Moscow Spring '89

    by David P. Stern             Part 3  

                   

    It was now late afternoon. We said good-bye to Irina and Natasha and returned with Kolya to the hotel. Back in Greenbelt Susan Kayser had given us the addresses of her two cousins in Leningrad, both married women with grown children, and we now called up one of them, Alla Pollack. Her husband Seva (Vsevolod) answered: yes, we should come, it was Alla's birthday and that evening both families would be celebrating together.

    Their apartment was in one of three enormous apartment blocks rising on the bank of the Neva, roughly across from the Smolny seminary, Lenin's base in the October revolution. With Kolya we rode a cab to the appropriate address and he then took his leave, to visit his parents and then to catch a train back to Petergof.

    The front of the building was lined with stores, but nowhere could we find an entrance. Finally I saw a group of women standing together and figured that at least one of them was likely to know. Wrong: they were all tourists from Kazakhstan, visiting the city together. Gradually we worked our way around the building and then we saw the rear where all the entrances and stairways were. That was the seamy side: the yard was muddy and littered, and the entrances rather plain. Each door had an electric keypad where a code number was to be punched, as in the IKI lab. We waited outside and soon enough a woman appeared and punched the combination: we entered and rode with her in the cramped elevator. The staircase was dark and unventilated but we soon found the right door, rang the bell and were welcomed.

    Seva, balding, spoke very good English and introduced us to Alla and to their teen-age son Borya (Boris); Susan had given us a present for Borya, a nylon jacket with "NASA-Goddard" stitched on it, which was greatly appreciated. We were also introduced to the other cousins, Dusya (or Ida), her husband Yura and one of their two daughters Larissa and Lena, I forgot which. Soon we all sat down to a long table loaded down with a great variety--meats, salads, chopped liver and the inevitable vodka, as well as "cognac" and apple juice. Only much later did I realize that all men were seated at one end, all women at the other, while Audrey and I straddled the dividing line.

    A toast was said and soon I faced a barrage of questions, most of them from Seva. Could I tell him about the problems of America? Was it safe there? What about Blacks? Drugs? I was careful to stick to what I have seen myself, to first-hand experience rather than hearsay. What about the "Star Wars" defense initiative? I cited the report of the American Physical Society (of which I am a member) which concluded that it was not likely to work. What about the space shuttle? And its Russian copy, the Buran? I said I did not particularly favor the shuttle, it seemed unnecessary to risk human lives just to launch unmanned missions, and that Academician Sagdeev had objected to Buran on similar grounds. How good was life in Israel? Why did I leave? (For personal reasons.) And from Yura: Can one get a Russian bible in America? Seva again: How good were Russian scientists? Like American ones, I said, some very good, some not.

    Seva then asked Borya, a student of engineering at the Leningrad Polytech Institute, to bring me some of his texts. The boy blushed but brought out texts in calculus and electricity. Seva handed them to me: "Look! Isn't that all old, 19th century?" They seemed rather standard, with many problems and examples, and I said no, they seem to cover the same ground as US texts.

    Boris studied engineering, but was finding the subject difficult and was seriously considering switching to an easier subject. In his class of 22, ten students were Jewish like him: "there used to be discrimination," but not under perestroika. Seva then asked, did there exist antisemitism in America? How much did it cost to get into a good university? And: where was Greenbelt? He brought a large-scale Soviet atlas, but our town was too small to show up and all I could tell him was that it was near the letter "p" in "Silver Spring."

    And then: why did the US allow scientists with technical knowledge to travel abroad, "say, Edward Teller or you"? In the USSR no officer of the armed services would be allowed to travel, because of military secrets. "Cannot terrorists kidnap you and extract secrets from you?" I answered that such things actually never happened. The damage done to a state where such kidnapping was tolerated would outweigh the values of any secrets gained.

    I then asked Seva a question. All those present were Jewish, and newspapers in the US often wrote about Soviet Jews who strove to emigrate. But, I said, not everyone could or wanted to do so--and Seva concurred here, he could never leave. Did there exist any Jews who, rather than leave, would like to renew Russia's Jewish culture, rebuild its Jewish community?

    In way of answer Seva went out and brought back three publications in Yiddish, all printed in the USSR in Hebrew letters. One was a literary magazine--volume 3, about 200 pages--and Seva opened it to an article he had written, a search for the archives of the Jewish ethnographer Harkabi (Garkabi in Russian) who disappeared in the purges of the 1930s. Another was a newspaper, printed in blue lettering in Estonia. And the third also seemed to be a literary collection, about 50 pages. He said there now existed many more Jewish publications.

    An argument then arose whether Jewish culture could exist without Jewish religion. Seva, the Jewish Communist, strenuously argued it could not, and I suddenly realized that the conversation was exclusively confined to my end of the table, among the men. The women just listened and never participated, even Audrey was never asked any questions. I excused myself and went out to look at some book, and by the time I returned the focus had shifted to Audrey, who was telling Seva and the rest about the Jewish Day School in Rockville which our boys used to attend.

    We left around 9, carrying an inscribed box of chocolates as a present to Susan. The huge colored neon displays on top of the embankment buildings were lit, displaying commercial messages, not political ones. There was still some twilight left and Yura and Ida who escorted us to the bus (their daughter was married and lived elsewhere) told us that soon will come the famous "white nights" of Leningrad's summer. They provided tickets and we rode the bus to the Finland station, and from there were escorted to the hotel. Ida set a time to meet Audrey on Monday, when I would be lecturing at the university.

Sunday, April 9

    This was the day when we were to meet Kolya's family. It was also the day of the runoff elections; one was held in Kolya's district in Stary Petergof and he promised to try to take us to the polls.

    He met us early at the Leningrad and together we walked to the Finland station where we boarded the subway to the "Baltic" railroad station. The Leningrad Metro resembles Moscow's in many ways but runs even deeper underground: from the top of the escalator in the Finland station the bottom could not be seen. On the way down I counted 30 lampposts, which translated to a depth of about 45 meters or 150 feet. "It is dug under the Neva," Kolya explained.

    The Baltic station was small and unsheltered, and our local elektrichka train was already waiting, painted a dark green with a star emblem on the prow of the engine car. Carriages were austere, benches of lacquered wood, but the ride was pleasant.

    At first we passed suburbs--wide avenues, great blocks of high-rise tenements, fields of boxy garages where Russians stored private cars. Then the scenery gradually shifted to muddy fields. Nature looks at its worst at this time of the year, the snow is gone but the greenery has yet to emerge. Very few fields seemed to be under cultivation, though Kolya said it was not so in nearby Estonia.

    The plan was to visit first Peter the Great's summer palace at Novy Petergof and to eat a late lunch at Kolya's home. Outside the large covered station of Novy Petergof we boarded a rather beat-up bus to the Petrodvoretz palace. Petrodvoretz means "Peter's Palace" and is also the name of the town of 65,000 which encompasses Novy Petergof, Stary Petergof and the University campus.

    We still had a good walk to the palace grounds. We passed a fancy church which was closed, though Kolya said it might be opening soon; meanwhile he was taking his family to church in Oranienbaum, the next town down the railroad. I asked how many of the Russians were "believers" like him: about 16%, and the number of baptized babies was "increasing exponentially." As recently as 10 years ago baptism was hardly practiced and having one's child baptized could cause trouble at work, but that had changed under perestroika.

    We also passed the high school which Kolya's daughter Zoya was finishing this year. Today the building held a polling station, red flags were flying over the entrance and people were walking to it and from it.

    Then we passed low buildings where palace workers and "ladies in waiting" used to be housed, now they contained park offices. In one was an exhibit of an old-style pharmacy, open to visitors, nicely finished in wood with old-style jars and even a mummified baby crocodile. Then we entered the grounds, passed what seemed like a house reduced to a pile of stones (in WW II this was the frontline) and arrived at the palace, a long ornate building in yellow and white, stretching on a bluff parallel to the shoreline. Like the rest of Petrodvoretz, this was a restoration: the retreating Germans left behind only ruins and burned-out shells.

    North of the palace the ground sloped down to formal gardens which stretched to the sea, dimly visible. A straight boat canal from the sea led to the foot of the rise on which the palace stood, ending near an ornate fountain where a gilt statue of Samson ripped apart a lion's jaws. A fair number of tourists were around, but the time of the year was altogether too early for a visit: the palace was still closed, thick ice slabs lined the canal, the elaborate cascade descending to the Samson fountain was dry (as was the fountain) and its many statues were still encased in large green boxes of wood, their wintertime protection.

    We walked down to the canal, passing by a few small stone sphinxes with the faces of outsized puppy-dogs. Kolya pointed out large trees covering the slope below the palace, flanking the cascade. Khrushchev once visited here and casually commented to an aide: "fir trees would look nice here." Soon someone ordered such trees to be planted and now, 30 years later, they are tall enough to obscure the view of the gardens from the palace.

