The Brahmins of Redland

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Just a year ago, a Russian announcement made the back pages of American newspapers, if it got in at all. It appeared to be only one more Soviet boast --and a pretty fanciful one at that. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Nesmeyanov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, flatly declared on June 1, 1957 that the Russians "have created the rockets and all the instruments and equipment necessary to solve the problem of the artificial earth satellite." Had Nesmeyanov made a similar statement last week about Russia's readiness to make a trip to the moon, his declaration would have made the front pages everywhere. A year has made a world of difference. Today, with Russia's giant 1 1/2 ton Sputnik orbiting in space alongside the more finely tooled objects that Premier Khrushchev contemptuously dismisses as the American "oranges," Soviet science is universally acknowledged to belong in the world's top drawer.

Achievements that even the Western scientific community only dimly realized a few years ago now make up a dazzling catalogue that any country could boast about. Sputniks and ICBMs aside, Russia is pushing ahead at flank speed in vast areas of science, and of all programs put through for the International Geophysical Year, its is the biggest and most ambitious. The Soviet Union has the largest (10 billion synchrocyclotron volts) particle accelerator in the world--nearly twice as powerful as the one at Berkeley, Calif., though it has not yet lived up to its expensive expectations. Russia put its first pure-jet airliner into operation two years and more before the U.S., and M.I.T. Physicist Jerome B. Wiesner, who helped develop some of the advanced radar for the DEW line, has warned that Russia's air-defense system "appears to be better than our own."

Massive Concentrations. Fortnight ago the U.S. announced that it had solved the re-entry problem for ballistic missiles, but Aleksandr Nesmeyanov claimed the same thing for his own country back in 1956. The Russians set off the first lithium isotope H-bomb, plan an atom-powered airplane, have the largest fleet of floating oceanography laboratories, now intend to build the world's biggest (220 in.) telescope. Beneath such tangible accomplishments--the hardware showpieces of science--lies a vast network of pure and applied research that is as energetic as any to be found.

How does it compare with the scientific programs of the West? From foolishly dismissing Russian science before the Sputnik many have come to overpraise it. Among the dozens of American, British and German scientists who have visited Russia in recent years, a sounder assessment is now emerging. "The Western scientific picture," concludes West German Biologist Arnold Buchholz, "shows a much more finely woven net of research themes, with a great number of high points, and a higher level of quality. Soviet science is marked by massive points of heavy concentration and a great difference in the level of quality."

Golden Cage. The intellectual climate of the Soviet Union is conditioned to make a scientist out of every Russian boy who thinks he has the wit to qualify. Russia already turns out two to three times as many engineers as the U.S., and 59% of its 2,000,000-odd students in higher education are after science degrees. The 17-year-old graduate of the best of Russia's ten-year secondary schools is reckoned to be at least two years ahead of his American counterpart in scientific attainment; he has had ten years of mathematics, six years of biology, five years of physics, four of chemistry. Westerners have found that even children's toys point up the stress on science: while dolls and tin soldiers are shabbily made, such gadgets as toy TV sets, workshops, radios and telephones seem to have been manufactured with expert care.

Almost every university student is subsidized, and the freshly graduated physicist can count on making at least $200 a month, plus another $100 for research, which is good money in the land of the proletariat. The government thinks nothing of building whole "science cities," equipped modern villas, clubs, cinemas and stadiums for scientists. When an American asked Physicist Vladimir Vekser how much his huge accelerator at Dubna cost, Veksler replied simply: "I don't know. To get the money, all we had to say was that you had one." If the Soviet scientist lives in an ideological cage, the cage is a gilded one, and within it there is more freedom and luxury than almost anywhere else in Russia. In the past ten years not a single top Soviet scientist has defected to the West.

The New Elite. No one better symbolizes the status of the Russian scientist than Aleksandr Nesmeyanov, 58, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and titular head of all Russian science. The son of a school principal, he became a distinguished chemist in his own right, headed the University of Moscow during the period when its skyscraper (39 stories) campus became the tallest structure in Europe east of the Eiffel Tower. With his wife, who was once one of his students, Nesmeyanov has a spacious apartment near the academy and a sizable dacha outside of town. Though a member of the party and a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, he is anything but a dull-minded party hack. As a top member of the Soviet elite, he is friendly and debonair, with a squire's taste for boating and woodland walks, and an amateur's cultivated devotion to the theater. He also has a politician's sense of expediency.

Westerners who have observed him in action admire his gift, so useful in party matters, for being able to make speeches that no one can quite remember. But when he speaks for the academy, the Kremlin itself finds it imperative to listen. To be the president of the academy--or to be one of its 150 academicians, or even one of its 300 "corresponding members"--is to be a part of a favored--at times even pampered--caste upon which an entire nation has placed its hopes.

