Monday Begins on Saturday

Aleksandr Ivanovich Privalov, or “Sasha,” is embarking on a road trip toward Karelia. Sasha is a programmer from Leningrad, and on the way, he picks up two hitchhikers. They are scientists on their way to Solovets and work for an institute called the “Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry.” In Russian, the pronunciation would be close to “Ничего” (Nii-Cha-Vo), which has an obvious proximity to the word “nothing.” It has also been translated as “NITWITT” or “The National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy.” A state think tank whose name sounds like “nothing” is the Strugatskys’ joke, and the target is the Soviet faith in scientific planning.

The Soviets believed that the fundamental behavior of human psychology and motive could be quantified statistically, that it could be surmised rationally, and this analytical and data-driven approach to a population could usher in a Utopia for its citizens (further reading on the subject would include Gosplan and the Stakhanovite Movement).

Sasha is a young man indoctrinated by the Komsomol, which was a Soviet youth program that ushered in a new generation of citizens under the ideology that Lenin desired. The Komsomol taught a relentless work ethic (now think about the title Monday Begins on Saturday) and stressed a life of moderation and willful discipline, discouraging the use of alcohol, smoking, and other “bourgeois” activities ideologically opposed to this new Soviet way of life. This organization metamorphosed the Soviet youth into the very “cogs” Lenin wished to create that would give everything to the state; the individual was dead. There was only the collective.

Read the Strugatskys; they are fiendishly witty, accompanied by a high degree of humanism. While the future is unknowable and may be a black horizon, hope and humanity’s capacity for goodness will not be easily thwarted.