    We walked to the end of the canal which jutted out to the sea, flanked by breakwaters. In the summer thousands of tourists arrive here by hydrofoil, only 30 minutes from Leningrad, much faster than the train. The sky was gray and overcast and the cold water matched the sky's color. Kolya told of a great environmental battle over this piece of water. In past years, now and then, a steady strong westerly wind would sometimes pile up the waters of the Gulf of Finland and flood Leningrad. To guard against such floods the local authorities had started to build a dam, a causeway across the gulf through the island of Kronshtadt. Unfortunately, the dam also trapped pollution which flowed from Leningrad and the water around the city became quite dirty, causing a great wave of protest. The project was now stopped and its future was uncertain (it was finished, much later).

    We then returned to the bus line and rode to Stary ("old") Petergof where Kolya lived, past a large factory for watches, then a WW II cannon and a memorial associated with the frontline which passed here. Finally we crossed the railroad near the small station of Stary Petergof and got off at the development where Kolya lived, a relatively new one consisting mainly of high-rise brick buildings, 10-15 stories tall.

    The area between the building was muddy and raw, and construction was still in progress with tall cranes poised above incomplete buildings. We walked down the central road to Public School 411, a 3-story brick building, site of Kolya's polling station. Two candidates were running for the office of local delegate and Kolya wasn't enthusiastic about either of them. One was an army officer, and he distrusted military people; the other was a truck driver who had only limited education. He told us that he would take us in with him, but asked not to speak English or take pictures--"it might frighten people."

    Just inside the entrance a woman stood by a table selling sweets and baked goods. Later Audrey asked Kolya what the woman was doing there. "Was it a bake sale?" Kolya did not understand and she explained that "in our country" public organizations such as the PTA raised funds by selling baked goods on election day. It took a long time to get the point across, and in the end Kolya said no, nothing like that at all. It was an old tradition in Russia to make available at polling stations goods that are normally hard to obtain in stores, to induce citizens to come and vote.

    We continued through what looked like the school's cafeteria to the polling station. It did not look much different from elections back home, except that the color red was very much in evidence. Tables covered with red cloth were joined to form three sides of a square and behind them sat people with the election rolls, each workers covering a different range of the alphabet, denoted by letters which were not always familiar. A pair of overseers stood in a corner, carefully watching, The exit led through three voting booths, cubicles with frames of slats, covered by red velvet curtains which descended to waist level. A small plaster bust of Lenin watched over us from a shelf on the wall, flanked by potted red geraniums.

    Kolya registered and was given a ballot, covered with extensive printed instructions. The only thing that counted on it, however, were two printed names: he could cross out one of them or if he wished, both. We accompanied him into the booth where a small writing surface was provided, sloping down: he crossed out one name and later told us he had voted "for the local candidate." He then dropped the ballot into the ballot box standing on the other side and we walked out. I was very much moved by it all, to tears at one point: history seemed to be in the making, the first true election. Only later did I realize that it meant far less to the Russians, who knew the candidates better than I did.

    From the polling place we walked to Tsyganenko's apartment house, a brick high-rise on the western side of the development. Beyond it stood weedy fields and some distance away rose the big concrete-gray blocks of the University of Leningrad. That was where Kolya walked to work, he explained, a 20-25 minute hike across the fields. He told about a trick students pulled one night, bringing a sheep into one of those buildings, taking it by elevator to the 11th floor and leaving it there to roam.

    The area around the building seemed little improved, just a few benches and a climbing tower for small children. The ground was muddy: maybe later in the year grass would cover it and make it look more pleasant. The entrance again was protected by an electronic keypad and the elevator was just as small as the one we rode the previous day. Apartments 27 and 28 shared a stuffy foreroom with no outside ventilation.

    The apartment itself, by contrast, looked spacious and airy. We were met by the entire family: Lida, Kolya's wife, a short woman with a sunny disposition; Zoya, 17 years old, an intense and earnest girl who spoke good English; and Andrei, 14, with straight long hair. He smiled a lot with what seemed a mischievious twinkle, but said little because of his limited English. And not to forget Vassily, a big gray tom with tigerish dapplings. Vassily was quiet and unobtrusive and Kolya later told us he was once badly injured by a fall off the balcony, he was lucky to survive and took a long time to recover.

    The apartment centered on a large entrance hall from which doors lead to three rooms, to a kitchen, bathroom and toilet. The toilet had a hand-made wooden seat (one starts noticing these things in Russia); on a table near its door stood a home-made radio, built by Andrei. There was no phone: we were told the waiting time for new phones was 10 years, though recently a new exchange had been opened and the family expected its phone within a year. And there was a tiny television receiver, its screen perhaps 6" square: Kolya did not care for TV.

    After the introductions we all moved to the long living room where an elaborate meal was already set on the table: a giant heap of piroshki, borsht, chicken, potatos, peas, scallions, salad, cucumbers, a berry drink prepared by Lida and also bottles of fruit juices--grape, apricot and apple. As the food was being divided, I kept protesting "not so much" but this only reduced portions by token amounts.

    The living room belonged to the entire family and each member, it seemed, had a share. Kolya's physics books stood in the bookcase, also "Solar Wind" conference proceedings and NASA compilations of solar wind data. Kolya was also the one who played on the small electric organ, built in one of the Baltic republics and selling for 700 rubles (Kolya's monthly pay is 300 rb.): the pedals were a later addition and were built by a friend. Kolya played "Come back sweet Jesu" by Bach, quite well. The stylized copy of Leonardo's "Last Supper", hanging on the wall, was probably also put there by him.

    Andrei's contribution included a display of human bones (all but one plastic replicas), hanging on another wall: his school had discarded them. And Zoya had her picture gallery: some entries were photos, of Khrushchev and of her class in school, others she drew herself. There was a cute dragon wearing a tie and a sketch of (she explained) Kolya hitting Andrei after a parent-teacher conference, probably for good reasons.

    Audrey and Lida seemed to understand each other fairly well in spite of the language gap. Kolya then decided to show us some slides with his projector, which had no magazine but was fed the pictures one by one. First came pictures of his dacha, his summer house, located 100 km SE of Leningrad, a long train ride away. There were actually two cottages: a large one built with paid help and a smaller one, still unfinished, which Kolya was building by himself: after it was completed he planned to give the larger one to the children. This was followed by pictures of various trips Kolya undertook as part of his scientific work. From Kamchatka he showed pictures of volcanos and a close-up of small mud-cones that appeareed like mountains. From Askhabad, slides of a stylish monument mixing crosses, colorful ceramic tiles and a statue of Lenin. It was built by the artist Neizvestnii ("Unknown") who also designed Khrushchev's tomb. And pictures from a trip to East Germany and from a visit of Lake Baikal, with shots from a hike along disused railroad tracks, built in 1946 with American rails from "Lend Lease".

    Also a picture of Kolya's friend Sergey Sazhin, sitting by a fireplace. Sergey, another physicist, was instrumental in Kolya becoming a "believer" and lived now in England. Kolya told his story: Sergey had been associated with dissidents and had a long-standing conflict with the KGB. He was called to testify against a dissident and refused, or else gave testimony other than what the KGB had wanted to hear, and as a result, when some time later he applied for admission to a seminary, wires were pulled and his application was denied. He then applied for emigration and lost his job; when I met him in Cambridge, the preceding summer, he gave me a copy of a scientific article on which he listed his home address as his institution. After 4-5 years he was allowed to leave and since he had belonged to Pudovkin's group, the authorities blamed Pudovkin and found ways to express their displeasure.

    We had brought Lida a box of chocolates and an aerobie for Andrei. Later Audrey asked Zoya for names of Soviet rock bands, explaining that our sons back home had asked for Russian rock records. She went to her room and brought a record by "Assa", top Soviet band, as a present to our boys. Audrey was surprised but Kolya said "take it."

    We said our good-byes while Kolya kept looking at his watch, to make sure we did not miss the train. We had a tight schedule ahead, for Natasha had secured for us seats at the Kirov ballet's Giselle, with two Australian guest dancers in the top roles. We return to the hotel for dinner and Kolya ordered a cab for 6:30.

    The time came and passed, no cab, and Kolya then stopped a cab in front of the hotel. Its Georgian driver had hoped we would pay in dollars, but when he found out it wasn't so he became angry: "What do you think I am, a taxi?" In the end he took us, but argued loudly with Kolya all the way.

    A big crowd was milling in front of the Kirov, a few scalpers selling tickets and a rather larger number of hopefuls looking for someone willing to sell excess tickets at a reasonable price. According to the printing on the tickets they cost only 2.5 rubles; however it seemed that most of them were not sold openly but were made available selectively to those with pull. Somewhere in all this humanity we located Natasha, and after a while also found Professor Pudovkin and his wife. Natasha had a ticket for a seat in the middle balcony, in the rear, but because of us she obtained seats in the director's box--the best seats in the house, right underneath what used to be the imperial box.

    Since these were not regularly ticketed seats, we went to an entrance on the side and after Natasha talked to the keeper of the door, were admitted to a small lobby. Natasha exchanged her street shoes for more classy ones which she brought in a bag--she dressed stylishly and kept a trim waistline. We then went to the box and watched the hall fill up noisily. The seats were so close to the stage that from the last seat, where I sat after the break, one could bend over and touch it. Of course, the entire audience would have seen.

