In the ‘Virgin Land’ regions of the Soviet Union, in west Siberia and north Kazakhstan, farms had been facing severe climatic conditions since the plough-up began in 1954. Forty million hectares of dry steppes had been put to grain farming on Moscow’s order, on both sides of the Kazakh–Russian border, until then a region deemed too dry to grow wheat on a large scale. In the first half of the 1960s, peasants experienced several catastrophic droughts and crop failures against the background of a huge erosion crisis created by inadequate economic incentives and agronomic practices.Footnote 1 Their extreme dependence on moisture fluctuations made them long for weather forecasts that could predict temperatures and precipitation several months in advance, ideally from May to July. To fulfil this need, the Soviet Weather Centre began publishing long-range forecasts: monthly and even seasonal predictions of the weather.Footnote 2 The main agricultural daily Sel′skaya zhizn′ (Rural Life) reprinted these forecasts to make them available to farms in the remotest corners of the country. Meteorological knowledge was deemed key in developing the country’s agriculture.
However, many Virgin Land agronomists rejected as unreliable the Weather Centre’s long-range predictions and favoured, as an alternative, those of a lone forecaster by the name of Anatolii D′iakov (1911–85), based at a tiny and remote weather station in the west Siberian region of Kemerovo. D′iakov gave, in the words of one Virgin Land agronomist, a ‘precise’, ‘non-ambiguous’ answer to the main question preoccupying agronomists – whether the agricultural year would be ‘favourable’ or ‘dry’. D′iakov based his long-range forecast of the weather on his own telescope observation of sunspot activities.
Until 1972, the existence of an alternative forecast did not seem to pose a challenge to official meteorology. However, during that year, not only did a formidable drought strike Soviet agriculture in general, but heat waves affected Moscow, as forest and peat fires choked the capital with thick air. The government had to buy enormous amounts of grain from the USA. In the press, the Weather Centre came under heavy criticism for its failure to foresee the drought while D′iakov’s alternative forecasts were simultaneously presented as a solution to the problem of long-term weather prediction. A scientific controversy raged between meteorologists on the one hand, and D′iakov and his supporters on the other, on the predictive character of the sun’s activity for atmospheric circulation.Footnote 3
This controversy is the subject of this article, which is a contribution to a growing body of research on the transformations of science in the post-Stalin and late socialist decades. Historians have shown that the space race inaugurated an era of technoscientific optimism at the turn of the 1960s.Footnote 4 Disciplines formerly frowned upon or marginalized under Stalin, from cybernetics to genetics and sociology, flourished.Footnote 5 In the guise of a ‘scientific–technical revolution’, system analysis and future predictions became central tenets in the natural and social sciences.Footnote 6 Earth sciences such as hydrology, seismology or climatology enjoyed a new era of enthusiasm for prediction: with the development of computing, mathematical models and observational systems, accurate prognostications of natural events were within reach, it was believed.Footnote 7
In this article I will show that, in meteorology, the belief that computers and satellites would bring about a breakthrough in long-range forecasts vanished in the 1970s. To show how and why long-range forecasts failed I make the following two arguments. First, the government expected meteorologists to deliver long-range forecast capacities. The Weather Centre entered a risky game, promising that such long-range forecasts would soon give accurate predictions. This optimism raised user expectations, which were not borne out in actual results. Disappointed by the unreliable forecast, users turned to D′iakov for alternative long-range previsions.
The second argument is that, to understand the crisis in meteorology, we have to look outside science and government. Journalists played a key role in destabilizing meteorology in 1972. Although the government tightly controlled the papers, and no opposition press could exist until the second half of the 1980s, journalists were endowed with a special role to educate the public in the values of socialism.Footnote 8 Furthermore, they had an important function as informers for the government about the social problems they diagnosed in various milieux. This paper shows how they influenced politics by combining these two roles: they created a media space for D′iakov and his supporters to promote their views to a large audience, and they lobbied the Party leadership behind the scenes by informing on divisions in the meteorological community. Influential rural correspondents working for central newspapers and television connected regional Party functionaries and agronomists in the Virgin Land regions who relied on D′iakov’s forecasts. Attacking the meteorologists both in the pages of their outlets and in internal letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the journalists were successful in pressuring meteorology to enter into dialog with D′iakov and his supporters (called solnechniki, which I translate here as ‘sunspotters’), but not in bringing about official approval of D′iakov’s approach to forecasting.
A third reflection, developed in the conclusion, concerns the consequences of the vanishing prospect of quick results in long-range forecasting for the place of science in the Soviet government.Footnote 9
‘The weather did not “obey” the forecast’: the 1972 drought test
In the summer of 1972, a major drought hit the Soviet Union. An anticyclone sat atop most of European Russia from mid-June to the end of August, bringing scorching heat and dryness to a territory extending from eastern Ukraine and Crimea to western Kazakhstan, and from the White Sea to the Caspian.Footnote 10 Agriculture was affected, especially in the Russian Federation, where the preceding winter and spring had lacked precipitation. Because most of Ukraine and the Virgin Lands of northern Kazakhstan and western Siberia were spared by the drought, and because the government took prompt measures to save the harvest, the negative impact on agriculture was significant, but limited. Overall, production fell by 13 per cent against the previous year.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, the government had to import a record quantity of grain from the USA to make up for this loss and to save the livestock sector.Footnote 12
Usually, droughts were a problem for the countryside only. What happened in 1972 was different: forest and peat fires raged in the capital region, creating a thick smog which suffocated Muscovites. Around Moscow, where many of them had dachas, several villages burnt to the ground, and more than a hundred residents lost their lives in the fires.Footnote 13 Against the background of this disaster, the meteorologists faced heavy criticism.
