix du Style

"Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century." —Nature

In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and sentenced to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other "political prisoners" in a camp on Solovetsky Island, under vast northern skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937—a fact kept from his family for nearly twenty years.

Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexei's story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world that Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution, maintaining that he'd been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him. His stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long.

Stalin’s Meteorologist is a fascinating work that casts light on the devastating consequences of politically inspired paranoia and the mindlessness and trauma of totalitarianism—relevant revelations for our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640091573
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	12/11/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Olivier Rolin was born in Paris in 1947, and spent much of his childhood in Senegal. He is a freelance writer for Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, and has written numerous essays and travel journals. His three books have all been critically acclaimed and have won prizes in France: Port Sudan won the Prix Femina in 1994, Paper Tiger won the Prix France Culture in 2003, and The Meteorologist was awarded the Prix Du Style in 2014.

ROS SCHWARTZ is an English literary translator who translates Francophone literature into English. In 2009, she was awarded the Chevalier d’Honneur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to French literature.

Read an Excerpt

And I thought and I read
According to the Bible of the breezes
—Sergei Yesenin, 'Soil, Soil Soil' in The Collected Poems

I

1

He was an expert on clouds. The long cirrus ice quills, the swollen, towering cumulonimbi, the torn ragged strati, the stratocumuli that ruffle the sky like wavelets left in the sand by the receding tide, the altostrati that veil the sun, and all the vast, drifting shapes rimmed with light, the fluffy giants that produce rain and snow and lightning. But he didn't have his head in the clouds — or at least I don't think he did. From what I know of him, there is nothing to suggest he was an eccentric. He represented the USSR at the International Commission on Clouds, he spoke at pan-Soviet congresses on the formation of fog, and in 1930 he set up the Weather Bureau. But these lyrical names didn't set him dreaming. As a scientist doing his job in the interests — of course — of building socialism he took it all seriously; he was no comic-strip Professor Nimbus.

Clouds were not his excuse to dream, there was nothing nebulous about him; I suspect him even of a certain starchiness. Appointed the first director of the USSR's Hydrometeorological Centre in 1929, he set out to establish a water registry as well as a wind and a sunshine registry. He probably saw nothing romantic in that, no invitation to reverie in mapping the intangible. It was the concrete that interested him, measurable realities, the collision of huge masses of air, the low-water levels of rivers, ice-dammed. rivers and meltdowns, rainfall, and the effect of these phenomena on farming and on the lives of Soviet citizens. Socialism was being built in the sky too.

He was born in 1881 in Krapivno, a village in Ukraine . . .

2

Before chronicling the life and death of this man dedicated to the peaceful observation of nature who was crushed by the fury of history, I shall say a few words about the circumstances that led me to cross his path, long after his disappearance (here the word takes on its full significance, as we shall see). Stories don't appear out of the blue or from the clouds, so it seems a good idea for them to present their credentials. In 2010, I'd been invited to speak at the University of Arkhangelsk. I was greeted with the warmth that is typical of Russian life, alongside a great deal of indifference and even roughness. A Welcome banner was unfurled and people brought out photos from an earlier trip (I'm a regular visitor there). The only downside was that the photos showed how much time had gone by, but it was touching all the same. I was treated perhaps not like a president, but let's say a sub-prefect. I love Arkhangelsk because its name means Archangel, because of the wide estuary on which it stands and which, in winter, you traverse on planks laid on the ice festooned at night with pale lights, because of the wooden houses that were still quite common when I first used to visit (few, since, have withstood the property developers), and because it seems to me that girls are particularly beautiful here (I remember girls gliding on roller skates on the embankment along the Dvina one May, their bare, tanned legs, hair flying in the wind, escorted by dragonflies — my equivalent of Proust's girls on bicycles. I vaguely recall that Blaise Cendrars talks somewhere of the golden bells (or golden belfries?) of Arkhangelsk, but I can't find it anywhere. It doesn't matter: writers are not only what they have written, but what we think they have written.

Then I took the small plane (an Antonov An-24, to be precise), which twice a week flies between Arkhangelsk and the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea. When the sea is frozen, as it is six months of the year, there is no other way of getting there. The man sitting next to me on the plane was a young Orthodox priest with a mop of frizzy hair who looked like Georges Perec (I'm not sure whether Perec would have welcomed the comparison, or the priest, had he known who Perec was, but I found that there was a strong resemblance). The holy man was holding an e-reader which I then thought to be the pinnacle of a modernity that I had not yet attained, and which seemed incongruous in a priest, especially Russian. Orthodox. The hi-tech object had a leather cover decorated with an icon of the Virgin Mary on which he bestowed profuse kisses. I covertly peeked at his screen, hoping that it was an erotic novel, but I have to admit that it wasn't.