    Giselle is a classical ballet and it was beautifully done, with elaborate precision. In act 1, a prince falls in love with a simple peasant girl, then abandons her for his aristocratic fiancé and causes her to die of a broken heart. In the second half the girl has become a ghost, one of the "Willies," spirits of jilted girls, and almost exacts her revenge on the prince--except that (for the sake of a happy ending, no doubt) in the last moment he is forgiven. We watched everything at close range: the Australians danced well, but there was no mistaking the prima ballerina of the Kirov company. With haughty eyes and regal carriage she played the queen of the Willies, and her leaps were just a tad higher than those of the other ballerinas.

    It was all very much in the spirit of the 19th century. Just like Lyuba's dress and the round caps worn by sailors on the street, with the name of their ship or fleet imprinted on them and twin dark ribbons trailing from the rear.

    During the break we went to see the Pudovkins and Natasha obtained for us programs with English translations. She also facetiously offered to let us watch the rest of the ballet from her old seat high up in the rear, to get a taste of what the rest of the audience was experiencing. She herself had seen "Giselle" many times, even in Moscow, and thought the performance at the Kirov was the best one.

    After the show we emerged into drizzling rain. Natasha's husband (who chose not to attend--"he prefers football") promised to fetch us with a car, but the ballet ended at 10, an hour earlier than usual, and he was nowhere to be found. In the end the Pudovkins escorted us on bus 4a to within a short walk of the hotel.

    The following month's issue of the National Geographic (May 1989) had on its front a large color picture of "Giselle" at the Kirov. It looked very familiar.

Monday, 10 April

    As on the preceding morning we again ate breakfast at the "Express Bar" downstairs, a fixed-price cafeteria which was faster and better than anything we saw at the Rossiya. The clientele seemed heavily weighted towards Finns and Swedes. On the elevator Audrey met a group of Poles who spoke excellent English. They had driven from Gdansk to attend a trade fair and complained that the roads ranged from bad to non-existent. One Pole told her: "I have been to your country. Wonderful roads." He had driven from Texas to New Orleans. "There is only one problem with your country."

-- What?
-- Too many goddamn niggers.

    Audrey was so taken back she stood speechless.

    Alla and Seva had called to tell Audrey they would pick her up for a shopping trip in town, and that Ida would join them an hour later. It turned out to be a pleasant outing with much conversation. The previous year Ida had visited her her relatives in New York for 35 days, and she told Audrey she could still remember every one of those days. "And I wish I could forget all the years I lived here."

    On the street a young and handsome sailor heard their English and attached himself to them, to improve his own English, he said. His name was Sazhan Alexander and he told them he was a "high marine," a cadet of the merchant marine academy like Natasha's son. Sazhan was a charmer: he told Audrey and Ida he was getting married the following week, steered them to his recommended restaurant and warned Audrey not to exchange rubles on the street. Apart from being illegal, he told her, many of the exchangers were flim-flam artists and the wads of money they gave in exchange were padded with plain paper.

    Meanwhile I was picked up by Ira and again rode the subway to the Baltic station. This time the train ride was rather crowded because repair work on the line had cancelled the two preceding trains. We shared the compartment with several members of the Leningrad space research group--Pudovkin, Natasha and also Svetlana Zaitseva, a motherly-looking lady with straight fair hair and an interest in the ring current.

    The time passed in conversation. Sample question: why is it that American books have such elaborate settings with so much attention to detail, yet relations between people are so simple? I answered, "Americans like books that are easy to read." Svetlana then turned the conversation to ecology and it turned out everyone was unhappy about the Kronstadt dam. We passed the large station at Novy Petergof, then the small one at Stary Petergof, and stopped at a still smaller one, which served the university. Because of the earlier cancellation a large crowd left the train with us and we all trudged along a wide path to the university, about 10 minutes away. There was no bus, and when I mentioned it later to Kolya, he replied "fresh air is good for you."

    The path took us between the buildings of geophysics and physics, big gray buildings with tall window bays; further away stood the partially completed building of the faculty for mathematics. Some of the gray stucco was already chipped, revealing bricks underneath. This campus, established in 1976, was the legacy of an ambitious rector who "wanted this to be the Oxford of Russia." The faculty regarded it as a blunder, far too distant from town.

    About 5 cars were parked in a space under the building--with so few of them, no parking lot was needed. We climbed up, followed a wide passage to the adjoining building and continued to the end occupied by the space research group. On a bulletin board hung a large hand-drawn cartoon, featuring snakes of all colors and sizes, over a dozen snakes on and around a big apple tree. The artistry was very good and most snakes had balloon captions in Russian: one said "Good Year (hiss)," one was swallowing a rabbit, one pushed a pram, one held a shoe, one dripped venom while another looked innocent, and so on. Pudovkin explained that one of the students drew it to mark the "year of the snake" on the Chinese calendar and that the captions were all jokes on topical matters, though none involved politics.

    In Pudovkin's conference room, next to his office, a table was set and the faculty sat down around it. Lunch included a mound of piroshki which may well have been left over from Lida's feast the day before. Alla Lyatskaya, an ionospheric scientist with long dark hair, had baked delicious sweet tubes of dough (like Italian canolli), filled with cream cheese: she was the divorced wife of Lyatsky, who with Maltsev modeled Birkeland currents in 1974. Also on the table were kolbassa sausage sandwiches, cookies in various shapes and berry preserves ("something like cranberries, smaller") which tasted tart and good. And of course tea.

    I was introduced to the faculty. Arkady Usmanov was there, as was Dmitry (Dima) Ponyavin with whom Arkady now worked on the interplanetary current sheet and the extrapolation of solar magnetic fields into space. Balding Vladimir Semyonov worked on reconnection. Victor Sergeev, a thin energetic man with a large drooping mustache, coordinated a ground network to support the Interball mission and was interested in reconstructing equatorial magnetic field from particle observations at low altitudes. I later argued with him on this point, expressing doubt the idea would work since the particles observed at low altitude represented just a small part of those crossing the equator: but the language barrier was too much. Also present were Ludmilla (Luda) Wagina and Igor Kubyshkin, and of course those who rode the train and Kolya. Natasha was there, her interests included magnetospheric boundary flows and reconnection, auroral breakup and (like Arkady and Dima) the tracing of the interplanetary magnetic field to its origins on the Sun. Ira's interests, I found, were sunward and discrete arcs of the aurora.

    Two bookcases in the room held journals and various publications, including copies of the Journal of Geophysical Research and Reviews of Geophysics since 1978. Pudovkin was among the 10 Soviet scientists who, by special agreement with the American Geophysical Union, was allowed to subscribe to AGU journals and pay in rubles; I had heard that the AGU had a large hoard of rubles in a Moscow bank and did not know how to spend it, but I never got around to asking AGU for some of it. But he lacked the earlier issues and I promised to try to get those, from some retiring scientist giving away his old collection.

    We had arrived just before noon and my seminar was set for 12:40; it was titled "Methods of Magnetospheric Modeling" and about 15 people attended. Halfway through the talk I reached the subject of Euler potentials, a mathematical representation of magnetic field lines. They were first glimpsed by Leonard Euler, an incredibly talented mathematician born 1707 in Switzerland and hired by Catherine the Great to be the star of her academy of sciences. "It gives me great pleasure," I began, "to talk here about Euler, because he lived and worked in Leningrad."

    Pudovkin looked at me. "Petersburg!"

    The questions at the end took nearly as long as the lecture itself and continued after we returned to Pudovkin's office. Dima asked about applying the methods to the Sun, Pudovkin about relating the current density to the stretch function, and Natasha wanted to know "what was the story about Triad" to which I referred briefly. Triad was a Navy satellite whose magnetometer first mapped the pattern of the extensive electric currents associated with the polar aurora, and I explained that the experiment was conducted by Al Zmuda and Jim Armstrong, both of whom had tragically died by the time their discovery appeared in print, in 1974. I added that I had noted Zmuda's name on the spine of a book in Pudovkin's bookcase: Pudovkin then pulled it out, it was a 1975 memorial volume.

    Pudovkin later posed an interesting question: "How is it that I never saw you before at international meetings?" I said that I had become active on that scene rather late. But I did see him at the Edinburgh IAGA Assembly in 1981, only I believed at the time that he was Tsyganenko, because he read there a paper by Kolya.

    I rode the train back with Kolya. Previously I had offered to nominate him for membership in AGU and to pay his dues, and now he gave me a neatly typed letter, with a photo clipped to it, asking AGU to admit him to membership. He also told me that there still remained bureaucratic obstacles to his attendance at July's IAGA Assembly in Exeter. Therefore, could I please write the organizers and ask that they transfer to him the registration of his friend Oleg Troshichev, of the Arctic Institute in Leningrad? Oleg had agreed to such a transfer, because he had sufficient funds to register later again.

        (I agreed, and only later, back in the US, I began wondering whether the Exeter organizers would honor such a request, just on my say-so. In the end I paid Kolya's registration myself and when we met again in Exeter, one of the first things Kolya did was to repay me.)

