According to an ancient Buddhist wisdom, everything in this life is conditioned by everything else. In plain language, it simply means that everything is interconnected: one thing leads to another, and so on… I had an unexpected proof of that dictum recently, when an E&T colleague drew my attention to Google’s home page, which on that day marked the 111th anniversary(!) of Lev Davidovich Landau, or simply Dau, as he was nicknamed by his colleagues, among whom, incidentally, was my father at one point.

Well, we are all used to Google’s rather charming tradition of marking the utterly un-round and un-even anniversaries of some little-known celebrities’ births and deaths. To me, it signifies memory, respect for the past as well as a gentle dig at the all-permeating celebrity culture. Indeed, why should we revere the discoverer of America, say, more highly than the inventor of an ordinary screwdriver, for no one knows whose input in our civilisation was more significant? After all, as the inimitable Oscar Wilde once stated jokingly, America had never been discovered, it was merely detected.

Lev Landau, however, was not just another B-List celebrity. Born on 22 January 1908, in the family of a Baku engineer, Dau was one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists: a theoretical physicist, a Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of the quantum theory and much more. The USSR’s legendary enfant terrible, purged and imprisoned by Stalin in the 1930s, Dau was also a larger-than-life character: a notorious womaniser and an eccentric, who claimed to have mathematically solved the mystery of human happiness. A thoroughly cinematic character!

I happen to have a personal connection to Lev Landau via my late father, a particle physicist and Doctor of Science, who had worked for most of his life at the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, the city where I grew up.

The chain of that day’s extraordinary coincidences was further extended in the evening when I habitually tuned to the Russian Service of the formerly Munich- and now Prague-based Radio Liberty – my favourite radio station, with which I have collaborated for many years. In the 1990s, I was Radio Svoboda’s (‘Svoboda’ is ‘liberty’ in Russian) Australian stringer and am very proud of the role it had played in the collapse of the USSR.

The weekly programme ‘Poverkh Bar’yerov’ (‘Above the Hurdles’), edited and presented by my old friend and colleague Igor Pomeratsev, was already on air. The first thing I heard were the interviewees’ voices speaking Russian with an inimitable ‘southern’ accent, characteristic of the residents of Kharkov (I myself used to have that peculiar accent until my move to Moscow in 1978). Men and women were talking about their lives inside some giant retro movie set where they were supposed to behave as if they were stuck in the 1930s Soviet Union.

That was how I first learned about the unique and unprecedented – socially, artistically and technologically – DAU Project: the set of multiple full-length feature films, documentaries and TV series, altogether of 700 hours duration, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and based around Lev Landau’s life. The Project, incorporating hundreds of participants in a number of European countries, was started in 2008, and January 2019 should have seen its long-awaited first release in Paris (for some obscure reasons, the premiere was postponed at the last moment). A true ‘Wow!’ project, or so it sounded.

At this point, the readers of this blog, aware of my background and of my undying interest in anything related to my now-defunct mother country, the USSR, might be forgiven for asking: “How come you only found out about that gigantic endeavour 11 years after it was started – in fact, only after its actual completion?”

A legitimate question, revealing the very essence of the DAU Project. It was hard, if not impossible, to find out anything while it was still in progress largely due to the extreme secrecy in which it was carried out, with all the participants’ contracts containing strict confidentiality clauses. I did of course hear rumours of a “secret Soviet town” being constructed somewhere in the outskirts of Kharkov and of occasional massive filming sprees, with cranes, helicopters and hundreds of extras, in the city centre in the middle of the night, but no solid proofs of any of the above. The DAU Project participants were only allowed to speak out after it was all but completed, and Igor’s radio programme was one of the first media outlets to interview some of them.

What Igor’s interviewees were talking about was mind-boggling. But before I recount their personal impressions, here are some general facts about the ‘Wow!’ Project, made public only recently.

