Each head of every department thought that their area of specialty was the most important one. Even in the Athletic Department, teachers practically terrorized the students who failed to meet the regulation standards for jumping or distance running. It didn’t matter if you were good at skiing, for example, or if you played volleyball very well. Our overweight PE teacher, Victoria Naumovna, was concerned only with her test.
In our second year, my fellow sportsmen and I failed the test in physical training, even though we achieved good results in different city competitions. This was because we had problems with an idiotic set of exercises called “GTO” (“Ready for Labor and Defense”), which required bizarre exercises such as standing on your head.
Two days before our exams, I had to train one whole night, learning how to stand on my head. The next day, I took the damn test with an open wound on my forehead, and since I had trained the whole night, there was no time to prepare for my exam. However, the women from the Athletic Department were not interested in that. Our trainers who were also teachers couldn’t help, as they couldn’t go against the instructions “sent down from above.”
After my third year, the student life at MITKhT became merrier. Apart from Marxism and military science, practically all the unnecessary subjects were behind us, and we could focus on our major subjects. The teachers and professors in our favorite subject areas were not so diabolical, and they didn’t hate the students. Many students never made it this far, because they couldn’t cope with the meaningless drills.
My introduction to the manufacture of chemical products came through my internships at some operating plants. Unfortunately, they were more like excursions, though perhaps a bit more specialized. They didn’t help us much in acquiring the skills of a technological engineer.
I was most impressed by my internship at the Novocherkassk Chemical Plant. At that time, it was a huge plant for producing synthetic fuel from carbon monoxide and hydrogen, using captured German technology and equipment. This plant received state subsidies, but it was unprofitable because the gasoline it produced was of such low quality, that it wasn’t even good enough to refuel the factory buses. During the war, the Germans solved this problem by using additives such as tetraethyl lead. But this additive, which is also a strongly toxic compound, was produced in small quantities and so the products of the plant were of little use. The situation was the same at the two other large factories that were relocated from Germany to Salavat (Bashkortstan) and Angarsk.[8] By that time, the U.S.S.R. had started developing the rich deposits of natural oil from Bashkortstan and Tatarstan, which produced much better gasoline.
Some time later, a team of scientists led by Andrei Bashkirov, the head of our department, found a better application for the saturated hydrocarbons produced from carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
At that time, the U.S.S.R. had the largest whaling fleet in the world, and it practically wiped Antarctic whales off the face of the earth. Fat was cut off the carcasses of these huge mammals and sent to chemical plants (for example to the Kazan plant), where it was processed and used to produce heavy primary alcohols. These in turn were used to make the synthetic detergent “Novost”. Even at that time it was clear that this madness would have to stop some day. Bashkirov proposed a method for oxidizing the product of the Novocherkassk plant, called “synthine”, in the presence of boric acid into heavy primary alcohols. This was a revolutionary solution, and we were very proud of our professor.
When Docent Gilyarovskaya suggested that I should conduct experiments researching the process of synthine oxidation in my fourth year of studies, I happily agreed. Before that I had hardly dreamed about the career of a scientist. At the time, I thought it was better to work at a plant in the field of chemical engineering; however, I quickly realized that my place was in the research laboratory. You are practically alone there, face to face with the unknown, and it is up to you alone whether something new and unexplored is created or not.
This became even clearer to me when I was a fifth-year student during an internship at the Shebekino Chemical Plant, not far from Belgorod, where the first industrial technology for producing primary alcohols was under development. A few students from our department studied the operation of this future plant, with a prototype unit. The performance of this unit was dynamic and full of surprises, but generally I felt it was terribly boring, routine and repetitive from day to day. The few night shifts that I spent with the unit finally and for all time convinced me that there was nothing remarkable about the job of a shift engineer, except the monotony of the technological process. The work is exhausting and it is not compensated by any creative satisfaction.
By that time, I had seriously fallen in love with my fellow student, Rita Skibko, who returned my feelings. She worked diligently at the department for the synthesis and technology of vitamins and drugs, headed by the famous scientist Nikolai Preobrazhensky. Soon we got married, dreaming about a family scientific career.
Bashkirov suggested that I do the work for my degree thesis in his laboratory, and I was very inspired by this opportunity.
Soon I was introduced to my supervisors – Yuli Kagan, a senior scientist, and Nikolai Morozov, a graduate student. When Kagan and Bashkirov went on an extended business trip to China, Morozov became my actual supervisor. We studied the role of proposed carbon complexes with an iron catalyst while different organic hydroxyl compounds were synthesized on it.
Nikolai was a kindhearted person who did everything possible to make me feel free to devote myself to the work. We conducted almost all experiments together and I certainly trusted him completely. I quickly mastered the experimental techniques, and I carried out the kinetic experiments with pleasure, drawing gas samples into adsorption tubes and weighing them. You literally kilometers run, for hours on end, rushing from the laboratory to the weighing room and back again.
Unfortunately, our early work was unproductive. We failed to get reproducible experimental data. All the time, we got different results, which were beyond any logical explanation. Sometimes, we made odd “discoveries”, when the catalyst we tested showed more than a 100% conversion of the carbon monoxide. Later it turned out that when we were cleaning the reactor, we had left a few threads of a worn-out cleaning rag behind.
We didn’t know what to do. The day when course papers had to be defended was approaching with a disastrous speed, but still we had no reproducible results. As if sensing that we were having problems, Kagan wrote a letter from China, though naturally he couldn’t help us from there.
Fortunately, Bashkirov returned from China earlier than planned. Though he didn’t know our work in detail, he taught us a valuable lesson. Bashkirov listened to Nikolai, who was just starting his career in science, and rebuked us properly. He demanded that we repeat all the experimental operations with the maximum possible accuracy and observe intervals between selecting the samples and the weighing. After this, things went smoothly, and I managed to finish my work on time.
CHAPTER 4
I Become a Person from “The Box”
Before we had to defend our theses, the members of our class of 1958 were assigned to various scientific research institutes and plants. I was offered work at “Post Office Box 4019”, located on the Highway of Enthusiasts in Moscow. I agreed to this, though I knew nothing about this enterprise or about my future work there. The institute was a secret establishment which was significant for the defense of our country, so my future seemed romantic and thrilling.
8
One plant was situated in Salavat, in Bashkortstan, and the other in Angarsk, which is located on the Angara River in the Irkutsk region, about 30 kilometers north-west of the city of Irkutsk and 50 kilometers north of the western tip of Lake Baikal.