    We discussed the collaboration agreement on the train. I said: "I am not really important at NASA. I don't know if I can make the administrators do things." And Kolya: "I am the same." We arrived at the Baltic station in time for the rush hour (it was now a weekday): the steady flow of humanity into the subway station had become a torrent and it took some effort just to squeeze through the entrance door. Inside the train we both stood, tightly packed against other passengers, and Kolya signaled to me to start moving towards the exit one station ahead of our destination. His comment on the crush: "Not too bad."

    We dined in the lower level restaurant of the Leningrad (the one on top, with a better view, only opened late). Audrey urged me "don't speak Russian," service would be better if we spoke English. It riled her to see how Russians were treated in their own country, but Kolya enjoyed the way our waiter groped with his English. He was a young fellow with large hands and a wide smile, but his service was awkward and it seemed strange that an able-bodied man like him was not employed in a more fitting way. The steak was good but the only fresh vegetables available were as usual sliced green cucumbers (oh for an American salad bar!). Kolya sampled of few slices and let the rest stand.

    Afterwards we sat in the lobby and waited. Our train was again scheduled to leave around midnight, and once again Kolya was responsible for our getting on it. He had ordered a taxi for 10:50 and assured us that this company was reliable. He gave us its phone number and we then urged him to leave, telling him we could handle everything by ourselves, even call the cab company to confirm. After some protests he left reluctantly, saying he still wanted to visit his parents, especially his mother, 81 years old and ill with cancer. Awkward good-byes, then as he left I snapped one last photo.

    We had hoped to meet Ludmilla Matveyeva that evening, a schoolteacher who half a year earlier had taught Russian in Greenbelt. But she was unable to come, she had to supervise a student party in place of a sick principal. She sounded rather regretful on the phone.

    The taxi arrived on time, the ride was short and we again reached the train with plenty of time to spare. Our wagon-mates included an artist who guarded in his compartment a load of framed paintings, and two loud Scotsmen wearing kilts who later turned up at the Rossiya. The trip was even less comfortable than the first one, the cabin was significantly hotter and still no way of beating the heat. In the morning we watched the Russian countryside roll by--again, very little cultivation--and rolled into the Moscow station at 8:30. Nadia was already waiting.

Tuesday 11 April

    We returned to the hotel, were assigned a new room and unpacked there, to discover that my "good" shoes were missing. They were probably under the bed and Audrey must have missed them when she packed. We searched the old room but found nothing: no use to try any further, such shoes are here worth two months' salary.

    Then on to IKI: that was to be the day of my presentation on models, but the schedule had slipped and models have been re-scheduled for Friday. All that was left to do was to sit at the long conference table and listen to Stan Shawhan open the sessions of the working group by reviewing past meetings. After him Lev Zelyoni and Tom Armstrong listed experiments and tentative investigators on "Regatta," a proposed US-USSR equatorial spacecraft to be launched in 1993. No mention of physics: the margins of my notebook say "Amway."    (Amway used to be a combination of home cosmetics sales and pyramid scheme. Some member of the Greenbelt congregation once tried to recruit me to it.)

    In the lobby I met Zelyoni, Israelovich'es boss, and he proposed various changes in the agreement, to shorten the preamble and pin down what exactly would be done--e.g. dependence of the model on parameters such as AE, Dst and lobe field. I felt uneasy, because I did not like to change anything that Kolya and I had agreed about without Kolya's consent, and in the end I suggested that he talk it over with Armstrong. I also asked Zelyoni about support for Kolya--lending him an AT-class computer, support for a student and providing him with $250 he needed to attend Exeter. I was told that any of these would be very difficult to do. Zelyoni also discussed with me drift-free particle motions and chaotic motion, on which he was working, and I promised reprints of my articles in that area.

    I later raised the same points with Oleg Vaisberg, the handsome head of the interplanetary lab, concerned with the solar wind, Venus and Mars. I urged him to help Kolya's work: "In Leningrad I felt like a rich man visiting a poor but talented colleague, like Salieri visiting Mozart. They [Pudovkin's group] do a lot with very little." Oleg promised to look into the loan of an AT. But to provide money for Exeter was again "very hard."

    Later Zelyoni sounded more conciliatory. He thought well of Kolya but less so of Pudovkin. I said Pudovkin seemed like a father to his group (many members were in fact former students of his). "Yes, but he should let his children go. They have grown."

    I also talked to Tom, who said he had come to appreciate the importance of modeling, and he agreed that the US effort should be expanded. He said that the following October he would release a call for proposals to produce models, related to the ISTP-Interball effort. He wished to shorten the agreement with the Soviets, to make sure the Washington bureaucracy approved it, and I warned him--cut too much and all that would remain would be an expression of goodwill.

    Postscript: Few things in politics are what they seem. There was no solicitation in October, nor later that year. Nor did Kolya receive any AT on loan--in December Pudovkin told me, while visiting Goddard, that his only computer was still that expensive XT clone. "Regatta" seemed uncertain, since NASA had not allocated any specific funds to it. And--as already noted--the agreement on collaboration in modeling was drastically changed, promising more than my original draft.

    After the sessions everyone was invited to attend the Moscow circus; Audrey, too, had been brought to IKI. All Americans and a fair number of Russians with them took seats in the bus and waited, as did the driver. Five minutes passed before the realization penetrated that no one was really in charge and there was nothing to wait for, and the driver was then told to proceed.

    The circus is housed in a stylish round arena built of concrete, completely enclosed, across the road from Moscow University. Everyone was given a ticket, but nobody mentioned dinner: it was a regular performance and we saw not one empty seat in the entire house. The show began with an acrobat riding a circling model airplane suspended from the top, first standing on it, then hanging by a hand or by an ankle as she whirled above the front rows. There followed a long succession of acts, most of them very good: high-wire artists, clowns, Azerbaijani horsemen, two-humped camels and a monkey hitching rides on them, magic tricks and so forth, but contrary to what one might expect in Russia, no bears. The high-wire acts were particularly elaborate and in the finale acrobats stood on shoulders of acrobats who stood on shoulders, and others balanced each other on opposite ends of a beam centered on the wire. The clowns were funny and agile and their acts included quick artistic sketches of subjects in the audience.

    Like other Soviet establishments the circus too had a coatcheck, a huge one stretching part of the way around the circular lobby. In the break I went down and suggested to the lady in charge, who was passing her time by reading, that perhaps I should retrieve our coats now, to avoid a long wait in the end. She assured me there would hardly be any waiting, and she was right. I have never seen such a fast and efficient retrieval of coats as the one that followed the performance. Zip, zip, zip, the coats almost flew. And hardly any waiting.

    Brandt of the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad, a lively older man with a good sense of humor, guided us to the subway. He also told us where to get off, near the Lenin Library, and guided us through underground walkways to the Kremlin, then to Red Square and the Rossiya. The girls in the 8th floor buffet were already closing shop, but we managed to buy three pieces of cake, which had to serve as dinner.

    Back in our new room, I spotted a little cockroach scurrying across the bathroom floor, then another one. I tried to ignore them until a half-grown roach appeared on our bed and waved his antennas in the air. Audrey yelled and I tried to squash it with a book, harder than one might think. I then walked out to our key lady and in my best Russian told her: Pozhalusta, zhuki v komnate (beg your pardon, cockroaches in the room). She gave a little yelp: "Zhuki?!" I confirmed and she promised that the next day they would be taken care of.

Wednesday, 12 April.

    Yesterday was a warm day, today is downright hot. The number of heavy coats on the subway has dropped markedly, though not to zero. Our room remained overheated and Audrey complained of drinking too much.

    She was also afraid the room might be fumigated, with all our belongings in it. I went again to the key lady to explain that the zhuki we saw were quite small. Da, dyeti (yes, children), she said. In the end a porter came around 5 p.m. and with a wheeled contraption transferred all our luggage to another room.

    In the morning Audrey placed a routine call to the US embassy, to inform it of our new whereabouts. She was told that our son Allon had called the State Department, to notify her that her brother Sanford in Miami was in critical condition with lung cancer and might not live through the week. Just before we had left for Russia Sandy had started coughing blood and was taken to the hospital: it was a bad sign (he had smoked heavily) but there was no diagnosis and Audrey remained hopeful.

    She immediately went to the hotel desk and tried to place a long distance call to the US, but the clerk was unable to place the call. A man saw her and with a heavy Russian accent told her not to go through the hotel desk. "I will give you a number to call," he said and gave her the number of the long-distance operator in Moscow. He explained that the hotel operator would not do anything more than call that number, too, "but the difference is, you keep calling until the line is not busy." He said he used the number in all of his own calls. "Where do you live?" she asked. "Long Island."

    Using that number she managed to get through to her friend Marge Bergemann in Greenbelt, who had been in touch with Allon. Sandy had weathered the emergency, though he was still in poor shape; because we were anyway scheduled to return that Saturday, Audrey decided against an early return. As it turned out, Sandy regained enough strength to return home again and lived another three months.