Sel′skaya zhizn′, the leading Soviet countryside daily, published the monthly forecast of the Weather Centre on its back page. It also sported a weather review on its front page three times a month. Written by a meteorologist from the Weather Centre, the review was not a prediction but a description and assessment of the weather in relation to agriculture in the preceding decade. After the scorching summer of 1972, Sel′skaya zhizn′ journalist Boris Lesik vented his discontent with the quality of the long-range forecast of the Weather Centre in an article that was withdrawn shortly before publication.Footnote 14 Lesik disparaged the triumphalism displayed by the Weather Centre in its yearly report by showing the low accuracy of its long-range predictions. Comparing the monthly forecasts with actual weather as stated in the decade reviews, both published in Sel′skaya zhizn′, he showed that long-range meteorologists vastly overestimated their success. Not one of the monthly forecasts predicted the unusually hot and dry weather that marked the spring and summer of 1972. Every month they announced the imminent end of the heat and a return of precipitation – but the drought continued.
A retrospective comparison of the forecasts with the decade reviews is indeed sobering on at least two counts. First, as Lesik noticed, the monthly forecast turned out to have been entirely wrong from April to September 1972. For instance, according to the forecast, July would see ‘a fall of the heat’, ‘rain and thunderstorms’ and ‘fresh nights’ in central Russia.Footnote 15 But in July the drought continued unabated, with temperatures reaching forty degrees Celsius. For August, the newspaper, on the basis of the Weather Centre’s prediction, announced to their readers ‘warm’ weather for the main grain regions, again missing predicting the extraordinary heat and drought.Footnote 16 As Lesik ironically concluded, ‘The weather did not “obey” the forecast’.Footnote 17
Second, the weather reviews were deceptive in that they never named the drought a ‘drought’, and never stated clearly its characteristics or the problems that these weather conditions posed to farms. Neither did they reference the peat and forest fires, according to a general ban on disaster reporting and ‘bad news’ in the USSR. Although their author, meteorologist M. Agafonova, noticed that temperatures were three to eight degrees Celsius higher than normal, an observation that had not been seen for the past ninety-three years, she insisted that the heat created ‘good conditions’ for the growth of all main cultures, including wheat, rice and beet.Footnote 18 At a time when wildfires destroyed many homes, Agafonova upheld the obligatory optimism until the end of the crop failure.Footnote 19 All drought-related information was presented as opportunities – for instance, the earlier growth of cereals by ten to twenty days, misleading grain growers about the real state of affairs.Footnote 20 Readers living in drought-ridden farms would presumably have been irritated by this considerable censorship and lies.
Better an unreliable long-range forecast than no forecast at all
Why did Soviet meteorologists publish their long-range forecasts in a national daily as well as in their own professional journal? Were they not aware of the risk of misleading grain growers and other users and exposing themselves to hefty criticism? In what follows I develop three explanations for their temerity: the standing of long-range research in Soviet meteorology; the atmosphere of scientific optimism in the 1960s, when the Weather Centre began publication of seasonal forecasts; and the bond of trust between the Hydrometeorological Service and the government.
Soviet meteorologists had a strong tradition of long-range weather forecasting.Footnote 21 In the 1920s Boris Mul′tanovskii (1876–1938), a leading weather forecaster¸ had set up a long-range team at Leningrad’s Main Observatory, which from 1922 provided an eight- to ten-day forecast alongside a seasonal forecast, using a synoptic approach based on the interpretation of meteorological maps and charts.Footnote 22 G.Ia. Vangengeim and S.T. Pagava, who replaced Mul′tanovskii in 1938, developed his periodization and typologization of atmospheric circulation patterns into a ‘macrocirculatory’ forecast.Footnote 23 Another group of Mul′tanovskii’s students, led by mathematician Il′ia Kibel′, used hydrodynamics equations to approximate the general atmospheric circulation. Based on this research, in 1943 Ekaterina Blinova, the first female scientist elected to the Academy of Sciences, designed a method for weather forecasting up to forty days in advance.Footnote 24 Although these methods were unreliable, they were actively developed in the 1960s.
Katja Doose has pointed to the central importance that research on long-range weather forecasting had in the Soviet Union, both in the meteorological community and for the government, which expected scientific inquiries to produce useful results.Footnote 25 The government hoped that meteorology could help farms prevent drought disasters and limit the huge interannual fluctuations in grain production. Droughts hit every few years (1961, 1963, 1965, 1967 and 1969) with catastrophic consequences for the harvest and often for the food situation of the population.Footnote 26 Long-range prediction would help farms choose the best time to sow and harvest and the best varieties depending on the expected weather conditions.
In the 1960s, the demand that science work toward practical results took the shape of a ‘scientific–technical revolution’ hailed by Soviet scientists and politicians.Footnote 27 It reinforced the pressure on scientists, especially in areas of research concerned with the predictability of Earth processes and societal change (seismology, vulcanology, oceanography or sociology), to use computers and cybernetics to develop methods of providing accurate forecasts of sudden changes and catastrophic events.Footnote 28 This atmosphere of scientific optimism, and the expectation of imminent breakthrough, influenced the relationship between the meteorological community and the government.
In 1971, the director of the Hydrometeorological Service, Evgenyi Fedorov, announced that one of the main goals of the five-year plan in meteorology would be to ‘complete the development of substantially new methods of quantitative long-range forecast of global processes several decades in advance’. Meteorologists would soon be able to ‘forecast important anomalies in average monthly and seasonal air temperature and precipitation as well as sudden changes in weather in the course of the decade, the month and the season for the most important regions … of the USSR’.Footnote 29 Besides, forecasting precipitation and temperatures ‘several years in advance for large regions’ was within reach for 1975, Fedorov announced, who assumed that major atmosphere processes were ‘cyclical’. These objectives were extremely ambitious, speculative and certainly out of reach in a five-year term. Fedorov was grossly exaggerating his capacity. Forecasting ‘sudden changes’ could appeal to the political leadership, who were eager to control weather disasters in agriculture, but was unattainable given the state of research.Footnote 30 That the chief meteorologist proclaimed these goals to the world indicates the pressure put on scientists dealing with forecasting nature’s dynamics.
