I arrived at the Biology Department, where I had been a student twenty years before and where my father, a professor of zoology, had worked almost all his life. The speech of Academician Sokolov, who was secretary academician until his death in 1998, as well as the director of the huge Academy Institute of Evolutionary Morphology and Ecology of Animals and the chairman of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the Moscow University,298 was very short. He told me: “Your last name is Birstein [which meant, ‘You are a Jew,’ because Russian names would sound like Sokolov, Ivanov, Petrov, and so forth]. That is why you must find a job as a merchant.”
It was not surprising that Academician Sokolov remembered my last name. In the 1960s, my father was invited to an international congress in England. After a long process of clearance by the Party and KGB officials, he was allowed to go to a zoological congress. He had already boarded the plane to England when suddenly he was called on the radio and asked to exit the plane. While he stood in front of the plane, trying to figure out what had happened, he saw young, handsome Sokolov taking his place on the plane. Evidently, for Party officials, Sokolov, a well-connected party functionary, was more important as a representative of Soviet science than a professional in the field, a nonmember of the Party with a Jewish name.
There was no sense in my continuing the conversation with Sokolov. Academician Sokolov followed Communist Party and KGB orders (do not forget that all appointments at the academy, as well as the results of elections within the academy, were approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and, therefore, by the KGB). I contacted the regional, City of Moscow, and Central Committee Communist Party departments in charge of science, as well as the Russian Federation and Soviet Council deputies.299 My Russian Federation deputy was president of the Soviet Pedagogical Academy, and the Soviet deputy was rector of Moscow State University. Everybody listened to me attentively. I told them: “The Soviet Constitution guarantees employment to every Soviet citizen according to his or her level of education and degrees. I am an unemployed geneticist, a Candidate of Biological Sciences. I am an example that this guarantee is not fulfilled.” All officials replied that they could not help me find any position at Moscow research institutes, at Moscow University, or even at an elementary or secondary school. It seemed that neither the Party nor the Soviet authorities were able to solve my problem.
Finally, I was invited to meet Vladimir Sverchkov, the head of the Academy First Department. When I arrived at the Academy Presidium, two KGB men, typically dressed in plainclothes, were waiting for me and showed me to their boss’s office. Outside the office was a poster with photos of the Academy First Department members. I learned from the poster that I was escorted by two KGB colonels, and their boss had the rank of a KGB general. Inside the office, a very impressive looking man with gray hair and good manners tried for forty minutes to persuade me that his department and the KGB had nothing to do with my unemployment and problems of publishing scientific books. His point was simple: within the academy, I had never had access to or worked with secret materials. It was true, my work was not secret and, therefore, I could not release any state secret. Evidently, another KGB department, not the First, was in charge of my problems and the fate of my manuscripts.
From time to time, I received phone calls that possibly came from the other KGB department. A polite voice (not the curator’s) invited or, to be precise, ordered me to come to the KGB Office in Charge of Moscow and the Moscow Region. I strongly rejected meetings with the KGB men offered in “safe apartments” or hotels. Each time, different KGB officers met me in the long corridors of one of the Lubyanka buildings. Usually there were two officers: the “bad” one, who threatened me during the meeting, and the “good” one, who pretended to be sympathetic to my problems. They insisted in calling these meetings besedy, or “talks,” rather than “interrogations,” while they named many of my friends during these “talks” and tried to get information from me about them. I knew that this form of meeting gave them an opportunity to record our conversations without my knowledge (according to the law, during interrogations, the interrogator should inform the interrogated person about any recording), and I was very cautious with my answers. The “bad” officer used to mention details of my life that the KGB could only know only if my apartment had been bugged. This was a common KGB tactic: The “organs” know everything.
The end of every “talk” was the same. After having talked to me about my job problems, the officers repeated the following: “You must understand us. You are a talented scientist (our experts evaluated your papers) and you should work at the Academy of Sciences. It is so unfortunate that you are unemployed. If you understand us, you will work at any Moscow Academy institute of your choice. If you don’t, you know what happened to some of your friends: They have been arrested.” All these meetings of course were designed to get me to collaborate in some way with the KGB in exchange for the opportunity to continue my professional work. My goal was to show them that because of my moral principles, I would not collaborate with them under any circumstances. I responded to their hints by “playing dumb,” pretending not to understand what the officers were offering me. I asked them to tell me plainly what they meant by the phrase “You must understand us.” My tactic, to force the KGB officer to say something straight, which they never do, worked well. The officers got angry, ordered me to leave the KGB building, and left me alone for a while.
This was not the first time in my life when I consciously refused to work under Soviet structures I considered immoral. Before my graduation in 1966, representatives of the Defense Ministry visited Moscow University and talked to every student who might be useful to the biological warfare institutes. During our years at the university, all of us were trained as specialists in biological warfare and automatically received the rank of junior lieutenant of the medical service and, in principle, could be forced to work at a military institute. The officers who visited the university promised a lot—a high salary and a quick career in military biological science. At that time, sophisticated methods of genetic engineering had just been discovered, and the military desperately needed high-level molecular biologists for the development of new programs on biological warfare.
It was easy to reject the offer of the military. But the next step was more difficult. After my graduation, I was assigned to work at one of the newly created Main Administration of the Microbiological Industry (Glavmikrobioprom) institutes, the VNII Syntez Belka, that is, the Institute of Protein Synthesis. In the Soviet university system, after graduation students must sign a contract with their future place of work, not according to the interests of the student but according to the demands of scientific institutions and schools that particular year. Supposedly, this was the price for the free university education. But there were some tricks that allowed students to escape this signing and get hired by an institution where they wanted to work.
When I visited the VNII Syntez Belka for the first time, it became clear to me that it was connected with secret work, probably with the development of some biological weapon. It was heavily guarded by plainclothes KGB men. The head of the Personnel Department, who appeared to be a retired KGB officer, submitted my documents for the special clearance needed to be employed at that institute (it was not clear if I would be accepted at all because of my Jewish name). To work at a secret institute on a military project was the last thing I wanted in my life. But I was lucky. The checking took a long time, during which I passed exams for a graduate student position (aspirantura). I started to work at the Radiobiology Department of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy on my Candidate (Ph. D.) dissertation on classic genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila, which had nothing in common with military projects.