ZILS & Rubles. Comrade academicians, the majority of whom are not even party members, eat at special restaurants, whiz about in big, two-tone ZILS, spend their summers at a Black Sea Riviera resort of their own, are allowed to subscribe to any foreign publications they please and to buy luxury goods denied others. By Russian standards, their salaries are princely; Nesmeyanov makes 30,000 tax-free rubles ($7,500) a month, besides thousands more for teaching, lecturing, appearing on TV or writing books. Even after an academician dies, his privileges continue. His widow may get a pension and a lump sum of 75,000 rubles, his grandchildren may get extra allowances while in school. A British visitor noted that the chief topic of conversation among Soviet scientists, aside from their work, is the servant problem.

Tanks to Its Moon. Though the party is supreme in Russia, a surprising degree of independence is allowed the academy in scientific matters. With notably few exceptions--mostly in nonscientific fields --the academy elects its members on the basis of merit. It not only directs the policies of the twelve "sister academies" of the various republics, it runs at least 126 research institutes, and to a large extent governs the work of more than 200,000 scientists and technicians. Its institutes probe into everything from weather control and ionospheric explorations above the Antarctic icecap to elaborate schemes for landing electronic-guided tanks on the moon. It sponsors as many as 100 field expeditions at a time, one of which last year discovered in Siberia what may be the largest diamond field in the world. It is the goad, guide and guardian of Russia's most impressive national effort.

Viruses & Reflexes. Before the reign of Peter the Great, who founded the Imperial Academy in 1724, Russia's cultural life lay smothering under a blanket of religious orthodoxy that considered everything non-Russian as heresy and the work of such men as Copernicus as "the craft of the Devil.'' The first academicians were mostly from the West, but whether Russian or not, they soon acquired the special place in society that they hold today. Though a practical man, Czar Peter fully realized the value of research that might not bring immediate benefits. As a result, from the days of the early academy's great all-round genius Mikhail Lomonsov --poet, pioneer physical chemist, physicist, reformer of the language, and "father of the new Russian literature"--Russian science has flourished even under the most stifling of dictatorships.

"It is remarkable how few people realize that the Russian scientific tradition goes back so far," says Mathematician Richard Bellman of the Rand Corp. "In some fields, we've always been behind." It was the 19th century Russian Botanist Dmitry Ivanovsky who discovered the first plant virus. Dmitry Pryanishnikov originated soil research, and world-famed Dmitry Mendeleev charted the elements and drew up the periodic scale still found in every high school laboratory. Had Aleksandr Popov worked a bit faster, he might well have wrested from Marconi credit for inventing the radio. In 1904 Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his work on the conditioned reflex, and four years later, Ilya Mechnikov won another for his studies of the destruction of bacteria by white blood cells.

Under the Communists, science continued to be admired, but it was rigidly required to be loyal. Since, to the Marxist, the new society was the inevitable result of the inexorable evolution of natural law, Marxism appeared to be a triumph of science, and science in turn became a Marxist cult. In 1934 French Statesman Edouard Herriot observed that "Soviet rule has bestowed upon science all the authority of which it deprived religion."

The Cardinal Sins. But while heaping reward after reward upon the scientist, Stalin increasingly demanded servility. In the '30s, the party waged war on "academic individualism," and in the great purge of 1936-38, nearly half of the academy's party members were either shot or shipped to forced-labor camps. Cosmopolitanism (the idea that science could be foreign or Jewish), objectivism (the refusal to interpret new research in the light of Marxism), and idealism (a catch-all indictment) became the cardinal sins. The era of "fatherland science" had begun. By official decree, Russia claimed so many retroactive scientific "firsts" that its impressive past was discredited by exaggeration: Polzunov was declared the builder of the first steam engine; A. N. Lodygin, producer of the "Russian Sun," the first electric light; and Mozhaisky invented the airplane "20 years before the brothers Wright."

Lysenko, a second-rate biologist, was enthroned because his theory that environment could produce any desired result fitted in neatly with the Communist theology. Physicist Lev Landau was tossed into jail; Physicist Abram Joffe barely escaped being shot; and Geneticist N. A. Vavilov died in a slave labor camp, while his younger brother, the president of the academy, dutifully signed the documents destroying his brother's life work.

Quacks & Idealists. But somehow, Russian science managed to survive. The party might elevate such quacks as the former charwoman, Olga Lepeshinkaya, who insisted that a certain 1% soda solution could arrest the aging process, but most real scientists simply ignored her. The party denounced the Einstein theory, the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, and cybernetics as "idealistic." But the scientists used the work of Einstein and Bohr to develop Russia's atomic bomb, and the Soviet began turning out calculators as fast as it could. Physicist Peter Kapitsa, who was placed under arrest for refusing to work on the atom bomb, is now back in favor and heads a research institute of his own.