Originally conceived as a mere Landau biopic, the project has ballooned into what one Russian journalist described as “the most expensive, complicated, and all-consuming” cinematic endeavour in history, beating even the well-known Soviet movie epic ‘War and Peace’, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. The filming, involving 10, 000 principal actors (most of them amateurs – with Landau himself played by a Greek orchestra conductor – but with several A-list Hollywood stars thrown in); 10,000 extras; 392,000 auditions and 40, 000 costumes – all generously financed by the Russian philanthropist and technology entrepreneur Serguei Adoniev, started simultaneously in several locations, including Paris, Berlin, Moscow and London, with the main set – the specially constructed 12,000 square-metre fake Soviet town, known as ‘The Institute’ (for it included, but wasn’t limited to, a life-size replica of the whole of the 1930s-1960s Physico-Technical Institute campus), in Kharkov, or Kharkiv, as the city has come to be known since Ukraine gained its independence from Russia in 1991.

Astonishingly, the replica included the Institute’s life-size and fully-functioning technological and scientific equipment of the 1930s-1960s: transformers, energy generators, the very particle accelerator on which my father used to work (then the largest in Europe), first-generation TVs and computers, and so on.

400 Kharkivyani (residents of Kharkiv) – scientists, workers, teachers, students, policemen, engineers, retirees etc., including women and children, had been recruited and contracted to live and work within the compound for two years, thus recreating the 30 years of Soviet history, from 1938 to 1968. Bound by the draconian non-disclosure agreements, they were expected to wear period costumes at all times, even when the cameras were not rolling (and they were not rolling very often).

In his programme, Igor Pomerantsev interviewed about a dozen of the participants for the first time, including a scientist, a costume designer and a caretaker. Below, I will try to reproduce the picture of life inside the compound as it was described by them.

The participants were expected to lead normal lives inside the compound and to never mention (at the peril of hefty fines) anything related to the filming, movies in general and/or the DAU Project, in particular. They were allowed, and even encouraged, to enter into relationships, to have sex and consume alcohol, often with ensuing fights and conflicts (many of which were filmed on the spot), even to crack political jokes which would then be duly reported by the ‘informers’ to the NKVD, MGB or KGB (depending on the assumed timing of the misdemeanour). Filming was undertaken sporadically, often unbeknown to the participants, contracted to be prepared for it at all times.

The period costumes to be worn 24/7 were entirely authentic: from underwear to the last button. The costume-maker, interviewed in the programme claimed to have been told off by the organisers when they spotted some “incorrect” underwear on a mannequin(!) in a replica clothes store. The participants’ hairstyles, of course, had to be authentic too, and those included the notorious and much-hated (by me at least) ‘Box’ (basically, a crew-cut) and/or ‘Semi-Box’ (a crew-cut with a short silly fringe above the forehead) – the only ones boys at my primary school were allowed to wear.

The film set housed a large restaurant-cum-buffet where all authentic Soviet dishes were prepared and served. Allegedly, the quality of food was very high, for the restaurant was at times – in breach of the strict confidentiality rules – patronised by local dignitaries from outside the compound. With them, one of the interviewees once spotted Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his ex-model wife Dar’ya Zhukova.

Inside the restaurant and elsewhere in the compound, the hooray-patriotic and ad nauseam super-optimistic Soviet songs were played from loudspeakers at all times, and that, in the words of one female interviewee, was the hardest thing (for her) to take: they made her feel “violated and terrified”.

According to the interviewed scientist, most of the equipment inside the replicated Institute’s laboratories was either in good working order or could at least produce all necessary sound and visual effects, when switched on: sparkles, hisses, blinking lights etc.

That very scientist, however, was not happy with such extravagant spending on costumes and replicas while the state of the real-life science, and physics in particular, in Kharkiv, was in his words, “deplorable” and in desperate need of investment. That opinion is shared by some of my own contacts in Kharkiv.

So here’s a million-dollar (or a hundred-million-hryvnia, in Ukrainian terms) question: was (and is) this whole megalomaniac enterprise worth its while? I would probably be very unpopular among the struggling scientists and engineers of many post-Soviet countries if I say that I think it was. Memory is an extremely important social commodity. Even if it does not pay off immediately, it is the best guarantee that the gruesome past is not going to return and therefore the best possible investment in the country’s future. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” according to George Santayana.

