Once, a man who resembled a human being appeared in this Communist kingdom of almost medieval ignorance. That was Rem Belousov who came to us from Moscow State University. Rumor had it that he was a secretary of the Komsomol committee there, but had been removed because his views were incompatible with the party doctrine.
Soon we learned about the views of Belousov. First of all, he said that not a single one of Stalin’s five-year plans for the economic development of the country had been implemented. It was even more terrible to hear that the party’s plan, according to Lenin’s appeal, to have 100,000 tractors which would secure the victory of socialism, was never fulfilled. “How come?” we asked in a great outburst. Rem Aleksandrovich explained this very simply. In all the reports on implementing the plan, hundreds of thousands of manufactured tractors were mentioned as, “translated into a 15 horse-power tractor”. So, each 60 horse-power tractor was counted as four tractors, though it couldn’t work in the place of four machines. All this was very strange. Although the views of our new lecturer were very progressive at the time, he didn’t aim to go beyond “going back to Lenin’s principles”.
For a long time after his lectures, we joked whenever we saw a tractor in the street. One student asked another how many tractors he saw. The latter answered that he saw one. “No, dear friend, you are opposed to the party line. There are four tractors there, not one. You should study the history of the party, young man!” added the joker.
The party paid close attention to the institute. Ekaterina Furtseva was a former weaver, who studied at our institute for a year or two. Later she became a member of the Politbureau at the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. I saw her in 1955. I remembered her resolute, attractive face, her red hair braided on the nape, and her energetic step tap-dancing on the marble floor of the second floor landing, which students traditionally called the “hole” because of the glass dome above it.
The institute’s rector, Myshko, was a stout dumpy guy with short legs, who could hardly keep up with the leader of Moscow Communists (at that time Furtseva was the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the C.P.S.U). For a long time, Myshko held “important posts in the Soviet state apparatus”, including that of Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Council. But afterwards he was demoted to rector of MITKhT. We remembered him, because he quoted Sergei Esenin in his speeches. Esenin was proclaimed a bourgeois poet by the official propaganda, and it was forbidden to publish his poetry.
However, Myshko combined Esenin’s romanticism with his own roguish habits, which were very far from poetry. For instance, he hired his son-in-law to design the Marxist-Leninist rooms, for which large amounts of money were budgeted. In fact, professional artists did this job for peanuts, while Myshko and his son-in-law divided the money between themselves. At that time, the mischief of the Soviet elite knew no limits.
A storm broke out when it turned out that Myshko had borrowed large amounts of money from some elderly professors, with no intention of repaying them, hoping that these old creditors would soon pass away, departing for a better world where they wouldn’t need any money. But the wife of one old man proved to be quite brave. She stirred up such a scandal that Myshko even agreed to be transferred to some department and to write a doctoral dissertation. But this job was too hard for him. The question was settled simply: Myshko was transferred to another “important position in the Soviet administration”. After all, it was impossible to cast a shadow on the “pure reputation of a Communist”.
A friend of Furtseva’s was Lecturer Khokhlova, who was a permanent secretary of the institute’s party committee. She was especially noted for keeping up appearances.
When the next rector of the Institute, Professor Xenzenko, divorced his wife and married a student (oh, what a scandal!), Khokhlova organized a crusade for “the purity of Communist morals”. As a result, Xenzenko was removed from his position as rector and later, he was driven out of the institute. After this great shock, the scientist fell seriously ill and died.
Lecturer Aleksander Smirnov was another “prominent party leader” who worked at the institute during my studies. I don’t know why, but as the Vice Chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Industry of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U., he frequently visited the Department of “Artificial Gas and Liquid Fuel” to supervise our group. In class he would just stand there silently, while we carried out experiments on the synthesis of organic compounds or performed differential distillations of the heavy residues of resin pyrolysis. Nothing could bring him out of this inert state. Even the time when I once made the mistake of short circuiting the power grid and plunging the whole laboratory into darkness for a while, seemed to have no effect on him. I think the prospect of a scientific degree attracted Smirnov. In the evenings, he tried to work in Andrei Bashkirov’s Laboratory at the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis, at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. However, Smirnov’s attempts were doomed. In one of the laboratories, he assembled an experimental unit for synthesis based on carbon monoxide (an extremely poisonous gas) and hydrogen. Either he forgot that the gases flowing out from the reactor should be directed into the exhaust hood, or the rubber hose that served this purpose came off, and the whole thing nearly ended in catastrophe. An employee who happened to enter the room found the unconscious Aleksander Sergeevich on the floor and immediately carried him out into the street. The people summoned by the alarm just barely managed to save the unlucky researcher.
None of this prevented him from becoming the chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Industry of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. The fate of six to eight Soviet ministers, who were in one way or another connected with chemistry, depended on him. Additionally, through his department, he managed issues of chemical weapons and often visited the State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GOSNIIOKhT) — the premiere institute that developed chemical agents in the country, where I later worked for 26 years. His son-in-law, Henri Kazhdan, also worked in this institute and though he wasn’t a specialist, he still held a high position there.
Eventually, Smirnov achieved his ambition and became a “famous scientist”. Smirnov and Vladimir Gryaznov, a former party administrator at the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, received a patent some very dubious discovery (pure Soviet classification).
I still remember quite well a number of other meaningless subjects which students were forced to study, such as the theory of machines and mechanisms, heating engineering, and construction, etc. Sometimes we asked our teachers why a chemist should try to calculate and design thermal boilers that produce steam and electrical energy, if electricity has been transmitted for a long time from electric power stations. There were mechanical engineers who worked there, specialists in this field. The machines and components were also designed by specialists and machinists. There were other institutes in Moscow that trained plenty of engineers, majoring in that area. We didn’t receive any answers to our questions. I fear that the same thing still goes on and students have no time to study their major subject areas, for which they entered their institutions of higher learning in the first place.