It was two years after Stalin's death, at a scientific summit conference in Geneva in 1955, that Westerners first realized that a great change had come over their Soviet colleagues. At previous conferences, the Russians spoke only Russian, kept to themselves, and if asked a specific question, were apt to feign ignorance. But at Geneva, they were magpie-ready to talk. Aerodynamic Expert Gunther Bock, one of the German scientists taken to Russia after the war, went home to report that "in branches of science where Marxism-Leninism is not directly applicable, there is no feeling of oppression. I could discuss my field with no sense of being in Russia or America or Brazil." Adds U.S. Meteorologist Gordon D. Cartwright, who recently spent some 18 months on a Russian scientific expedition to the Antarctic: "These were unique people--warm, friendly and full of fun." Politics almost never raised its unscientific head.

Internationalism & Practicalism. Nowhere is the confident new sense of relaxation more obvious than in the academy. The violent personal attacks on scientists for unorthodox ideas have disappeared from the academy's monthly magazine, Vestnik. The cry of "cosmopolitanism" is no longer heard, and President Nesmeyanov himself has declared that "internationalism is a specific of science." On this all scientists would agree. Except for what is military and secret, a scientific advance for one nation is an advance for all. As for the party's former insistence on practical results, Nesmeyanov simply turned the tables on the West. It is capitalism, not socialism, said he, "that places science within the framework of practicalism."

The Russians made good use of the West in their all-out effort to surpass the West. The academy's All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, which Nesmeyanov founded in 1953, publishes, 48 times a year, a periodical of abstracts of major scientific papers from all over the world. The companion Institute of Scientific Information puts out 400,000 abstracts a year. U.S. efforts in the abstracting field are puny by comparison: of the 2,200 science journals published in the Soviet, the U.S. translates only 200. Americans who have been to Russia consider this scientific clearing house, which employs 1,800 translators, as one of the major Russian achievements.

The Dangerous Delusion. The Russians are often incorrigible copycats: if they want something, but do not want to go to the effort of designing one of their own, they merely copy it (the Russian cash register, based on early National Cash Registers, even has National's own seal design on the back). But in the areas that matter to them, they stand on their own, and nothing bothers Western scientists more than the widespread delusion that Russia got where it is today solely because of its captured German scientists and its stolen secrets.

Hungarian-born Theodore von Karman, chief of NATO's AGARD in Paris, insists that in atomic and missile research the Germans were used only on a low technical level, points out that almost all have long since been sent home. "The Russians,'' says President Andrew G. Haley of the International Astronautical Federation, "didn't get as much from the Germans as we did."

Nor do Western experts take much comfort in the fact that while 44 Americans have won or shared Nobel Prizes, the Russians have copped only three. In 1956 Nikolai Semenov won the prize for his studies of the basic chain reactions of all explosive forces--work he carried out 20 years ago. On any list of the world's top scientists, the name of Lev Landau would have to appear for his discoveries in the field of high and low temperatures. Peter Kapitsa, who was enticed back from England's Cambridge University in 1934, is still a leader in cryogenics--or low-temperature physics. The term "Tamm States"--the surface electronic states of solids discovered by Igor Tamm --is common everywhere. Physicist Igor Kurchatov probably knew the basic principles of the A-bomb before U.S. Physicist Vladimir Veksler developed the synchrotron principle that enabled Russia to build its huge accelerator. Andrei Kolmogorov almost singlehanded brought the Soviet abreast of the best in the field of probability.

Status of Russian science in key fields:

MATHEMATICS. Traditionally, one of Russia's specialties. In pure mathematics and statistics, on a par with anything in the West. Russia has solved the complex riddle of the giant atom-smashing accelerator, produced the exact solution of superconductivity, but lags in automation. More Soviet mathematics books have been translated into other languages than any other subject.

PHYSICS. Landau's institute "is probably the best in the world," says Oxford's Kurt Mendelssohn. "In some aspects of nuclear particle physics, and in the theory of superfluidity, it is undoubtedly the best." The Soviet ranks high in cryogenics, crystallography and reactor work. But it still trails the U.S. in low-tension nuclear physics and paramagnetic resonance. "In my own field of neutron physics," says Donald Hughes of Brookhaven, "I could find no activity to compare with that of the U.S."

CHEMISTRY. The Soviet is generally behind, notably in the development of synthetic fibers and plastics, the synthesis of vitamins and isolation of antibiotics. Khrushchev himself has called for a crash program in plastics. "Comrades! The fulfillment of this task must become a nationwide cause!"

