Tito Pontecorvo is one of Dubna's most famous residents. His father Bruno, the brother of Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, studied with the great Enrico Fermi, then fled fascist Italy, emigrating to Canada and disappearing with his wife, a Swedish communist. As it turned out, the man who was dubbed the Hydrogen Traitor (though he maintained he'd never worked on the H-bomb) went to Finland and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where, apparently by prior arrangement, he was hidden - in Dubna. A couple of years after Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the West, he reappeared at a press conference in Moscow, his transformation into Soviet scientist complete. He lived in Dubna for the rest of his life; his wife, they say, lost her mind.
Dubna myths feed on the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo's flamboyance: he is said to have delivered April Fool's Day lectures and to have ridden his horse through Dubna at midnight wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The latter story, though, seems to conflate his image with that of his youngest son: Pontecorvo the father is most fondly remembered for introducing the Soviets to snorkeling; his son is the one with the horses. Tito Pontecorvo started out as a scientist in oceanology and spent most of his time at sea - but as the son of foreigners, he was not considered reliable enough to disembark in foreign lands. finally, Pontecorvo quit, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had been forced out of science.
Since he was a child, Tito Pontecorvo had had a thing about horses. Enough of a thing, apparently, to do the unimaginable: launch a private enterprise not just anywhere in the Soviet Union, but in one of its showcase towns. In 1979 he built a barn right where the town of Dubna met the forest and started offering riding and horse-grooming lessons.
Having a local riding school appealed to the Dubna ambition for the finer things in life. Tito Pontecorvo and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research entered into a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted a dozen years and produced hundreds of Eastern bloc city kids uncommonly good with horses. In 1991, when Russia legalized private farming, Pontecorvo set about building the dream of his lifetime. He spent more than a million dollars of borrowed money to build the biggest palace the Volga has seen. He situated it on the opposite side of the river from Dubna, where the gray-brown of dilapidated villages unexpectedly gives way to the spectacle of a red-brick rendition of a sugar castle, with tiny turrets and silver-topped towers stretching as far as the eye can see. The castle lies low in a valley, surrounded by the green pastures rolling down to the river, dotted with Pontecorvo's 200 Akhal-Teke, some of the world's most exotic, most expensive and, possibly, most beautiful horses; there are only 2,500 of them on earth.
But the Russian nouveau riche have not rushed to buy these fine animals. And the state is in no hurry to fork over half a million dollars in farming subsidies that Pontecorvo figures he is due. Pontecorvo's plan now is to use his natural charm, native English, and Canadian citizenship to popularize the Akhal-Teke in North America, "so that American snobs start saying to one another, 'What, you still have not bought an Akhal-Teke?'" For now, though, he has sold off most of the farm equipment. His telephone has been turned off for nonpayment. His six employees, his family, and his 200 Akhal-Teke are living in the castle, gates closed tight against the creditors.
The moral of this story, then, is that ambition can trap you - indeed, that if science was among the Soviet Union's greatest ambitions, then the science towns were its best-built traps. As these things go, of course, it is better to be trapped in a castle, like Tito Pontecorvo, than in barracks, like the builders of Protvino's ill-fated accelerator tunnel. When miners and construction workers were called in from all over the country, some of them were temporarily settled in barracks on the outskirts of Protvino. In the years since the money stopped, the 200-family barracks settlement has turned into a town of its own, rife with the complaints, the smells, and the rumors bred by hopelessness and poverty.
As soon as I declare myself as a journalist, the women of this shanty town flock to me and interrupt one another with complaints. "Our children have to travel to school in another town." "The sewers leak everywhere!" "The rats are as big as a soccer ball!" "We were tricked!"
True, they were tricked. They were lured here with high salaries - about the same as a physics PhD's then - and the promise of an apartment in a few years. When the construction came to a standstill, all hope for an apartment vanished. A couple of years ago the local sanitary commission deemed the shanty town unsuitable for living. Some of the wives in the town formed an activist group, and last summer they finally succeeded: they obtained permanent residence registration stamps for all the barracks' residents. Now they have more rights, including the right to stay indefinitely in a place unsuitable for living, playing the raggedy ghosts of Protvino's ambition.
The town retaliates by putting on an aggressively happy face. Protvino is holding a town-anthem contest, in which the front-runner is local celebrity poet Alexandra Kurbakova.
In a scene too heavily symbolic for even the most exploitative of journalists, Kurbakova greets me from her bed in a cramped first-floor studio apartment in the "saw building" by saying she doesn't have long to live. Reclining beneath a wall of portraits of great Russian poets - Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Yesenin, and Kurbakova herself - she performs her hymn to Protvino, a waltz that I present here in my own faithful translation:
Where the scientists are free Like the birds in the trees, Hear the sounds of science In the forest's green silence. You can feel antimatter And the scientists had better Take you down the stairs To the tunnel that's theirs.
Kurbakova's husband, also a local poet, has lit candles and cranked up a crackly mono tape recorder for this performance. I sort through my embarrassment at being the recipient of this ritual, my disgust at this filthy little apartment, my squeamishness at the sight of Kurbakova, who really does not look like she has much time left - and discover that I am not only touched, but also vaguely envious.
There was a time, albeit when I was 9, when I would have been willing to be shot in the butt with a salt bullet just to stake out a place in the science-town mythology. How glamorous it is to be going out as a science town's tragic living classic.
That's the thing about science towns: their projects are so grand they are absurd, their residents are so stubborn they have tunnel vision, their artists are so gloriously provincial they are pathetic, but somehow, even now, the total is different than the sum of its parts.
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Not in terms of mass-energy, charge, spin, and so forth.
: )
That might be the most mercifull thing that could happen.
The Akhal-Teke are called the "golden" horses of the steppe, as they have a golden glint peculiar to their coloring. The Russians have established a bloodline book in their efforts to promote this beautiful breed of horse.