Fedorov lamented the bad results of long-range forecasts and the lack of progress made in the last decades. The forecast success rate for periods beyond a few days remained low, and the quality of forecasts for beyond five days stagnated or even deteriorated. Notwithstanding this failure, long-range forecasts remained a top priority: even with little ground for optimism, Fedorov needed to promise sudden and significant progress.Footnote 31
Fedorov believed that economic actors should use even weakly reliable long-range forecasts:
Is it worthwhile for the national economy to use long-term forecasts, if at the current level of knowledge they have such a low success rate? It is worthwhile, very much so … as all our experience and calculations have shown, the national economy benefits from them.Footnote 32
The idea that long-range forecasts were always useful for the economy as a whole lay in the fact that they were more accurate than the regional climate profiles available to farmers from their local libraries. A second reason for Fedorov’s confidence in the usefulness of inaccurate forecasts lies in his belief that the economy was based on science’s successive breakthroughs. Therefore, even exploratory results like long-range forecasting had to be shared with the public: ‘We will aim at realizing our scientific research for practical needs not just when everything is already clear to us, but even when not everything is clear yet.’Footnote 33
In exchange for making high demands, the government pampered the Hydrometeorological Service. Since 1962, when Fedorov became its director, the service had morphed into the major Soviet institution for operational information and scientific research on the present status and future prospects for Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere. Khrushchev’s 1963 scientific reform had transferred five major scientific institutes from the Academy of Sciences to the Hydrometeorological Service, making it one of the largest scientific institutions in the country.Footnote 34 The service enjoyed access to weather satellites, rockets, balloons and aeroplanes. In 1972, the government entrusted the service with using its huge station network to monitor and forecast pollution throughout the biosphere. In the 1960s, the Weather Centre, the forecasting branch of the service, delivered its predictions to every sector of the economy, from fishing boats to farms, not forgetting the army, aviation and the general public via the media. The Hydrometeorological Service was one of the leading weather institutions in the world and was heavily engaged in international cooperation. In 1972, cooperation over climatology was a central piece of the détente policy between the US and the USSR and the agreement on scientific cooperation.Footnote 35
Constructing the ‘Weather God’
In the same year, the relentless confidence of Soviet meteorologists experienced a setback when journalists began to extol the weather forecaster Antaolii D′iakov, as an alternative to ‘official’ meteorology. Journalists Yuri Chernichenko for Pravda, Boris Lesik for Sel′skaya zhizn′ and Oleg Moroz for Literaturnaia gazeta painted D′iakov as an infallible lone weather forecaster who predicted, ten days in advance, storms in France, typhoons in Japan and hurricanes in the Caribbean, and, for a whole season, drought and frost in the Soviet Union and Europe – all from his tiny observatory-cum-weather station in Gornaia Shoria, Kemerovo oblast′, in western Siberia.
The journalists emphasized the contrast between the two forecasts. The Weather Centre had thousands of high-end computers; data from space launches, satellites, planes and balloons; an immense archive of the world weather; and tens of thousands of forecasters. Despite this, they were no better, the journalists claimed, than a lonely forecaster in the taiga, assisted by his wife, Nina Georgievna, and equipped only with a telescope and the standard meteorological instruments of a basic Soviet weather station. D′iakov, an astronomer by training, had no research degree and no publication in scientific outlets. But, as the journalists maintained, he was nevertheless able to accurately predict the weather for farm managers located hundreds of kilometres away from his station in a timely manner for sowing and harvesting, a task at which the Hydrometeorological Service had failed for decades.Footnote 36
D′iakov was successful because he had the right theory about nature, they argued. D′iakov believed that the main trigger for changes in Earth’s atmospheric circulation was to be found in the Sun’s activity. With his telescope he observed the Sun daily, paying special attention to changes and turbulence in sunspots and groups of sunspots. He rose to fame thanks to a writer from Novosibirsk who published a long reportage about him in a Siberian literary journal.Footnote 37 In ‘The courage of a visionary’, Gennadii Paderin set up the main threads of D′iakov’s myth: the infallibility of his predictions for any point on the map many days and weeks in advance versus the low success rate of official forecasts; the power of simple ideas of nature versus the infinite and eventually useless collection of data; his modest means and status that made him a sympathetic oddball (chudak) versus a powerful state agency who tried to dismiss him as a quack (znakhar′); and his relentless courage as a ‘heretic’, a new Giordano Bruno or Galileo Galilei, persecuted by powerful institutions. Paderin’s article was reprinted in the export outlets Sputnik and Soviet Land, and an article in an influential science youth weekly was largely based on his account, bringing D′iakov to the attention of Moscow journalists.Footnote 38
The next big step in D′iakov’s rise to fame came in June 1972, when Boris Lesik published a polemical article in the pan-Soviet daily Sel′skaya zhizn′. He too had visited D′iakov in Gornaia Shoria. What was new in Lesik’s account was his intensely antagonistic attitude to ‘official’ meteorology: their long-range forecasts were inaccurate because they had the wrong theory about the atmosphere. They ignored the radical influence of the Sun’s activity on its circulation.Footnote 39
After a suffocating summer for Muscovites, the attacks against the Weather Centre meteorologists in the media redoubled. In Pravda, the country’s main daily, Chernichenko went as far as stating that D′iakov was a legitimate competitor to the Weather Centre: ‘Nowadays there are two weather services: the Weather Centre and the “Weather God” from Gornaia Shoria’.Footnote 40 The journalist borrowed the expression ‘Weather God’ from Paderin to suggest how impeccable D′iakov’s forecasting record was and how respected he was by those who used his forecast. Moreover, he asserted that ‘meteorology is the younger sister of astronomy’, thus reducing the former to a subsidiary role. D′iakov reached the peak of his fame on 27 September, when he appeared on the television evening news.Footnote 41
If journalists Paderin, Lesik and Chernichenko were instrumental in bringing D′iakov to the fore and making him a popular figure, D′iakov himself used them to broadcast his ideas. D′iakov was both polemical and convincing. He made them believe that his forecasts were almost always spot-on: ‘I have brought the accuracy of ten-day forecasts for central Russia to 90–95%’, he would boast.Footnote 42 Lesik and Chernichenko uncritically publicized his ideas about the Sun as the sole engine of the Earth’s climate, giving the impression that meteorologists were divided into two camps: the ineffective and failing ‘official’ meteorology and the marginalized but accurate sunspotters, with D′iakov at their head. At D′iakov’s suggestion, journalists further implied that ‘official’ meteorology repressed sunspotters, preventing the country from accessing a solution to bad harvests and food problems.
