People · Zora Arkus-Duntov · Chapter 1 of 11

Revolution

Brussels, Belgium — December 25, 1909

He arrives on Christmas Day, in a city that belongs to nobody in the family. His mother, Rachel, is a Russian Jew studying medicine in Brussels — a woman so determined to finish what she starts that she is attending university in a foreign country, in a foreign language, in an age when medicine does not want women at all. His father, Jacques Arkus, is a Russian Jewish mining engineer. They name the boy Zachar. The world will come to know him by the nickname that sticks instead: Zora.

Within about a year the family is back in Russia, in St. Petersburg — soon to be renamed Petrograd, when the Tsar decides his capital's name sounds too German for a country at war with Germany. It is the first time in Zora's life that the ground shifts under him because of forces far above his head. It will not be the last.

Consider the setting of this boyhood. Zora is four when the Great War begins, seven when the February Revolution topples the Tsar, and barely eight when the October Revolution brings the Bolsheviks. The city outside his window is a place of bread queues, ration cards, street fighting, and typhus; the currency dies, the food runs short, and the winters are lethal. An empire — the entire operating system of the world he was born into — simply ceases to exist before he is old enough to shave.

Children who grow up like this tend to come out one of two ways: broken, or impossible to break. Zora came out the second way, with a lifelong allergy to being told what couldn't be done. Decades later, colleagues at General Motors would marvel at how serenely he absorbed corporate catastrophes that flattened other men. A canceled program was not a tragedy. A tragedy was Petrograd in 1919. This was merely Tuesday.

The house with two fathers

The most revealing story of Zora's childhood, though, is not about the revolution. It's about his name.

His parents' marriage came apart when he was a teenager, and another man — Josef Duntov, like Jacques a mining engineer — became his mother's new partner and moved into the household. Here is the extraordinary part: Jacques didn't leave. In a time and place where housing was scarce and convention was a luxury, the household simply… expanded. The boy grew up under one roof with his mother, his father, and his stepfather — two engineers and a physician, which may explain a few things about how his mind worked.

Rather than choose between the two men, Zora and his younger brother Yura chose both. They stitched the surnames together and wore the hyphen for the rest of their lives: Arkus-Duntov. It was an act of diplomacy performed by a teenager inside his own family — honoring the man who made him and the man who helped raise him, giving offense to neither.

File that away. The engineer who would one day thread the world's biggest corporation's politics for twenty-two years — charming allies, outlasting enemies, smuggling race programs past chairmen — learned coalition-building at the kitchen table, between his two fathers.

Petrograd — 1927

By 1927 the Soviet experiment has hardened into something the family can read plainly, and like hundreds of thousands of others they get out while getting out is still possible. The destination is the loudest, fastest, most electric city in Europe — a place mad for cabaret, science, and speed, where the world land speed record is front-page news and the racing drivers are national heroes.

Zora Arkus-Duntov, seventeen years old, twice a refugee before his eighteenth birthday, steps off the train into Berlin — and into the machine age that has been waiting for him all along.