    All those things I only learned in the evening, for this was my day to visit Moscow State University (MGU). At 9 in the morning Alexeev came with his red Zhiguli to pick me up: the car was only two years old but already seemed worn. We drove along the river, then on a wide highway across a double bridge, and immediately past the Moscow Circus the car turned right into the university campus. Igor parked outside a group of bright-yellow buildings (again, very few other cars) and we walked over to the entrance of the Institute for Nuclear Physics, where we checked our coats. Yellow is a popular color: as we climbed the stairs I could see that the building was being repainted by two people on a scaffold, using long-handled paint rollers.

    We immediately went over to an old classroom, where 20-25 people were already waiting. Professor Igor Veselovsky introduced me: Lisa Antonova was in the audience, but apart from her I recognized no one. In honor of the audience I wore the pin she had given me, showing the tall university tower and the letters MGU, the university's acronym.

    The lecture went well, but the audience was less lively than the one in Leningrad. Something was missing, perhaps the people's command of English was not as good. Of the question period I only recall a rather disorganized rambling by Kuznetsev, an older faculty member, on asymmetries associated with interplanetary Bz and By. Later we met again at IKI where he bent my ear on the effects of the Earth's rotation on the magnetic field near the cusp lines. He said this would lead to very fast motions, about 150 km/sec: I replied that I did not quite get his argument but that my intuition seemed to say such fast flow was not likely.

    The group also seemed to lack a focal person similar to Pudovkin in Leningrad. No one in it received the Journal of Geophysical Research, and in order to consult back number (if I understood correctly) they had to use library microfiches. On the other hand, Moscow enjoyed far better computer support. I was shown the department's computer room, large and well stocked, with a mainframe said to be a copy of an IBM 3033, 2.4 gigabytes of memory and some 100 users. In the offices were quite a few microcomputers and an Epson 800 printer. The blue color of the mainframe computer imitated the style of IBM machines, as did the little plaques that said ЭBM, the Russian acronym (EVM) for a computer. I photographed Alla Antonova next to one of those, with her copper-red hair and wide smile.

    Alla was one of the faculty members introduced to me when we returned from the lecture to Alexeev's office. She was that "other Antonova" on the faculty, the one who had spent almost a year as exchange visitor in France. She enjoyed conversation and laughed a lot. Others present were Kropotkin (already met a week earlier), Veselovsky and two associates of Alexeev: Elena Belenkaya, a small quiet woman with dark hair, and Volodia (Vladimir) Kalegaev, a graduate student working with Alexeev on models. My notes say "agreement with Lev Zeloni that when Interball is launched, there will be two models--Tsyganenko's and that of Alexeev." But I don't recall what that meant.

    Alexeev showed me some recent modeling work and it looked good, a model with dipole, paraboloid and a resistive boundary layer and with its distant tail disconnected, in agreement with ISEE-3 observations. The article had appeared (or was to appear soon) in the Russian Geomagnetism and Aeronomy. He said he did not submit papers to any western journal because he could not afford the page charges, and I told him that such charges could now be waived and promised to send him the new rules. He also gave me a book of abstracts from a magnetospheric conference in memory of Velior Shabansky, held the previous year at Suzdahl, a "tourist center" not too far from Moscow.

    For lunch Alexeev took me, Alla, Veselovsky and Kropotkin to the main building of the university, the 32-story tower (rather tall stories!) erected by prisoners during the Stalin era. In the style of public edifices favored by Stalin, it was square, ornate and rose in tiers to a sharp pinnacle, like a wedding cake. I repeated to Veselovsky an old joke, that from the top one had the best view of Moscow, for that was the only place in the city from which the building was not visible. "But it is a very nice building" he said, adding that the Russians often referred to it as Khram Na'uka, the cathedral of science.

    As one drew near one noticed the lower outbuildings, each still quite big. They contained student dormitories. At the door a policeman checked our papers and Alexeev apologized, saying he knew it was unseemly for a university to have such guards, but they were only posted in the last year because too many non-students were entering the dorms to steal. In the entrance hall past the guard were the inevitable coat-check and also four bulletin boards arranged around a square and titled "University Hyde Park" (actually "Gyde" because Russian transliterates the sound "H" as "G"). Alexeev explained that here any student could express opinions about anything, within limits, just as speakers in London's Hyde Park were allowed to preach publicly on whatever they wished. Quite a few students stood around reading.

    The basement held a large student cafeteria, but because of my presence Alexeev suggested we should eat at the faculty club. Unfortunately some large meeting had just ended and a long line snaked out of the door of the club. Alexeev entered, talked to whoever was in charge and soon came to take me past the line into the dining hall. Quite a few well-dressed white-haired faculty members were standing there and waiting, and they seemed rather annoyed to be passed by a latecomer wearing an American flag in his lapel. Furthermore, when we arrived at the table, I realized that only Alexeev was with me. I apologized and said, I'd rather not eat here but in the cafeteria, and we left again. We managed to catch up with Alla and Igor, but Kropotkin was already gone.

    The student cafeteria occupied a large noisy hall downstairs and its tables were scattered between stout square pillars that held up the building. One ordered food by the usual Russian system: go to the front to see what is being offered, find the price, then stand in line at the cashier's booth in the lobby, pay, go back to stand in line for the food and finally trade your receipt for the dishes. After that, as in any cafeteria, one carries the dishes on a tray to whatever free table one finds. The meal cost about one ruble (the hosts paid) and compared well with those of the hotel: carrot salad with a dollop of sour cream, a hearty vegetable soup with a chunk of meat, goulash with mashed potatoes and some bland mashed vegetable (could have been pumpkin), and for desert the usual watery "compote" with a few berries at the bottom.

    I had told Alexeev that my children would love to have T-shirts of Moscow University, but he did not think any existed. Yet going through the halls I spotted a young man wearing such a shirt. I stopped and asked: where did he get it? "I don't know where." A little later, a girl with another MGU shirt, different style, waiting in line for the cashier: she didn't know, either. How can it be? Shrug. In the end we discovered near one of the exits from the tower a stand selling T shirts (and other goods). But it had no MGU shirts and in the end I bought three shirts with "football" and names other sports written in Cyrillic characters across them. They cost 8.70 rubles apiece.

    We then sought a way to reach the top of the tower. The elevator only reached the 28th floor, a museum of geology with small windows, streaked on the outside and not giving a good view. A smaller elevator went from the landing to the top, but it was not open to the public and Alexeev admitted that he had never been any higher. Just then a foreign visitor appeared, a biologist from Massachusetts being shown around the university, and her escort had a key to the special elevator. We joined them and rode up to the 31st floor, in several shifts because the elevator was quite small.

    At the top was another exhibit, most of it in memory of an ecologist who had recently passed away. One panel was devoted to a word the man had coined, "noology," the study of what people visualize in their minds. But even this was not the top of the building, the windows were still useless and above us we could see an internal balcony one floor higher. Alexeev found a metal door opening to a spiral staircase that lead up, and we followed it through partitions which resembled bulkheads of a ship. But it ended in a locked metal door and we had to retrace all our steps.

    Finally the elevator took us up one more floor to the inner balcony, close to the vaulted ceiling in whose middle a large red star was set. Around the balcony were alcoves leading to windows, each turned into a small office, one can wonder who worked there. And yes! One alcove had a door leading outside, to an exterior balcony which circled the tower. A woman who worked there said no one was actually supposed to go out, because stones could fall from the top--but it would be OK if we watched out.

    Indeed the balcony looked weatherbeaten, and on closer look so did the fancy pinnacles of the lower "wedding cake" tier. Lightning must strike here often, and the winters have not been kind to the stonework, which was darkened and streaked. All around the balcony stood searchlights which at night played on the pinnacle.

    The view may indeed be the best in Moscow. Unfortunately the day was hazy and of the Kremlin one could only see dim reflections of golden domes. On one side the Moscow river curved lazily around a large sports arena, on another the Moscow Circus could be seen, and at our feet all around were university buildings. Alexeev identified some of them--the Physics Institute, the Shternberg Observatory and in the middle of a large garden he pointed out the statue of the university's patron saint, Lomonosov. I said, I know about him, in Leningrad I saw art works by Michael Lomonosov, and at this Alla began laughing out loud--I had said "Michael" as in English, it should be "Mikhail."

    Then a quick elevator ride down and a leisurly walk back to the car. Someone pointed out large olive-drab metal boxes, like shipping containers, scattered throughout the campus and even next to the Circus. They contain cosmic ray detectors, part of a large air-shower experiment [observing cosmic rays of the highest energy] of the university.

    Alexeev then drove me and Alla back; Alla lived halfway to IKI and before we parted she volunteered to guide Audrey around Moscow. Then we drove to IKI and I bid farewell to Alexeev. At IKI I learned that an official reception was scheduled that night at the "Praga" restaurant, near the beginning of Arbat street. I then returned to the Rossiya, where Audrey was waiting to tell about her telephone calls.

    On the street a pair of young Russians helped us find the "Praga" which filled an entire building, had several entrances and many banquet halls. It occupied an ornate building with marble stairs and fancy decorations, quite possibly some sort of palace before the revolution. The head waiter informed us that the Akademia Nauk (Academy of Sciences) had reserved the "hall of mirrors" upstairs, and as we searched for the place we could hear music emanating from some of the other halls where parties were in progress. Finally we found it, empty except for some waiters: the reception was scheduled to start at 7:30 and we had arrived half an hour early. The table was set with luscious appetizers including quantities of smoked salmon and there was no lack of strong drinks (the waiters offered us some); only much later we discovered that what we saw was all we would get, there was (again!) no dinner.

