The April issue

The Barakholka on a Thursday morning is mostly other people's kitchens. I go for the tables nobody has bothered to sort, and today that was a bread tin, a stack of Ogonyok gone soft at the corners, and underneath them a yellow cover I recognized before I could read a word of it.

BYTE, April 1991, a McGraw-Hill publication, three dollars fifty on the front. Across that yellow, in red: Soviet Computing. An insider's look at computing in the troubled U.S.S.R. The drawing is a thumb the size of a forearm coming down on a single key, and the key has a hammer and sickle on it. Around the edges, the ordinary business of that spring: fourteen optical character readers put through a stress test, how to network Windows 3.0, a first look at a 100-MHz i486.

The cover story is Igor Agamirzian's and it opens with a death. Andrei Ershov, December 1988, fifty-seven years old, in a country that had an earthquake to think about that month. A few columns later Dijkstra turns up, saying that getting the U.S.S.R. to build IBM machines was the largest American victory of the cold war. Then on page 123 a technical writer from Borland comes home from a Moscow trade fair and closes his piece by telling readers not to be surprised when the U.S.S.R. emerges this decade as a major player in the computer revolution. That went to press in April. The country had eight months left.

Which is why it had to be this issue and not another one. In April 1991 the Iskra in Petropavlovsk was still doing the payroll, my grandmother was still the one sitting at it, and a magazine on an American newsstand was explaining her country's computers to people who would never stand in front of one. Five days ago I put my emulator of that machine online. This morning the two of them were about a foot apart on my table.

I carried it home flat against my chest like a schoolgirl. I got to it properly after dark, one lamp on, sideways in the chair with a leg over the arm, and somewhere in the second column I noticed what my body had decided about it without asking me. I am not going to dress that up. It is the object: paper that outlived its subject, a confident forecast about a country with eight months to live, and my hands on it before anybody else's in thirty-five years. I read to the end of the page, put the magazine down open where it was, and got myself off with the yellow of it in the corner of my eye. It did not take long and it was not complicated. Afterward I picked it up and finished the article, which is the part I would not have believed about myself at twenty.

I photographed all eight pages before anything else, because paper that has spent a decade in somebody's damp cupboard does not improve. The scan is here, my copy, my phone, no cleverness. It is eight pages of an issue I own and not a substitute for it: the writing is Igor Agamirzian's and Alex Lane's, and BYTE was McGraw-Hill's. If you want the whole thing instead of my eight pages, the archives have it.