But D′iakov wasn’t a newly discovered provincial hero, unearthed by perspicacious journalists. He had a history of engagement in the controversy over sunspot meteorology that had been active since the 1930s. Post-Soviet writers have documented D′iakov’s tragic biography. Born in 1911 in Ukraine to a family of teachers, he was raised next to the city of Kropivnitskii (then Elisavettgrad).Footnote 43 He moved to Odessa in 1928 to study physics and mathematics at the Institute of Popular Education. During his studies he worked for the city’s Astronomic Observatory as a calculator. In 1933 the young astronomer was called to Moscow University to further his studies, but less than a year later was arrested for criticizing the state of the country in his diaries. Condemned to camp detention in Siblag, he was sent to forced labour for a mining enterprise, eventually becoming their meteorologist.Footnote 44
During his imprisonment, the young astronomer gained practical experience of meteorology and access to meteorological literature. Freed in 1938, he remained in Gornaia Shoria as the corporate meteorologist of the mining combine.Footnote 45 He spent the 1940s and 1950s struggling to keep the station free from the stifling control of the regional director of the Novosibirsk Weather Centre. D′iakov called himself a ‘heliogeophysicist’ and his station a ‘helio-meteorological observatory’, refusing to be a simple meteorologist working for Novosibirsk.Footnote 46 As result, he was fired and remained several years jobless in a precarious material situation. D′iakov’s grudge against mainstream meteorology needs to be considered in relation to this painful part of his biography.
During the 1950s, D′iakov built a reputation as a polemical and intransigent debator. He was invited to give talks in Leningrad and Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan’s capital.Footnote 47 At the Main Geophysical Laboratory, he built alliances with astronomers favourable to sunspot ideas in meteorology. At the Kazakhstan Institute of Meteorology (KazNIGMI) he met several sunspotters who were interested in his experience of forecasting the weather by observing the Sun. But after an initial warm welcome, colleagues in both cities grew suspicious when D′iakov could not explain his forecast methodology: how did he go from observing sunspots with the telescope to predicting the weather for widely different time intervals and spatial scales, and that for the whole globe? D′iakov constantly dodged this question in Q & A sessions and in his writings. With time, even colleagues sympathetic to D′iakov’s approach eventually abandoned him. D′iakov for his part did nothing to retain his supporters, eventually breaking with several of them.Footnote 48
In 1953 D′iakov submitted his short monograph On Long-Range Weather Prediction on an Energy-Climate Basis to the Academy of Sciences, which he perceived as a higher court of appeal in his conflict with meteorologists. Five meteorologists reviewed it.Footnote 49 The treatise began with a polemical refutation of the mathematical research of Kibel′ and Blinova on long-range forecasts. D′iakov accused them of having constructed equations to produce results which matched observations, in order to give the impression that these equations had accurately forecast the weather. For decades, Soviet long-range forecasting had been predicated on the works of Kibel′ and Blinova and was therefore on an ‘entirely wrong path’, he claimed.
Unsurprisingly, the reviews were negative. One of the reviewers was Kibel′ himself.Footnote 50 Two further highly regarded meteorologists, Kharen Pogosian and Sergei Khromov, had no obvious reason to be prejudiced against D′iakov. Both, however, were put off by the unfounded polemics against Kibel′ and the lack of methodological exposition. D′iakov’s aggressive and secretive approach made it difficult for even supportive colleagues to endorse him. Lazar′ Vitel′s, for example, was open to sunspot theories and would later become one of their main proponents, but still could not endorse D′iakov’s manuscript. A fifth reviewer, M. Eigenson, alone lauded the work. Kicked out of the Pulkovo observatory, the sunspotter had found refuge in L′viv. He saw D′iakov as an ally, but after a few years of correspondence D′iakov broke with him, as he did with Vitel′s. D′iakov resented the negative reviews, and could not rejoice in the positive ones, feeling misunderstood, denigrated and rejected by the meteorological community.Footnote 51
Twenty years later, when journalists extolled D′iakov’s work and attacked that of the ‘official’ meteorologists, the old battle resumed. But while D′iakov was still deprived of any scientific acknowledgement, he had now won powerful allies: New Land farm managers and journalists. Together, they destabilized mainstream meteorology.