It was the beauty of the place, seen in photographs, that had prompted me to undertake this journey. And I'd barely stepped out of the little air terminal built of blue-painted planks when the sight of the high walls, the squat towers and (golden . . .) belfries of the monastery-stronghold stretching along an isthmus between a bay and a lake shrouded in snow convinced me I'd been right to come here. The same beauty as Mont Saint-Michel except that it was completely the opposite: a monastic and military monument, and a prison, in the middle of the sea, which extends horizontally, whereas Mont Saint-Michel soars vertically. Here, no crowds, no tourist tat. I hiked around the island, a black-and-white landscape of frozen lakes and coniferous forests that glowed blood red at sunset. I found sanctuary in a tiny hotel called Priut — the shelter. Katia, the owner, was charming, extremely cheerful (admittedly, despite my Russophilia which friends tease me about, this is quite unusual), pretty (perhaps the rather outmoded adjective 'buxom' would be more apt), and her kindness stretched to telling me that I spoke her language very well. From my room in the evening I could see the walls and the scaly onion domes blazing across the ice. I had no idea that the first seeds of a book were being planted inside me — but that's always the way, it creeps tip on you.

The monastery, founded in the fifteenth century by hermit monks, is one of the oldest in Russia. Each era has left its stamp, and from 1923, the monastery housed (if that is the word) the first camp of what was to become the Main Directorate for Camps and Detention Facilities, the Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerei , sadly known by its notorious acronym, the Gulag. On my return, I set about reading all the books I could find on its history. That was how I learned that in the camp there had been a library of 30,000 volumes, made up directly or indirectly of books belonging to the deportees, many of whom were nobles or intellectuals, byvshy intelligentny chelovek or bich'yo — 'ex-intellectuals' in the language of the secret police. Gradually the idea of making a film was born, and in April 2012 I returned to the Solovetsky Islands to scout locations.

I was welcomed by Antonina Sochina, one of the island's human memories. She was a delightful, lively, elderly lady, with reddish blonde hair and blue eyes, dressed in jeans and a roll-neck sweater. Her house was-full of books and plants, she made wonderful jams with the berries that all Russians love — bilberries, cranberries and another, whose name I don't know, a sort of orange-coloured raspberry called maroshka which grows in marshy areas and is so delicious that Pushkin is said to have asked for some on his deathbed (berries and mushrooms are a staple of the Russian diet and of its folklore; curiously the generic word for berries, yagoda, was also the surname of the head of the intelligence service arid secret police, the Gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravlenie (GPU), later the NKVD, from 1934 to 1936: Genrikh Yagoda, who is to play a role in the next part of the story). Among the books that Antonina showed me there was one that had a cover with a picture of clouds, an album not for general sale, published by the daughter of a deportee in memory of her father. Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, the meteorologist, had been deported to the Solovetsky Islands in 1934. Half of the book comprised reproductions of letters he had sent from the camp to his daughter, Eleonora, who was not yet four at the time of his arrest. There were pressed flowers and coloured illustrations of plants, drawn with a confident hand in crayon or watercolour, simple and clear. There were pictures of the aurora borealis, frozen seas, an Arctic fox, a hen, a watermelon, a samovar, an aeroplane, boats, a cat, a fly, a candle and birds. The dried flowers and the drawings were beautiful, but they had not been composed solely to be visually pleasing: they had an educational purpose. The father was using plants to teach his daughter the basics of arithmetic and geometry. The lobes of a leaf represented the elementary numbers, its shape symmetry and asymmetry, while a pine cone illustrated the spiral. The drawings were answers to riddles.

I was moved by this long-distance conversation between a father and his very young daughter, whom he would never see again, his determination to play a part in her education despite being far away. And I was moved by the daughter's steadfast lore for the father she had known so fleetingly, to which the commemorative book I leafed through at Antonina's bore witness. He was, Eleonora said, an accomplished pianist, and she remembered hearing him play the Appassionata,' the 'Moonlight' Sonata and Schubert's Impromptus. He was fond of Pushkin and Lermontov. Until 1956, the year of his posthumous rehabilitation, she wrote, my mother waited for him to come back. When I misbehaved, she added, my mother would tell me that I'd be ashamed when my father came home. Judging myself through his eyes became the rule by which I lived. The idea of writing the story of this man, one of the millions of victims of Stalin's madness, began to stir in me. Later, in Moscow, meeting people who had known Eleonora at the end of her life did the rest. She became a renowned paleontologist. I never had the opportunity to meet her: she had died not long before, in circumstances I shall describe. I regret that she didn't live long enough to know that the album she dedicated to her father's memory had the unforeseeable consequence of sparking another book, far away, in another country, in another language.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Stalin's Meteorologist