“Yes, but can’t we remember the past for less money and with less pomp?” I can hear you asking. Well, what can I say? We probably can, yet my strong belief is that – from the positions of social anthropology – a project aiming at properly recreating a totalitarian society should be a tad totalitarian too.

To me, the most evocative impression of the DAU Project came from the above-quoted female participant, scared out of her mind by the very Soviet music to the accompaniment of which people (myself included) had to spend our lives in the USSR. I now know that the new generation of Ukrainians will never allow totalitarian dictators to call the tune (in more than one sense) – and to me that knowledge alone justifies all the gigantism and all the expense of the DAU Project.

I am sure my father would have agreed.

I can’t wait to see (or shall I say “to experience”) the ‘Wow!’ Project in full and wish lots of good luck to its creators in their courageous attempt at keeping the memories alive, for without them, there is always a danger of ending up with another meaningful Buddhist concept – Sunyata, loosely translated as emptiness, or void.

PS. When this blog post was already completed, I came across the book ‘Scientists Under Surveillance. The FBI Files’, just released by the MIT Press in a facsimile format. It is a blood-curdling and thoroughly documented chronicle of the persecution of scientists – not in the USSR, but in the USA under J Edgar Hoover! Whereas Lev Landau was interrogated, tortured and imprisoned in the Stalinist Soviet Union, his famous American counterparts: Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman (my father’s all-time hero), Albert Einstein and many more – were followed, threatened, blackmailed and spied upon by the establishment in the world’s, allegedly, most democratic country.

 This is what the shortage of memories (luckily, unlike the Soviets, Americans had no Great Purge-like experiences they could recall) can lead to. For some reason – and particularly after my recent visit to Kiiv – I am convinced that none of above-mentioned totalitarian cruelty and excesses towards the scientists, engineers and other citizens can ever happen in Ukraine again.

According to an ancient Buddhist wisdom, everything in this life is conditioned by everything else. In plain language, it simply means that everything is interconnected: one thing leads to another, and so on… I had an unexpected proof of that dictum recently, when an E&T colleague drew my attention to Google’s home page, which on that day marked the 111th anniversary(!) of Lev Davidovich Landau, or simply Dau, as he was nicknamed by his colleagues, among whom, incidentally, was my father at one point.

Well, we are all used to Google’s rather charming tradition of marking the utterly un-round and un-even anniversaries of some little-known celebrities’ births and deaths. To me, it signifies memory, respect for the past as well as a gentle dig at the all-permeating celebrity culture. Indeed, why should we revere the discoverer of America, say, more highly than the inventor of an ordinary screwdriver, for no one knows whose input in our civilisation was more significant? After all, as the inimitable Oscar Wilde once stated jokingly, America had never been discovered, it was merely detected.

Lev Landau, however, was not just another B-List celebrity. Born on 22 January 1908, in the family of a Baku engineer, Dau was one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists: a theoretical physicist, a Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of the quantum theory and much more. The USSR’s legendary enfant terrible, purged and imprisoned by Stalin in the 1930s, Dau was also a larger-than-life character: a notorious womaniser and an eccentric, who claimed to have mathematically solved the mystery of human happiness. A thoroughly cinematic character!

I happen to have a personal connection to Lev Landau via my late father, a particle physicist and Doctor of Science, who had worked for most of his life at the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, the city where I grew up.

The chain of that day’s extraordinary coincidences was further extended in the evening when I habitually tuned to the Russian Service of the formerly Munich- and now Prague-based Radio Liberty – my favourite radio station, with which I have collaborated for many years. In the 1990s, I was Radio Svoboda’s (‘Svoboda’ is ‘liberty’ in Russian) Australian stringer and am very proud of the role it had played in the collapse of the USSR.