The criterion of practice: ‘not that easy to dismiss’
D′iakov showed visitors piles of letters and telegrams of acknowledgement. Sailors and farm operators lauded his forecasts, comparing them favourably with failed official forecasts. During the 1960s, he had developed a sizable user base, many of them swearing to use only his forecast instead of that of the Weather Centre. New Landers – workers and managers of farms located in the Virgin Land regions – in particular endorsed him. This group was influential in the leadership of the Russian Federation. Rural journalists Lesik and Chernichenko reproduced their praise in the national press and argued that D′iakov, rejected by his fellow meteorologists, nevertheless enjoyed the support of practitioners. The Soviet ‘criterion of practice’, which meant that scientific research had to provide useful results for the economy, was met.Footnote 52 As two astronomers attacking meteorology noted, ‘Many users were and are satisfied with D′iakov’s forecasts, and this is a criterion that cannot be dismissed so easily.’Footnote 53
Party secretaries and heads of agricultural departments of the Kustanai, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Kemerovo and Sverdlovsk regions (in the New Land zone) admitted to Lesik and Chernichenko that they had been using D′iakov’s seasonal forecast for years. Even the head of the Agronomy Department within the Russian Ministry of Agriculture swore by D′iakov. Aleksandr Baraev, the main agronomist of the Virgin Lands, and a friend of Chernichenko, confided that he went by D′iakov, not the Weather Centre.Footnote 54
In a letter to Chernichenko, New Land agronomist Dikov calls D′iakov ‘our national treasure [dostaianie]’. He presents him as a ‘heretic’, who, like all good prophets, was not understood by his national colleagues, but, supposedly, enjoyed a high reputation abroad. Dikov went on,
When, long before the beginning of sowing, we have an urgent need to know definitely what the year will be like – favourable or, on the contrary, dry … we can get a clear and unambiguous answer to these serious questions, without delay and protraction, not from the USSR Hydrometeorological Service, not in the places of concentration of our respectable science, suffocating from complacency … but in the backwoods … of Kemerovo region. From the head of the local meteorological station … D′iakov.Footnote 55
It is beyond the scope of this article to investigate how D′iakov’s telescope-based forecasts produced results usable by agriculturalists hundreds of miles away. But there are two possible sources for his popularity among New Landers. One key lies in the time range of his forecast. For summer wheat, the main crop in the Virgin Land regions, the vegetative season is short and the time slot to sow is narrow. The weather from May to July decides the harvest, with June’s forecast being especially important. D′iakov’s predictions covered May to July, while the Weather Centre did not produce a forecast for this period.Footnote 56 Thus D′iakov had responded attentively to the needs of the New Landers: in contrast, the Weather Centre appeared to be a distant, unresponsive institution.
Another key to D′iakov’s popularity lay in the way his forecast served several groups of users. Locally, the Kuznetskii Metal Combine (KMK) employed D′iakov as a weather forecaster. D′iakov based his local predictions on commonly accepted synoptical indicators, observed using traditional meteorological equipment (temperature, wind, pressure and so on). These local predictions reached up to five and ten days.Footnote 57 The KMK expressed satisfaction with D′iakov’s forecasts and was his greatest institutional protection until his death in 1985. In this context, D′iakov was a competent meteorologist.Footnote 58
A second, regional, group of users was mainly composed of farm managers and agronomists working in the New Land areas of Russia and Kazakhstan. To them, D′iakov telegraphed his famous seasonal agronomical forecasts for the next three months, which he saw as his most difficult task. A third group of users were scientific ships and the fishing fleet, to whom his storm forecast was also delivered by telegraph. Finally, D′iakov provided unsolicited warning of upcoming disastrous weather events to foreign governments, including Cuba, France and Japan.
Foreign embassies and weather services were not ‘users’ of his forecasts, as D′iakov never received any proof that his storm forecasts were effectively used in Cuba or Japan. Storms are frequent and seasonal in equatorial regions and their emergence was not especially difficult to forecast for national weather services. But journalists like Paderin, Lesik and Chernichenko were especially impressed by this aspect of his work, increasing D′iakov’s fame by announcing that he had ‘forecast’ Hurricane Ines to the Cuban comrades and Typhoon Ida to Far Eastern meteorologists in Vladivostok.
D′iakov’s foreign-storm and long-term forecasts were based on meticulous observations of the structure of perturbations at the Sun’s surface.Footnote 59 He followed how groups of sunspots formed, evolved and moved, and how eruptions occurred. When explosions occurred near the Sun’s meridian, D′iakov ascribed to them a strong influence on the Earth’s troposphere: within three to four days the cyclonic activity would rise. A second forecast sequence implied large groups of sunspots at the eastern border of the Sun moving toward the meridian and crossing it. According to D′iakov, within a week cyclones would then rage on Earth. This is how D′iakov ‘predicted’ hurricanes and storms in foreign countries.
D′iakov had observed that sunspots reached their maximum surface area every eighteen to twenty-two days, and this cycle, together with the eleven-year activity cycle of the sun formed the basis of his long-range forecast.Footnote 60 He hypothesized that corpuscular energy from the Sun concentrated at the Earth’s poles under the influence of magnetic forces, where, under heightened pressure, they formed anticyclones. From the north-east these high-pressure air masses descended toward the European part of the Soviet Union, provoking cold spells in the winter and dryness in the summer. At the same time, he speculated that a reverse process happened in the tropics, where warm air rose and moved north, forming cyclones over Siberia. When the sun calmed down, the polar anticyclone moved south toward Siberia, creating stark frost in the winter and dry waves in the summer in the New Land regions.
Furthermore, D′iakov had noticed that anticyclones in the European part of the USSR happened at the peak of the Sun’s eleven-year cycle, whereas in west Siberia and Kazakhstan they happened at the cycle’s minimum.Footnote 61 Based on the supposed synoptic polarity between the east and the west of the Soviet Union, D′iakov predicted in 1972 that 1973 would be a ‘calm’ year, whereas 1974 would see a severe drought in the east, which turned out to be the case at this level of generality.Footnote 62
It was unclear how D′iakov translated these general observations into predictions for concrete regions. How did he construct seasonal forecasts two to three months in advance? D′iakov did not believe that the Sun exerted a direct influence on the climate, but that its influence was mediated by air masses, so that even relatively small energy supplements from the Sun could trigger catastrophic changes in weather that would occur several weeks or months later.Footnote 63 D′iakov extrapolated from sunspots to weather using his fantastic memory of past weather configurations to find patterns of connections between the two.Footnote 64
In the autumn of 1972, the Soviet government asked the Academy of Sciences and the Hydrometeorological Service to form a commission to assess D′iakov’s work. The commission, whose head, E.P. Borisenkov, was sympathetic to D′iakov, spent two weeks in Gornaia Shoria to understand how he made his forecasts. The commission’s final report encouraged D′iakov to publish his forecasting method, and the Hydrometeorological Service offered him a slot in its book collection. D′iakov, however, did not follow this up. The next year, the Ministry of Agriculture, where D′iakov had supporters, encouraged him to publish his 1953 manuscript through its own press, but D′iakov refused to make even the most mundane changes demanded by the editor.Footnote 65 As a result, D′iakov’s main work did not appear in print until 2011.Footnote 66
Overall, though, the commission’s results were not positive for D′iakov. Its members studied his forecasts over fifteen years and found an accuracy of around 50 per cent; that is, the same as tossing a coin.Footnote 67 Contrary to his reputation for infallibility in warning of catastrophic weather for agriculture, D′iakov had not forecast a devastating drought in the north Caucasus in 1969. What is more, he had failed to predict the 1972 drought.Footnote 68
Stormy weather for meteorology
Despite this, attacks against ‘official’ meteorology reached their high point when journalists lobbied the Central Committee for a reorganization of the Weather Centre. Its head, Viktor Bugaev, was sacked. Old professional wounds reopened during this crisis, with astronomers taking the floor to discredit meteorology as an autonomous science.