One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2018

"Rolin’s writing is haunting, poetic." —The Washington Post

"Rolin proves to be a comforting and companionable guide to a gruesome period of history. Although the past he takes us through is irredeemably bloodthirsty, he confidently leads us back to the present, a seeker of light in a world of uncompromising bleakness . . . [Stalin's Meteorologist] serves two functions: for readers to pay tribute to the victims by bearing witness to their oppressor's crimes, and to understand the measures dictators take to silence their enemies, even a devoted husband and father with his head in the clouds." —Los Angeles Times

"A powerful and important book." —Victor Sebestyen, The Mail on Sunday

"Olivier Rolin’s new biography, Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death, is one of tragedy, but also of resilience—the kind that allows a sensitivity and love for the wonders and mysteries of nature to survive the most oppressive, cruel circumstances." —Atlas Obscura

"Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century." —Nature

"This outstanding book captures both the beauty and resilience of human nature, while also documenting its most heinous side. Winner of the English PEN award, it is immaculately researched and written . . . compassionately and with insight." —The Lady, Book of the Week, July 7, 2017

"Timely and well–researched, the book is a reminder of the real, human cost of blind loyalty to totalitarian political ideologies. A movingly illuminating biography." —Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Hotel Crystal

"In this witty puzzler of a novel by Olivier Rolin (translated by Jane Kuntz), a traveler with the same name as the author begins each chapter with a description of a different hotel room he’s stayed in around the world. These, in turn, become occasions for Rolin (or 'Rolin'?) to tell us of his adventures as a globe–trotting amateur spy and dashing lover. Frenchman Rolin engages in literary game–playing in Hotel Crystal, crossing influences such as Vladimir Nabokov and Georges Perec." —Entertainment Weekly

"For all its robust wit and cosmopolitan embroidery, Hotel Crystal details a Dorian Gray–like descent into the bottle. Our man in Khatanga, Port Said, Helsinki, isn’t a spy so much as a 'scribbler with too much drink in him,' as Graham Greene so famously described Harry Lime’s antagonist. For the lonely souls who check into the Hotel Crystals of the world and anesthetize themselves with expensive booze and cheap paperbacks, the dreary rooms are a sanctuary from perils real and imagined." —Los Angeles Times

"Rolin’s mastery of language, along with his rich perceptions of locale and the human psyche, rewards a reader willing to attend." —Lee Fahnstock, World Literature Today

"One of the most enjoyable 'serious' novels in many seasons." —Kirkus Reviews

"Olivier Rolin is a towering figure in French literature . . . Rolin is a consummate artist who will speak profoundly to the American heart." —Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Praise for Table Tiger

"Martin, an aging French radical from the 60s, wonders where it all went and why. One night in 2000, when this rushing stream of a book is set, he broods out loud while driving around (and around and around) Paris with Marie, the 24–year–old daughter of his best friend from 'the Cause.'. . . [T]here are also treats that make the car ride worth taking, some serious . . . and others delightfully comic . . . When the journey to the end of the night is over, the impression left behind (at once comforting and disturbing) is that history will make a paper tiger of every high hope and feared foe alike, no matter how seemingly imperishable." —Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2017-09-19
A prizewinning French writer tells the story of how a Soviet meteorologist lionized by Stalin was wrongfully imprisoned and executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s.Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim (1881-1937) was a distinguished weather scientist. Appointed the first director of the Soviet Union's Hydrometeorological Centre in 1929, he worked tirelessly to promote the interests of the Communist Party. He believed that the Soviet Union's ascendancy as a world power lay in its ability to convert wind into electricity that would heat and light its vast terrain. As Rolin (Hotel Crystal, 2008, etc.) writes, "[Wagenheim's] role in the construction of socialism was to help the revolutionary proletariat control the forces of Nature." His work was recognized by Stalin, who praised the scientist as a national hero for his help in ensuring the success of one of the Soviets' high altitude balloon experiments in 1933. Then a colleague implicated him in the activities of what he claimed was a counterrevolutionary organization within the Hydrometeorological Centre. In January 1934, authorities imprisoned an innocent and utterly dumbfounded Wangenheim—who was also a descendant of the hated Russian aristocracy—without ever telling him the exact nature of his crimes. The meteorologist was eventually sent to northwestern Russia, where he spent the last three years of his life doing forced labor in Stalin's gulag system while stubbornly clinging to his socialist beliefs. Part of what makes this book so fascinating is the way Rolin, using letters and other historical documents, depicts the unswerving nature of Wangenheim's faith in the Communist Party despite his mistreatment. The real horror is not so much the fate he and his gulag comrades suffered, but the extremes to which they were subjected before they even began to question the political system they held so dear. Timely and well-researched, the book is a reminder of the real, human cost of blind loyalty to totalitarian political ideologies.A movingly illuminating biography.

Kirkus Reviews