The plaque at Feofaniya

The park opens at eight and I was at the gate at eight, which after a night on a train is the only kind of discipline I can reliably manage. Two hundred and fifty seven hectares of it, a paid ticket, and a gate that stays open until eleven at night for people with more stamina than me. Ponds, oaks, a working convent, wet gravel, and somewhere along Akademika Lebedieva Street the building I actually came for. I found it in the morning and came back for it last thing, which is how I ended up reading a memorial by torchlight.

Between 1948 and 1951 a group under Lebedev built the first stored program computer on the European mainland in what had been the monastery hotel. Shkabara was in that group. Glivenko was in that group. A memorial plaque went up on the wall of the building next to the convent in June 2014, and it names one man, which is the arithmetic this blog exists to complain about.

One thing is worth saying plainly, because I have seen it collapsed into a single sentence more than once: the Institute of Cybernetics is not here. It stands across the district, on the avenue that carries Hlushkov's name. What this place holds is a birthplace. A site can keep the first machine and still not keep the institution that grew out of it. I walked the loop twice and stayed outside. The second loop ran late. By the time I was back at that wall the lamps were on, the plaque had gone the colour of the dark around it, and I had to hold my phone up to read a text I already knew by heart. One name, lit by hand, at an hour when nobody was going to argue with me about the other two.