D′iakov had enjoyed support in the government since the beginning of the 1960s: he sent his weather warnings to Dmitrii Polianskii, the prime minister of Russia, whose support for D′iakov continued after he baceme deputy to Soviet prime minister Aleksei Kosygin.Footnote 69 Polianskii allotted money for a new French-made telescope and a new building for the weather station in Gornaia Shoria.Footnote 70 After the publication of Lesik’s article ‘Sun’s wind’ in Sel′skaya zhizn′, it was Polianskii who ordered the formation of a commission.Footnote 71 He received D′iakov in his Moscow office at least once, and instructed the Weather Service to show him consideration.Footnote 72 In 1972, D′iakov was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner of Work ‘for his help to agricultural workers with long-range weather forecast’.Footnote 73
Following D′iakov’s lead, Paderin, Lesik and Chernichenko attacked Viktor Bugaev, the head of the Weather Centre, for his opposition to using sunspots’ supposed influence on the Earth’s climate as the basis for weather forecasting.Footnote 74 They implied that Bugaev’s position contradicted his boss Fedorov, whom they wrongly presented as more open toward heliometeorology, buttressing the idea that two schools of thought were fighting to dominate meteorology.
Using their link to the Central Committee, Lesik and Chernichenko lobbied the Party to demand a purge of the Weather Centre. In a stunning case of victim–perpetrator reversal, Lesik referred to the ‘methods of the sad times of the biological discussion’, implicitly comparing sunspotters to the silenced geneticists, and Bugaev to Trofim Lysenko.Footnote 75 To his readers in the Central Committee, Chernichenko attested that the ‘public atmosphere at the Weather Centre does not favour the critical assessment of the state of meteorology and prevents the development … of promising new directions’, by which he meant D′iakov and his sunspot theory.Footnote 76 The fault for this ‘crisis situation in meteorology’ was attributed to Bugaev,who exerted a ‘monopoly’ over theoretical developments, imposing, together with Pagava, dynamic meteorology against all other ‘directions’. Chernichenko gathered anonymous letters denouncing an ‘atmosphere of fear’, and pronouncements by outsiders from the Academy of Sciences eager to give a lesson to the Hydrometeorological Service. It is not possible in the given state of the documentation to assess the role that this campaign played in Bugaev’s sacking in 1973, although Lesik and Chernichenko considered it a victory for the sunspotters’ camp.Footnote 77
In November 1972, after being sent Chernichenko’s devastating accusations, Fedorov wrote a lengthy justification of his position to the Central Committee.Footnote 78 He confessed that long-range forecasts were inaccurate, pointing to the fact that those made elsewhere in the world were also bad. He practised samokritika, or self-criticism, acknowledging that meteorologists had ignored D′iakov. Fedorov wanted to show that his service had taken real steps to accommodate D′iakov, trying to avoid the impression that it had tried to silence him. He revealed that the Weather Centre invited D′iakov to participate in elaborating an official forecast for the end of 1972 and for 1973. D′iakov was, furthermore, among the speakers at a Weather Centre conference on the links between the Sun and the atmosphere, which D′iakov’s supporters had celebrated as a major turning point.
However, Fedorov didn’t make any substantial concession. He repeated what Bugaev and others had said to the press since the middle of the 1960s:
If in principle the possibility of solar-activity impact on the lower atmosphere is not in doubt, the specific prognostic value of solar phenomena is an object of great controversy due to the uncertainty in the mechanisms of impact, the small amount of energy brought [by the Sun] into the atmosphere, the apparent ambiguity of the impact (depending on the initial state of the atmosphere) and, finally, the need to forecast the solar phenomena themselves …Footnote 79
What is more, Federov toned down the optimism he had displayed a few months earlier regarding accurate long-range forecasting. Now he found that ‘articles in the press that promise a quick betterment [in long-range forecasting] mislead readers’, and that many colleagues thought accurate long-range forecasts unattainable in the near future. There was just no reason to await an ‘immediate and dramatic increase in accuracy’, contrarily to sunspotters’ promises, and, we should add, his own. Fedorov was probably realizing here that his earlier optimism had encouraged sunspotters like D′iakov, who could both promise and realize, with the help of the press, seemingly accurate long-range forecasts.
