Americans at Moscow U.

With remarkably little ceremony or commotion, 15 U.S. graduate students last week checked into Moscow State University, inspected the comfortable single rooms they had been assigned, and settled down to begin work on their Ph.D. theses. Part of a group of 21 Russian-speaking young men--the other six are enrolled at the Leningrad State University--they are the first students sent for a year's study in Russia under this year's cultural agreement, and the first U.S. scholars to enroll at Russian universities since before World War II. Twenty Russian students are expected to arrive in the U.S. later this month.

Chosen by the U.S.'s Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, the U.S. students are guests of the Russian government, receive a handsome 1,500-ruble ($375) monthly allowance--twice the subsidy Russia gives its own graduate students. Rent costs them one ruble a day, and food is sold at student rates. Most of the men, ranging in age from 22 to 37, are married, but at week's end only 23-year-old Harvard Political Science Student Jeremy Azrael had managed to take his wife. Shy, smiling Gabrielle Azrael says she has no pretensions to a Ph.D., but wants to learn Russian. Dependents left in the U.S. are supported by the Inter-University Committee.

Fields of study represented include most of the humanities and social sciences--but no physics or chemistry. The only student classifiable as a physical scientist is Robert Taaffe, 28, an economic geographer from the University of Chicago. Theses will be keyed to the U.S.S.R., e.g., Azrael's comparative study of industrialization's social effects in Russia and the U.S. University officials have promised complete freedom of study, and the Americans have been warmly accepted socially. In one friendly bull session, a U.S. economist had even tried to convince a horrified Soviet wrestling champ that Americans do not really hold maul-and-maim contests in which the object is to kill one's opponent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.