    Gradually the guests appeared--Kuznetsov came early, then Vika Prokharenka whom I introduced to Audrey, then many others. The red and white Georgian wines were passed around and toasts were made, each preceded by a long speech, sometimes with jokes so raunchy that the translator refused to repeat them in English, and sometimes one drinker added to the toast speech of another. Why are stars like the astronomers' lovers? "They both arrive in the evening and leave in the morning."

    Dan Shawhan had also come. He had spent 5 days as exchange visitor in a Russian school whose students had previously visited his own school in Maryland. Unfortunately most classes were held in Russian and he was unable to follow them. He told of a history class which was currently studying events of 1950 and the Stalin cult, with hot arguments about the subject. When we told about attending the Leningrad elections, he topped our story by telling how his escort let him mark her own ballot and cast it himself.

    We talked to Oleg Vaisberg, who felt that the changes in his country were a great improvement. I asked him, did he belong to the Communist party? Yes, he apologized, "I joined when I was young," his father was a member too and that might have been the reason. But now he was an enthusiastic liberal, actively supporting Sakharov and Sagdeev and fighting to change the academy's vote in the elections for the new assembly, originally railroaded by conservatives but later revoked. Still, he sounded cautious about the future.

    Later Vika heard dance music downstairs and excused herself--she liked to dance and wanted to go and join the fun. Soon people started drifting out and so did we. Footsore we took the familiar walk through Red Square to the Rossiya, where the 6th floor buffet still had soft drinks and creampuffs.

Thursday, 13 April

    Breakfast as usual was in the small cafeteria overlooking the Kremlin walls. Today the tables were crowded and we ended up sharing one with a bearded gentleman who introduced himself as John McCarthy, professor of computer science from Stanford University. He was accompanied by his translator Natasha, who told us she was Jewish, studied Hebrew but did not intend to leave the USSR. Her husband was a mathematician and she gave us her address in case we ever returned to Moscow.

    McCarthy had been visiting Russia since 1965 and this time he had met Sagdeev, among others (later he showed me a copy of Sagdeev's political platform). The changes were enormous, he admitted, and the department of Marxism in one university (Moscow?) was now renamed the department of "studies of the problems of socialism." He informed us of the latest scandal, involving a company trading wood-products to the West, buying there computers for dollars and reselling them in the USSR. The practice had just been declared illegal, though McCarthy felt it represented a commendable example of free enterprise. I told him I had known about such deals, those traders had taken the Leningrad scientists to the cleaners and it was a good thing the practice was outlawed. McCarthy: "You must be a socialist."

    He also told about a woman he knew who 20 years earlier had got into trouble with the authorities and was given the choice, emigrate to Israel or go to prison. She protested that she was not even Jewish. "Does not matter," she was told, "just find some sort of relative in Israel who would invite you." She found one and from Israel she moved to America.

    Last year she was allowed back, to visit her family in a town near the Ural mountains. The region had been traditionally closed to foreigners and a local KGB man told her "you are the first American ever to come here." Her parents were living in the same house as they did 20 years earlier. At that time the house was brand-new, and they were moved in even though it was still unfinished and lacked electricity and sewage. Twenty years later the daughter found that the house still lacked a sewage hook-up, forcing residents to use outhouses. After the woman had told the story to McCarthy she wondered whether foreigners were barred from the area to keep them from seeing things like that, not for military reasons at all. She asked him: "How would you like strangers looking around your backyard?"

    McCarthy was well aware of Russia's computer lag. Stalin at one time suppressed cybernetics, though by 1951 the Russians did have a working computer. He however felt that the role of Staros in this field [Physics Today, Sept. '85] was greatly overrated. In 1964, he said, the Soviets made a fundamental decision to copy IBM, and they still did so.

    This was the day we had planned to go sight-seeing and in particular, I wanted to see the Kremlin. I called Nadia at 9:30 (as Pyotr had asked me to do) and she informed us that she would gladly go with us, but the Kremlin was closed to visitors on Thursdays. This was rather unexpected. I said I would call back, but did not, because Audrey felt that Nadia would bring a car, which we did not want. Next day I found that Nadia was quite willing to walk.

    Our first stop was the central synagogue, marked on our tourist map. It stood on a side street a short walk from the Rossiya and looked run-down. A long line stood in front of the door, probably recipients of charity. And old woman with few teeth sat by the door and as we entered she mechanically asked for "cigarettes, souvenir." In the lobby hung a neat handwritten notice "if you want to learn contemporary Hebrew, call--" and then gave the number. The sanctuary was large and gloomy, no one was inside, but by the door stood a red-headed youth who spoke excellent Hebrew. I asked about sabbath services and he pointed to the side room where regular services were held; he himself did not participate. And about the "Jewish Cultural Center," recently opened with great publicity? "I don't go there. Only 20% of the Jews have anything to do with them."

    We go over to the prayer room. It is a small "shul" and some older Jews stand there in prayer, rocking their bodies. No one speaks Hebrew, only Yiddish and Russian.

    Then by subway to the "Jewish Cultural Center" on Taganska Square, formerly the Yiddish Theatre. A Jewish artist from Washington had briefly performed there and told us she was not sure whether it was a real Jewish center or just sham. Could we find out? We promised to try. We easily found the place, an undistinguished low building, on its door hung a large poster announcing a program of Jewish songs and above it a plaque marking the building as the "Jewish Chamber Musical Theater."

    The door was open and we walked in. By the entrance was an office with a bored doorkeeper, but we did not ask anything, just kept walking. The interior was dark and empty, the upstairs lobby held an old exhibit on the holocaust (English captions) and doors opened from there to some offices, stripped of furniture. From the lobby one entered a small theatre, seating about 200: on the stage were a piano and a drum combo, and behind them a curtain decorated with large outlines of Hebrew letters. In the rear stood a control panel for lights and sound equipment.

    In the theatre the guard caught up with us and told us (in Russian, but the message was clear) that we should not be there. Where was the office of the theatre? I could not make out the reply, but thought I recognized in the stream of words the name "Biro Bidzhan," the "Jewish homeland" created by Stalin on the Siberia-China border, essentially a sham for propaganda purposes.

    Back by subway to Dyetsky Mir (children's world), Russia's largest store for children's needs, next to the KGB headquarters and the Lyubyanika jail. Our sons collect flags of countries we visit, but so far we had found no place which sold Soviet flags. The children's store was a long shot, on someone's recommendation, and it was jammed with shoppers. It was quite large and had two levels, with wide marble stairs and columns, probably constructed before the revolution and now looking rather worn. We circulated a bit with the crowd but saw no information counter and no clear pattern. The merchandise varied: colorful but flimsy plastic toys, children's clothes, school needs, but also housewares, even meat grinders. And the purchase system was the same as in the cafeteria--find your purchase, price it, go to the booth to pay, then trade your receipt for the purchase. In one side gallery video games for children were set up and all seemed quite busy.

    Audrey got tired and sat down on a ledge outside, while I tried my luck again. I found a record counter and bought a few rock records for the boys, and then discovered small flags at the counter for school supplies, little red banners on yellow sticks such as schoolchildren might wave before a visiting dignitary, ten for one ruble.

    Lunchtime arrived and I proposed taking Audrey to "U Margarete" where Gurshtein had taken me. It is close to the Kropotkinskaya Metro station but we have no address, nor is there any directory to consult. From the station several streets radiated out and at random we chose the one furthest to the left. A young couple promised to show us the way to the "cooperative restaurant" but they brought us to a different one, a dark loud place which only accepted hard currency or credit cards. They knew of no other cooperative, "we are the oldest one here" we were told, rather arrogantly.

    We then turned right and after some search found the place. But the menu was in Russian and no one spoke English, making selection somewhat haphazard. The soup was pureed chicken, gribnoi we discovered to be mushrooms, well prepared, and the main dish was meatballs with mushrooms, again colorfully presented. With ice cream for desert the bill came to 28 rubles--40 dollars on the official exchange, 5 days' pay for many Russians, one of the better meals we had in Russia, though portions were rather skimpy.

    We took the Metro to the National Exhibition on the north side of the city. The exit from the station led directly to the huge Sputnik monument, a rocket rising into the sky at the tip of a long plume of smoke, all in metal and rather stylish. Across the highway stood the large Kosmos hotel, and to the south rose Moscow's high TV tower, with a basket-like bulge halfway up which contained a high-class restaurant. But the air was even more hazy than the day before, the tower only appeared dimly and tourists in that restaurant probably got none of the view they had expected.

    From the station it's a long walk to the tall gateway building and along the way were booths that sell food, records, maps and souvenir pins. At the gate we bought entrance tickets: relatively few people were seen and most of those seemed to be on their way out, for the time was getting to be mid-afternoon. Also, it was rather early in the spring and many pavillons were still closed for the winter.