The weekly programme ‘Poverkh Bar’yerov’ (‘Above the Hurdles’), edited and presented by my old friend and colleague Igor Pomeratsev, was already on air. The first thing I heard were the interviewees’ voices speaking Russian with an inimitable ‘southern’ accent, characteristic of the residents of Kharkov (I myself used to have that peculiar accent until my move to Moscow in 1978). Men and women were talking about their lives inside some giant retro movie set where they were supposed to behave as if they were stuck in the 1930s Soviet Union.

That was how I first learned about the unique and unprecedented – socially, artistically and technologically – DAU Project: the set of multiple full-length feature films, documentaries and TV series, altogether of 700 hours duration, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and based around Lev Landau’s life. The Project, incorporating hundreds of participants in a number of European countries, was started in 2008, and January 2019 should have seen its long-awaited first release in Paris (for some obscure reasons, the premiere was postponed at the last moment). A true ‘Wow!’ project, or so it sounded.

At this point, the readers of this blog, aware of my background and of my undying interest in anything related to my now-defunct mother country, the USSR, might be forgiven for asking: “How come you only found out about that gigantic endeavour 11 years after it was started – in fact, only after its actual completion?”

A legitimate question, revealing the very essence of the DAU Project. It was hard, if not impossible, to find out anything while it was still in progress largely due to the extreme secrecy in which it was carried out, with all the participants’ contracts containing strict confidentiality clauses. I did of course hear rumours of a “secret Soviet town” being constructed somewhere in the outskirts of Kharkov and of occasional massive filming sprees, with cranes, helicopters and hundreds of extras, in the city centre in the middle of the night, but no solid proofs of any of the above. The DAU Project participants were only allowed to speak out after it was all but completed, and Igor’s radio programme was one of the first media outlets to interview some of them.

What Igor’s interviewees were talking about was mind-boggling. But before I recount their personal impressions, here are some general facts about the ‘Wow!’ Project, made public only recently.

Originally conceived as a mere Landau biopic, the project has ballooned into what one Russian journalist described as “the most expensive, complicated, and all-consuming” cinematic endeavour in history, beating even the well-known Soviet movie epic ‘War and Peace’, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. The filming, involving 10, 000 principal actors (most of them amateurs – with Landau himself played by a Greek orchestra conductor – but with several A-list Hollywood stars thrown in); 10,000 extras; 392,000 auditions and 40, 000 costumes – all generously financed by the Russian philanthropist and technology entrepreneur Serguei Adoniev, started simultaneously in several locations, including Paris, Berlin, Moscow and London, with the main set – the specially constructed 12,000 square-metre fake Soviet town, known as ‘The Institute’ (for it included, but wasn’t limited to, a life-size replica of the whole of the 1930s-1960s Physico-Technical Institute campus), in Kharkov, or Kharkiv, as the city has come to be known since Ukraine gained its independence from Russia in 1991.

Astonishingly, the replica included the Institute’s life-size and fully-functioning technological and scientific equipment of the 1930s-1960s: transformers, energy generators, the very particle accelerator on which my father used to work (then the largest in Europe), first-generation TVs and computers, and so on.

400 Kharkivyani (residents of Kharkiv) – scientists, workers, teachers, students, policemen, engineers, retirees etc., including women and children, had been recruited and contracted to live and work within the compound for two years, thus recreating the 30 years of Soviet history, from 1938 to 1968. Bound by the draconian non-disclosure agreements, they were expected to wear period costumes at all times, even when the cameras were not rolling (and they were not rolling very often).

In his programme, Igor Pomerantsev interviewed about a dozen of the participants for the first time, including a scientist, a costume designer and a caretaker. Below, I will try to reproduce the picture of life inside the compound as it was described by them.

The participants were expected to lead normal lives inside the compound and to never mention (at the peril of hefty fines) anything related to the filming, movies in general and/or the DAU Project, in particular. They were allowed, and even encouraged, to enter into relationships, to have sex and consume alcohol, often with ensuing fights and conflicts (many of which were filmed on the spot), even to crack political jokes which would then be duly reported by the ‘informers’ to the NKVD, MGB or KGB (depending on the assumed timing of the misdemeanour). Filming was undertaken sporadically, often unbeknown to the participants, contracted to be prepared for it at all times.