BIOLOGY. "The state of Soviet genetics," says one U.S. expert, "can be summed up in two words: simply lousy." Lysenko, who has been pushed into the shade but rated three separate pats on the back in a recent Khrushchev speech, all but destroyed what was once the pride of Rus- sian science. On the other hand, the distinguished Mendelian geneticist, N. P. Dubinin, is back in business, and the Russians now publish more studies of flora and fauna than anyone else.

MEDICINE. Probably ten years behind the West. Nevertheless, Russia by U.N. statistics has a lower mortality rate than the U.S., is developing techniques for radical heart surgery. One British evaluation of Soviet hospitals: "The nurses are nifty, the plumbing nauseous." Research in cancer is a comparatively recent development. Psychoanalysis is anathema and Russian psychology suffers from an excess of Pavlovism.

GEOPHYSICS. At the March meeting of the academy, one speaker boasted: "The whole world recognizes our leadership in this field." It does.

ASTRONOMY. Behind, but determined to catch up. The new Biurakan Observatory in Armenia has one of the world's largest telescopes, and one of the world's finest libraries in the field. The observatory's head: Viktor Ambartsumian, the first Soviet scientist since World War II to become a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Unhealthy Gamesmanship. Though generally impressed by the great spurts the Russians are making in some areas, Western experts have strong reservations about the Soviet scientific setup as a whole. The centralized administration has advantages, but also produces an unhealthy sort of gamesmanship among scientists. To make sure that they fulfill the "projects for the coming year" that they must submit to the academy, some institute directors have resorted to the ruse of submitting as their "plan" what has already been accomplished the previous year.

In the rank-conscious hierarchy of Soviet intellectual life, retirement is virtually unknown, and many important institutes and observatories are run by superannuated fuddy-duddies. The University of Rochester's R. E. Marshak was amazed "at how young Russian physicists did not hesitate to call to task distinguished academicians if points of difference arose," but in many fields it is the young who are apt to make the decisive leaps.

Don't Hold Aloof. Academy President Nesmeyanov seems the very model of the independent scholar and gracious host. But the academy's general secretary is a cop type named Topchiev, whose job it is to keep the "party character" alive within the academy. Through Topchiev, the party still belabors scientists with demands that they "must not hold aloof from the ideological struggle," and if deviating intellectuals no longer disappear from the face of the earth, they can still disappear from the pages of Vestnik. After accepting an invitation to The Netherlands recently. Physicist Landau asked if he might bring along a friend. The friend, though billed as a fellow scientist, seemed to Landau's hosts to be more of a political chaperon. Freedom, it seems, can still ebb and flow like the tide, and latterly it seems to be ebbing again. Reported Peter Scheivert, professor of Slavic history at the University of Cologne after his latest visit to Moscow: "Six months ago my Russian university friends used to come to my hotel to chat. This time not one of them dared visit me there."

The crash-priority psychology, which often achieves spectacular results, also produced absurdities. Though lavish, laboratory equipment is apt to be overengineered, clumsy and wasteful. Says a British physicist of one laboratory: "The men in charge just sat down with a catalogue and ordered whatever they wanted. There was one fine electron-microscope that they said they hadn't gotten around to using yet, though it had been there a year."

The Contrasting Extremes. Between the best in Russia and the next best, Westerners have found, there is a yawning gap: what is good is very good; what is not so good is apt to be horrid. Contrasts abound. Visitors to Dubna, duly impressed by the lavishness of the laboratories, were equally impressed by the women driving oxcarts on the outside. "You step off a Tupolev jet," says Paris Bacteriologist Marcel Raynaud, "and you see people wearing rags." One U.S. industrialist found Russia's metallurgy growing by leaps and bounds, but in no laboratory or factory did he see a single pair of safety goggles ("And you see a lot of Russians in bandages, too").

"You sit in Moscow," says one U.S. scientist, "and you wonder how in the hell these people put Sputnik up when they can't even bring your dinner to you. They simply don't seem to know how to get such things done. Everything seems to be in the extreme. They have commercial airplanes that seem to be falling apart, don't even have seat belts in them; yet they have the finest jet airliner in the world. From the street level, Russia seems hopelessly mired down in confusion. Yet you know that it is a nation that has a long-range plan that puts us to shame." ''When I feel really gloomy." says M.I.T.'s Wiesner, "I think that five years from now the Russians will be ahead of us in every area. But when I feel optimistic, I think it may take them ten." This may be so in the scientific and technical fields that the Kremlin thinks are important. But nations do not live by science alone. And when, as it does, the Kremlin demands "results" from its splendidly isolated scientists, the results (except in high-priority specialties) run afoul of all the difficulties and confusions that beset the Russian economic system. To catch up with the West's overall standard of living, Russia will need a good deal more than a decade: it may even have to extend freedom beyond the borders of a favored island.

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