    The National Exhibition, known by its initials as VDNKh, is a collection of pavillions and exhibits set in a large park. For a low fee we boarded an open tour-train pulled by a tractor, providing a quick overview of the entire exhibition. In the center stood a large white building of the same wedding-cake architecture as the university tower, also topped by a spike; the pavillions around the route, in contrast, displayed a great variety of styles, but many appeared rather weatherbeaten.

    We got off across from a Vostok space rocket, held aloft by a crane: very impressive. The aviation museum across the road was still closed, but the "Kosmos" pavillion was open and we walked in, to a striking collection of spacecraft (or replicas). I recognized the twin Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft, docked together, the only manned spacecraft on display (the Smithsonian has a similar pair). The replica of the first Sputnik was also recognizable, hanging over the entrance beside a quotation from chairman Lenin. But most of the other spacecraft filling this great hall, with arched ceilings and skylights like a railroad station, were unfamiliar: Proton 5, Prognoz 3, Aureole and so on, including an array of Venus or Mars landers and a Venus-Halley spacecraft similar to the one on display at IKI.

    The far wall was dominated by a large photo of Yuri Gagarin, first man to orbit the Earth, smiling and holding a dove. Beneath it, out of the way in a space fenced off from public access, stood yet another spacecraft. No indication was given what it was but I wondered whether it was a replica of the ill-fated Phobos spacecraft, waiting to be taken away.

    Back at the hotel we started packing. We made two packages of what was left of our emergency supplies: for Nadia, a large chocolate bar, instant coffee, soap, shampoo and kleenex, and for Pyotr, another bar of chocolate, pens for his little daughter and an Apollo pin. We gift-wrapped both and attached notes of thanks.

Friday, 14 April

    Up early, breakfast by the Kremlin view--very foggy outside. This was the final day of the meeting, when the presentation on models was scheduled and also the day I was scheduled to lecture on history at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, at 3:30 in the afternoon.

    I arrived at IKI ahead of the delegation and Nadia took me to the lab, where Pyotr was playing a computer game. He did not have a draft of the agreement, but said it was with Mary Mellott. I gave both their presents and we discussed the presentation.

    At 10:20 the delegation arrived. I asked Mary about the "protocol" and she snapped back that I could not see it, it was not yet ready. What then should be used in my presentation? I told Pyotr that "we too have our bureaucrats" and proposed to use the old protocol, the original draft, and to say that was all I had. Just before the presentation I slipped into the office where Dolores Holland was busily typing up a draft of the protocol on a portable computer; a former secretary, Dolores now handled education and various coordination jobs for NASA headquarters and seemed efficient and personable. I borrowed her shears and cut the transparencies of the old protocol into strips, so that the English and Russian could be displayed side by side.

    Pyotr began, using my schematics and some of his own--graphics of field line traces, dependence on AE and other indices, the T87 model and so forth, a general exposition. He was followed by Vika's graphics, projected from a ceiling TV. Orbital points of Interball's twin probes were traced at 20 minute intervals with "Attention" flashed whenever their magnetic footprints on Earth were 50 or less apart.

    Then I spoke about what modeling did and the five systems of electric currents which must be represented by models, it was all well received. At the end I displayed the protocol, section by section, in both languages. After me Tom spoke in general terms of goodwill and after him Lev Zelyoni. Lev's first slide listed collaboration points:

  1. Exchange data and personnel.
  2. NASA would release an "Announcement of Research Opportunity" inviting participation in Interball.
  3. The Soviets would participate in analyzing data from Dynamics Explorer (DE) and would join in work on data from GGS (ISTP).
  4. The Satellite Situation Center at Goddard would expand to handle Interball and GGS together.

    As far as I know, none of these was started in 1989.

    Lev Zelyoni afterwards took me to meet two of his graduate students or "aspirants", Dmitry (Dima) Zorin and Boris Savenkov, working on chaotic particle motion in the Earth's magnetotail, along the lines of what Chen and Palmadesso had done. That was their thesis work and they were close to finishing; they showed me their computer graphics, nicely done. Boris did most of the talking, maybe because his English was better. Next to their office desk hung a large US election poster from the US, "Mike Dukakis for President."

    [Later I sent them and Lev Zelyoni bumper stickers from the campaign of Maryland State Senator Leo Green, from our district--"Leo Green for Senator." Leo Green translated into Russian is Lev Zelyoni].

    Eugene Zykov, a smooth character who spoke excellent English, was in charge of special arrangements (Audrey called him "our spy" because he told her that he had spent two years in Washington, on an assignment he would not specify). After the presentation I asked him about my seminar at the Institute for History. "Nina will go with you" he said, "she is our best translator." She had voice problems today, he said, but was very good.

    Lunch was in the downstairs cafeteria, with Vika and Vaisberg, 68 kopeks for meat and fries, red beets, salad, fruite compote and pancakes with a dollop of sour cream. It tasted good but the room was even darker than usual because outside the day had turned rainy. Vika said she planned to return to Warsaw the next day, 18 hours by train.

    Vaisberg then took me upstairs to meet his group, working on the solar wind and on shocks in space: Giorgi Zastyenker, older and sharp, Natasha Baratkova, Yuri Yemelayev who measured solar wind ions (He3, He4, O and Fe), Lena Kaleznikova (fine structure of the Earth's bow shock) and young Andre Fyodorov, building instruments to untangle the plasma distribution function. These areas of research were far from mine, but I told them about Ogilvie's branch at Goddard, which performed similar research, and explained how Goddard labs were organized. On the way down Vaisberg told me, in answer to a question, "I don't smoke. I don't see a need to ruin my health, although this is not popular."

    No sign of Nina in the office downstairs. Zykov was told she went to shop for something and would show up at the seminar, but not to worry, a car was already waiting for us outside. At 2:40 Nadia escorted me to the exit: a steady light rain was falling, but no waiting car anywhere in sight. She went out into the rain and searched, but soon was back--"sorry, there is no car, but we can still make it if we use the Metro." Unfortunately she did not know exactly where we were going, all she had was a slip of paper stating that the office was on Staropanskaya Lane, off Kyubishev Street. We rode to within one station of the Rossiya, then changed trains, rode one more stop to Revolution Square and emerged into the drizzle.

    A short distance further Nadia stopped in an entranceway. "It must be very close, wait for me here" she said and dashed out. Soon she returned to say it was just around the block: an old building, probably pre-revolution, with the familiar tiny elevator. The institute was upstairs and Gurshtein met us at the entrance.

    The time was already after 3:30, but Gurshtein first took me to see the director of the institute, the son of Dmitry Ustinov, Secretary of Defense under Brezhnev--a heavy old bureaucrat, another Breznev-era image. The doors of his outer office and inner sanctum were both padded in reddish leather ringed with brass tacks, and a brass tablet announced Direktzia. Laid out on the desk were 4-5 different packs of cigarettes for visitors.

    Two additional people were in the room--old craggy Viktor Sokolsky who headed the department of aviation and space, and younger Valerii Poltavetz, scientific secretary for foreign relations. Valerii spoke English well but Ustinov was less fluent and Gurshtein translated my replies to him. With Sokolsky I communicated in German.

    Ustinov has read the letter brought by me from Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum. He proposed a formal agreement with the museum and described in great detail what he wanted. I said that the ultimate goal was more study of history. Scientific achievements were described in journals but the stories behind them were easily lost, they should be recorded before that happened. Before the conversation got any further, however, Gurshtein reminded everyone of the seminar and it was agreed we meet again afterwards.

    The seminar room was small and drab and about 15 people were seated in it, including Nadia. God knows how long they have been waiting, the time was already 4 p.m.; Nina never appeared and in her place Gurshtein himself conducted a running translation, quite well. I launched into the story of the discovery of the radiation belt--the International Geophysical Year (1957), the Vanguard rocket, Van Allen, Explorer's 1 and 3, the discovery itself (1958), project Argus, the identification of inner and outer belts and so on to about 1963.

    Halfway through the presentation I stopped and asked: "Is this familiar to you?" I was told "yes, but in a general way." Minutes later I started on the story of Nick Christofilos and stopped again: "Who of you had heard about Christofilos?" No one had.

    The talk as originally prepared (and as presented at MIT one year earlier) had two parts, the second telling the story of substorms from Birkeland to Akasofu and Hones. But the running translation slowed everything down and the first part took the entire time. I ended by distinguishing two kinds of discovery in space research, the discovery of new problems and that of new solutions. The pace seemed fast during those early years but most discoveries were of the first kind and were almost inevitable once it became possible to send instruments into space. Discovering the meaning of those observations was a much slower process and the real scientific challenge. I then urged the audience to make the history of Soviet space exploration better known. My story was one-sided, I said, because I only knew one side: the other side had yet to be told, at least in my country.

    Just a few questions were asked. "Who invented the term solar wind?" I did not know, but mentioned the concept of a "solar breeze" which figured in a controversy around 1960. An old, heavy man introduced himself as Bronstein and tediously recounted how around 1955 some Soviet scientist had predicted the solar wind from the shape of solar streamers seen during eclipses.