The period costumes to be worn 24/7 were entirely authentic: from underwear to the last button. The costume-maker, interviewed in the programme claimed to have been told off by the organisers when they spotted some “incorrect” underwear on a mannequin(!) in a replica clothes store. The participants’ hairstyles, of course, had to be authentic too, and those included the notorious and much-hated (by me at least) ‘Box’ (basically, a crew-cut) and/or ‘Semi-Box’ (a crew-cut with a short silly fringe above the forehead) – the only ones boys at my primary school were allowed to wear.

The film set housed a large restaurant-cum-buffet where all authentic Soviet dishes were prepared and served. Allegedly, the quality of food was very high, for the restaurant was at times – in breach of the strict confidentiality rules – patronised by local dignitaries from outside the compound. With them, one of the interviewees once spotted Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his ex-model wife Dar’ya Zhukova.

Inside the restaurant and elsewhere in the compound, the hooray-patriotic and ad nauseam super-optimistic Soviet songs were played from loudspeakers at all times, and that, in the words of one female interviewee, was the hardest thing (for her) to take: they made her feel “violated and terrified”.

According to the interviewed scientist, most of the equipment inside the replicated Institute’s laboratories was either in good working order or could at least produce all necessary sound and visual effects, when switched on: sparkles, hisses, blinking lights etc.

That very scientist, however, was not happy with such extravagant spending on costumes and replicas while the state of the real-life science, and physics in particular, in Kharkiv, was in his words, “deplorable” and in desperate need of investment. That opinion is shared by some of my own contacts in Kharkiv.

So here’s a million-dollar (or a hundred-million-hryvnia, in Ukrainian terms) question: was (and is) this whole megalomaniac enterprise worth its while? I would probably be very unpopular among the struggling scientists and engineers of many post-Soviet countries if I say that I think it was. Memory is an extremely important social commodity. Even if it does not pay off immediately, it is the best guarantee that the gruesome past is not going to return and therefore the best possible investment in the country’s future. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” according to George Santayana.

“Yes, but can’t we remember the past for less money and with less pomp?” I can hear you asking. Well, what can I say? We probably can, yet my strong belief is that – from the positions of social anthropology – a project aiming at properly recreating a totalitarian society should be a tad totalitarian too.

To me, the most evocative impression of the DAU Project came from the above-quoted female participant, scared out of her mind by the very Soviet music to the accompaniment of which people (myself included) had to spend our lives in the USSR. I now know that the new generation of Ukrainians will never allow totalitarian dictators to call the tune (in more than one sense) – and to me that knowledge alone justifies all the gigantism and all the expense of the DAU Project.

I am sure my father would have agreed.

I can’t wait to see (or shall I say “to experience”) the ‘Wow!’ Project in full and wish lots of good luck to its creators in their courageous attempt at keeping the memories alive, for without them, there is always a danger of ending up with another meaningful Buddhist concept – Sunyata, loosely translated as emptiness, or void.

PS. When this blog post was already completed, I came across the book ‘Scientists Under Surveillance. The FBI Files’, just released by the MIT Press in a facsimile format. It is a blood-curdling and thoroughly documented chronicle of the persecution of scientists – not in the USSR, but in the USA under J Edgar Hoover! Whereas Lev Landau was interrogated, tortured and imprisoned in the Stalinist Soviet Union, his famous American counterparts: Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman (my father’s all-time hero), Albert Einstein and many more – were followed, threatened, blackmailed and spied upon by the establishment in the world’s, allegedly, most democratic country.

 This is what the shortage of memories (luckily, unlike the Soviets, Americans had no Great Purge-like experiences they could recall) can lead to. For some reason – and particularly after my recent visit to Kiiv – I am convinced that none of above-mentioned totalitarian cruelty and excesses towards the scientists, engineers and other citizens can ever happen in Ukraine again.