But why, then, was the Weather Service publishing monthly forecasts? Meteorologiia i gidrologiia, the meteorologists’ main scientific journal, opened the discussion on this question: Lev Gandin and E. Zhukovskii, two meteorologists specializing in the economic impact of weather forecasts, argued that users had to ignore forecasts with low accuracy. The lower the accuracy, the greater the economic loss to users. The efficient use of weather information in the economy did not depend mainly on the quality of the forecast, but on how users used the forecast. Depending on their constraints and goals, different users had an interest in using a forecast of a given accuracy, or ignoring it. A short discussion developed in the journal, but it soon became clear that Gandin and Zhukovskii had destroyed the belief held by many Soviet meteorologists, Fedorov the most prominent among them, that any forecast more accurate than chance was usable. The authors made another major point: the Weather Centre should only publish long-range predictions alongside information on their accuracy. In 1975, the Weather Centre discontinued publication of the monthly forecasts altogether. This year saw a devastating drought plunge Soviet agriculture into a severe crisis, and a renewed mass purchase of grain on the international markets.Footnote 80
The discussion in the general and specialized press revealed fault lines in meteorology when old foes seized the moment to attack the discipline. Astronomers teamed up with heliogeophysicists to argue that meteorology was merely an ancillary area of astronomy. In January, V. Krat, the director of the Pulkovo Observatory, and B. Rubashev, an experienced sunspotter, published in Pravda a scathing criticism of meteorology.Footnote 81 Pointing to the failed prediction of the 1972 drought, they found that the Weather Centre had ignored the influence of the Sun’s changing activity, the Sun’s ‘caprice’, despite the fact that huge groups of sunspots were readily visible on the star’s surface, warning that disastrous weather was on the way. As early as the 1930s, astronomers and heliometeorologists from Leningrad and Tashkent had offered ‘successful forecast methods for large-scale geophysical events’ twenty-seven days in advance. Recently, D′iakov had produced ‘successful forecasts’, but meteorologists remained understandably ‘sceptical’. The popular science weekly Tekhnika molodezhi presented meteorology as a premodern endeavour awaiting its Keplerian moment to move from primitive observations to the identification of a ‘law of the atmosphere’.Footnote 82 In two issues published during the first half of 1973, the magazine gave the floor to a triumphant D′iakov, who declared that meteorology had at last recognized the central role of the Sun’s fluctuation in the weather, with Krat, Rubashev and further leading Soviet astronomers and heliogeophysicists providing approving comments and lending D′iakov the credit of their grades and status.Footnote 83 It was left to the reader to decide whether D′iakov was the Kepler that meteorology had allegedly been awaiting.
Seizing the moment, heliometeorologist Rustem Usmanov, who worked at the Sun atmosphere lab of the Weather Centre, attacked his own colleagues on the pages of Literaturnaia gazeta, the main intellectual newspaper, for their ‘traditional, purely meteorological … often erroneous ideas’ about the causation of atmospheric processes.Footnote 84 He presented heliometeorology as cutting-edge research and himself as the leader of an ongoing revolution in meteorology, in contrast to mainstream scientists who spent so much time gathering data that they had lost sight of the fundamental questions of the discipline. He took on the promise of long-range forecasting, deriding cautious colleagues and stating that he had, using sunspots, like D′iakov, forecast storms three weeks in advance.
The years 1972–3 saw the triumph of heliometeorology in the Soviet Union. Sunspotters enjoyed support from many users, from key journalists and from regional and pan-Soviet politicians. Their hero was D′iakov, the Kepler figure able to establish meteorology on the firm fundament of astronomical laws. The Meteorological Service’s dangerous game of promising breakthroughs in long-range forecasting had backfired, creating a space for other people to fulfil their promise, in words at least. The service’s own long-range forecasts were not only often proved wrong, but were also broadcast without the necessary caveat about their low reliability. But the triumph of heliometeorologists was short-lived. The Brezhnev leadership did not purge the Meteorological Service beyond Bugaev, leaving it space in which to negotiate accounts of the Sun–atmosphere links.
The end of the gale warning in meteorology
In the general press, meteorologists found it hard to counter the vicious attacks of sunspotters and their supporters.Footnote 85 On the pages of their main outlet, Meteorologiia i gidrologiia, however, they stayed in control. Bugaev, who remained the editor of the journal after his dismissal, was forced to open its pages to sunspotters, but confined them to the ‘discussion’ pages, where they encountered vigorous refutations.
When an article condemned the ‘scientific disinformation’ in the general press and the ugly role played by astronomers Krat and Rubashev in attacking meteorology, the redaction published the astronomers’ response.Footnote 86 They claimed that a correlation exists between Sun’s cycles of diverse lengths (eleven years, eighty to ninety years and six hundred years) and meteorological events and insisted that the Weather Centre had to take these links seriously in forecasting.Footnote 87 Another controversy opposed astronomer E.R. Mustel′ and meteorologist I.V., on the question of the influence of the influx of corpuscular radiation (or charged particles) from the Sun on the Earth’s atmosphere, another major claim among heliogeophysicists.Footnote 88
Sergei Khromov, professor of meteorology and climatology at Moscow University, wrote a lengthy review of the state of the art in Sun–atmosphere relations, which resolved the controversy from the meteorological perspective.Footnote 89 Without ever mentioning D′iakov, whose work he had reviewed fifteen years before, he denied that sunspotters had been marginalized: they worked in research laboratories, published, spoke at conferences and otherwise led the normal life of Soviet scientists, he argued.Footnote 90 Khromov located the difference between heliogeophysicists and meteorologists in the realm of ideas: whereas meteorologists recognized the influence on the climate of changes in the integral flux of solar radiation (the solar constant), they denied a significant atmospheric influence of smaller changes in solar activity. Heliophysicists, on the contrary, attributed a massive effect of the Sun’s fluctuation on the troposphere. For Khromov, heliogeophysicists, despite their best efforts, did not prove that link.
Khromov classified a dozen Soviet sunspotters in two groups: the ‘enthusiasts’ or ‘believers’, and those who were more nuanced and cautious. In the first he put Moris Eigenson, Igor′ Maksimov, Iu. Vitinskii, A. Geodonov, Usmanov, M. Gnevyshev, Krat and Taisiia Pokrovskaia. In the second we find B. Rubashev, Oleg Drozdov, A. Grigor′eva, Evgeniia Rubinshtein, L. Polozova, Vladimir Sazonov, Viktor Loginov and Mikhail Baidal. He showed how all of them researched natural cycles on the Sun and on Earth and tried to correlate them. But there was only one clear Sun cycle as a candidate for influence on the climate: the eleven-year cycle. Other supposed cycles were less obvious (a twenty-two-year cycle and a ‘secular cycle’ of some eighty to ninety years). Dodging the problem of transiting from correlation to causation, sunspotters took loose similarities in cycle length for proof that atmospheric circulation was determined by the Sun’s fluctuations. Crucially, the vagueness and confusion in the cycles and their correlation render attempts to use them to forecast the weather futile. Some heliogeophysicists reacted to Khromov’s state of the art, without, however, bringing in data comfirming their views.Footnote 91
The 1972–4 crisis in meteorology had important repercussions for the discipline. Sunspot research was discredited and marginalized. After 1974, the flagship journal Meteorologiia i klimatologiia stopped publishing articles by sunspotters.Footnote 92 Younger colleagues who had begun as heliogeophysicists in the 1960s, like Loginov and Sazonov, reoriented their research.Footnote 93 Middle-aged researchers, like Drozdov and Aleksandr Girs, distanced themselves from their heliogeophysical research. The older generation of sunspotters – Vitel′s, Rubinshtein, Aleksandr Ol′ – died in the 1970s and were not replaced. A minority, though, including Pokrovskaia and Usmanov, remained faithful to their initial research agenda. Agrometeorology, agroclimatology and drought research were domains in which several former heliogeophysicists found a new home, when a dedicated institute opened in Obninsk in 1975.