    Then back to Ustinov and the other two. They presented me with souvenirs, pins commemorating space anniversaries and a 1-ruble commemorative coin with Tsiolkovski's picture. Ustinov then once again raised the question of exchanges with the National Air and Space Museum, to which he keeps referring as "your organization." I promised to carry his message and then asked: "Who here is studying the history of Soviet space research?" It turned out that no one did. "Maybe Gurshtein." I then said to them: "What do you want the Americans to do for you? It is your country, your history, you yourselves should be working on that history!" It was a long meeting and next day on the airplane I distilled it and other encounters into a 7-page letter to Harwit.

    Afterwards I parted from Nadia and went out to the street. The rain has stopped and the tower of the Rossiya was visible at the far end, only a short walk away. The pre-revolution buildings all around seemed to hold government offices and the street was filled with bureau workers rushing to the subway. In the hotel Audrey had almost finished packing.

    Tonight, we were told, a farewell banquet would be given by the US delegation at the Baku restaurant. At 6:30 we rushed to the subway but were overtaken by the bus taking the delegation to the Baku, Pyotr called out to us and we jump aboard. Then a ticklish situation developed: everybody had chipped in 20 rubles to pay for the banquet, but no one had told us. In fact we had just unloaded almost all of our Russian cash on gifts, including some inferior matrioshka dolls. Shawhan said he would forgo, but foolishly I say, would anyone sell me rubles? I did not expect anything close to the official rate, but David Bohlin said he would sell them for $50 put me on the spot. Later I hear more about David and I should not have been surprised.

    The Baku is a large sumptuous restaurant with many rooms and Azerbaijani decor and food. The party contained about equal numbers of Americans and Russians, but interestingly not one Russian woman, except for the interpreter. Many women scientists worked at IKI, but apparently none in a leading position. I sat between Pyotr and Audrey, across from a personable, fairly young man who introduced himself as Igor Yastremski, chief computer scientist at IKI.

    The tables were sumptuously laid out--with bottles of vodka and wine, to which gradually more and more appetizers were added--smoked sturgeon, vegetable and eggplant loaf (good), beans and grape-leaf wrapped balls. Much later shishkebab was served (no pilaf) and at the end ice cream, but the meal was rather leisurly, with much conversation. Audrey sat next to Eugene the spy who told her about his life and showed her color pictures of two daughters. He also had films of a third one, still a baby, but was keeping them in his refrigerator until he found a friend traveling abroad who could have them developed there. He would not entrust them to Russian processing.

    Shawhan toasted international collaboration, pointing out that on that very day two years earlier the group met for the first time, and he was followed by Galeev and others. Of all the toasts that followed I only recall the one by Bill Feldman. It was probably preceded by a few drinks, because Bill toasted the absent Bob Farquhar, who (he said) always knew his way around better than anyone else. In fact someone later told me that Shawhan was annoyed because Sagdeev had taken time to meet Farquhar but not him. "If I have another life to live" Bill concluded his toast, "I would like to live it as Bob Farquhar."

    The conversation with Pyotr and Igor drifted into the new Soviet politics, where "left" meant a supporter of private enterprise while "conservative" was an establishment Communist. I asked them: why did your people remember so fondly Napoleon's defeat in Russia? Thanks to that defeat the czars ruled Russia for another century; had Napoleon won, the czar would have been toppled and the ideas of the French revolution would have spread to Russia just as they spread to other countries conquered by the French.

    "You know why Napoleon lost?" said Pyotr. "Because he did not free the serfs. Had he freed them they would have supported him." And Igor added that Hitler, too, might have been supported by Russian peasants had he given them back their land. Instead, in parts of Russia captured by the Nazis the kolchozy continued working under new management.

    After the main courses were finished music began and people started dancing in the room next door. Audrey talked to Dolores Holland, who was planning to take the midnight train to Leningrad together with Ingrid and Diane. Around 9:30 Diane examined her ticket and discovered that their train was scheduled for 11:10, but they still took their time saying farewell. As we finally left David Bohlin began collecting untouched bottles of the "Siberian" vodka. Audrey quickly grabbed one near to us: "He won't get this one."

Saturday 15 April

    Last day in Moscow. We rose early, arrived at the buffet even before it opened and watched the Kremlin through a drizzle. I still planned to attend Sabbath services at the Moscow Synagogue and recite kaddish for my late uncle Albert on his annual anniversary.

    I arrived just as the "barchu" call to prayer was sounded and in the prayer room was just a bare quorum, 11 male adults. The prayers differed in subtle ways from the familiar ones, for instance the ending of the standing prayer ("Lord, guard my soul from evil") was longer and seemed more expressive. I joined the cantor in the kaddish at the end of the standing prayer--irregular, but I did not think I could stay until the mourners were summoned, at the end.

    The room was brightly lit and the Hebrew inscriptions on the wall included thanks to the government for maintaining this place of worship. The scroll was brought out: it was "Sabbath the Great" which preceded Passover, but the portion being read was rather undistinguished, on the rite of thanksgiving prescribed for those cured of leprosy. The reader cast around for a Cohen and a Levi to come forward for the first two readings, and as a visitor I was offered the third one. In fact the reader asked me if I could read the haftarah--I would have loved to do so, but the bus was to leave fairly soon and I could not stay.

    The delegation met in the lobby, everyone loaded down. On the bus ride to the airport we were given one last glimpse of the city: Dyetsky Mir, Gorky Street, Moscow city limits and a monument of tank barriers which perhaps marked the WW II frontline.

    In the airport we learned that our flight would be delayed at least one hour.

    Though the international air traffic through Moscow was rather small, lines were long. Our wait however was nothing compared to that of a large group of people camped out in a corner of the terminal. Families with babies and old people, living like Gypsies among boxes and suitcases and crates. Where from? "Kirghizia" they say. How long have you been here? Three days. How much longer? "Nedelya", which may mean Sunday or another week. Petya said they were emigrants--possibly ethnic Germans, Armenians or Jews. I told him "this is terrible" and he replied "it used to be worse."

    Finally we got to the customs and as our luggage slid through the X-ray machine, something in our bag excited the official. He called another one, energetically pointed at the screen and then made me unpack everything. After a long search, puzzling to Audrey and me, we reached the offending article: a small collection of US coins packed away in a plastic bag early in the visit, to avoid mixing them with Russian coins. Sorry guys, it's copper and nickel, not gold.

    Then we passed check-in and passport control, and still the plane was delayed. A bar is open but it serves no coffee, only alcoholic drinks and lemonade. We order a Russian "Fiesta" lemonade, the glasses that come with it have a whitish film on them and we end up drinking from the bottles.

    Finally Pan Am flight 30 is ready for boarding and an hour later we are comfortably cruising at 31,500 feet. I spend much of the flight composing a long report to Martin Harwit, not guessing that because of missed connections and bad weather, the trip from New York to Greenbelt would take nearly as long as from Moscow to New York, and that although our tickets were for Baltimore, we would end up on a flight to Washington's National Airport which would be diverted to Dulles in Virginia. Farquhar's daughter, out to pick up her father, drove to all three places: we called our friend Marge in Greenbelt who--thank God for friends--came out, 45 miles, and picked us up.

    On the plane I tried to sum up what we had experienced. It was not easy:

    "It is hard to fit all we saw in the USSR into an orderly pattern. There is a tremendous change: some sectors run ahead, some lag, some go off at a tangent. Vaisberg is a liberal Communist, Kolya a "believer," Ustinov still lives in the Brezhnev era... Society is headed away from the Communist state, but where it is headed is not clear."

    "It is like the stretching of a wire. Moderate stretching is elastic and reversible, but past a certain point the "plastic" stage begins where a relatively small force produces appreciable and permanent deformation. One gets the feeling Russia is in the plastic stage. Rules are strict but their enforcement is spotty and often no one seems to be in charge."

    And some further thoughts:

    Being involved in science, most of those we met were intellectuals, whom we got to like and appreciate. One finds a natural empathy with Russians now that we had little reason to fear them, either as adversaries or as competitors. Thirty years ago a genuine fear might have existed that although democracy was "nicer," Communism was tougher, that their tightly controlled and indoctrinated society would outstrip our easy-going one. The visit made clear that it was not so, freedom was resilient while rigid controls retarded society. We did not guess at the time how dramatically that point would be confirmed by events in Eastern Europe only a few months later.

    And at the same time, life in the Soviet Union seemed uncannily familiar. It reminded me of life in Israel 40 years ago--the austere society, shared tenements, standing in line, uncertain rumored information, sharing of kindness and friendship by people who at the same time were trying to carve out their own niche of privilege and "protektzia." Also a bureaucracy which touched all aspects of life, an official ideology and lofty ideals, sometimes ignored by those whohad success. Much of this, perhaps, was unwittingly brought to Israel by its founders, almost all of whom grew up in Russia. Just as "Jewish food" in the US was actually lower-class Russian cuisine, so many Israeli customs, dishes, figures of speech and attitudes seemed derived from Russian sources. I had been a visitor in the country, it seemed, but not a stranger.

         

Author and Curator:   Dr. David P. Stern
     Mail to Dr.Stern:   david("at" symbol)phy6.org .


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