In long-range forecasting, meteorologists turned toward numerical models. Iurii Izrael and Gurii Marchuk were central figures in this shift. The first became director of the Hydrological Service after Fedorov left office in 1974. The second was a mathematician, a student of Kibel′, who rose to the highest ranks in science, becoming the last president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1986.Footnote 94 Ten years earlier, as the director of the Computational Center of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences and an academician, he had laid out to meteorologists his plan for renewing long-range predictions.Footnote 95 He closed the sunspot debate by stating that ‘more thorough measurements of the variation of the solar constant … showed that supposed variations were strongly exaggerated’. Instead of a range of 1 to 2 per cent in change, which could provoke temperature hikes of up to two to three degrees Celsius, Sun’s activity fluctuated only by a few tenths or even hundredths of a percentage point. As far as corpuscular energy was concerned, the new data showed that it was even less than from the variation of the solar constant. Marchuk’s programme of developing numerical models that took into account the relationship between the oceans and the atmosphere was approved and dominated long-range forecast research in the next decade.Footnote 96
Conclusion
In his 1976 article Marchuk upheld the optimism about the prospect of seasonal forecasts, against more pessimistic US competitors.Footnote 97 However, it was clear to the reader that the path he proposed would require many years of work and large investments to bring an unforeseeable measure of progress in forecast accuracy. There was no way of predicting next week’s weather, let alone next month. In that, the 1972–4 debate turned out to be a defeat for both meteorologists and sunspotters.
In 1986, a popular-science book published by the Weather Service stated that ‘only the boldest optimists among meteorologists express the hope that the problem of long-range prediction could be completely solved in the next century’.Footnote 98 The idea that nature was infinitely predictable, because it was controlled by deterministic laws that were accessible to the collective mind of researchers, had suffered a major blow in the D′iakov controversy.Footnote 99 The predictability and controllability of Earth processes as scientific tenets had been linked to the functions ascribed to science in Soviet governance and ideology ever since Stalinist times. Scientists gained important command positions in the Stalinist system because their understanding of the laws of nature made controlling and exploiting physical processes possible. The best-known examples of the link between knowledge, power and ideology are the nuclear physicists who created the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the nuclear energy programme. They enjoyed extraordinary fame and influence because they had demonstrated that the Soviet state could tame and harness nature’s forces.Footnote 100 In meteorology, the 1972 drought was a watershed moment bringing doubt in this belief system.
The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe (1986) and the Spitak earthquake (1988) further weakened the belief in science’s power to accurately predict the behaviour of atoms and the tectonic movements of the Earth’s mantle.Footnote 101 Prometheanism decreased toward the end of the Soviet Union. Nature appeared less penetrable by knowledge and more fragile; also, efforts to tame nature destroyed it.Footnote 102 As transformism receded in many quarters of Soviet science in the 1970s, so did the idea of total understanding of nature and its control via technology. The 1972 crisis in meteorology as a science of weather and a technology of foretelling it was important in opening cracks in the Soviet belief system of total control over nature.
In 1972 a lonely weather forecaster in the Kuzbass had challenged meteorology. Journalists and politicians portrayed him as a saviour offering a cutting-edge solution to an old and complicated scientific problem. The D′iakov myth is inscribed in the Soviet tradition of the underdog versus the ruling elite in science, of which Trofim Lysenko is the most successful example.Footnote 103 The myth is adapted to the conditions of late socialism: D′iakov is not the son of a peasant, but a victim of Stalin’s terror; he is not antagonized by bourgeois scientists suspected of treason, but by bureaucrats of science eager to keep their positions. A major difference from the repression of geneticists under Lysenko is the behaviour of the political leadership: the shake-up of the meteorological service after the 1972 drought was limited to the demotion of Bugaev, the chief forecaster. Unlike Lysenko’s mandate from Stalin to destroy genetics in 1948, the Party and the government under Brezhnev let the Hydrometeorological Service sort out the controversy with the sunspotters, protecting the latter from reprisals by the meteorological bureaucracy.
However, in the 1970s and 1980s, research on sunspots was renewed using satellites to measure changes in the solar constant: slight variations in radiation with the eleven-year sunspot cycle were reported.Footnote 104 From there, research on the Sun’s influence on the atmosphere was mainly linked to efforts to explain climate warming outside anthropogenic greenhouse gases and to climate change scepticism and denialism.Footnote 105 But it was not used to predict weather on Earth.
After his death in 1985, D′iakov remained a popular figure in Russia. In the tradition of Lesik and Chernichenko, writers and journalists turned to D′iakov to find alternatives to a practice of science that they found too distant and numerical.Footnote 106 The link between distant cosmic bodies and the banality of our weather on Earth fascinates those who resent the transformation of meteorology into a cold science of numbers. Recently, advocates of ‘Russian cosmism’ have integrated D′iakov in the gallery of unheard prophets, pointing to the dependence of the biosphere on the Sun and the cyclical organization of all natural and spiritual life.Footnote 107
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