YOU COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THAT PLANE! (Part II)

I found my interpreter with difficulty, and he seemed annoyed that I didn't know where to find him.  He took me to a Academy of Sciences hotel, we saw billboards saying something.  I asked my interpreter what they said, and he said that they were telling people to be nice to each other.  At the hotel he got me checked into a room on the third floor, a floor I was later to learn was bugged.  It was a plain but serviceable room.  I was to go down to dinner by myself, a scary prospect because I knew only a few phrases in Russian.  It was the custom to fill a table so they sat me with three young women who turned out to be graduate students in history.  One, a plain overweight young woman, was majoring in American history.  A pretty one majored in English history, and the third one in some other country and didn't seem to know any English.  The American history student said that she was very glad to meet me because she could not figure out how policy was made in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  I replied that I didn't know but, if she ever figured it out, would she tell me?  She asked me what I thought of the Soviet hockey team. I said I thought they were excellent, and they all smiled.  Then one of them asked what I thought of the Czechoslovakian hockey team.  I replied that they were very good also.  They frowned.

The English student asked what I did and I said I was a geologist.  She asked if Soviet geologists were any good?  I said that your country has more than double the geologists than in the U.S.  At that she slammed her fist down on the table and said, "I didn't ask you how many geologist we have.  I asked you if they were any good?"  So I mumbled something about they didn't have very good equipment.  Again she slammed her fist on the table and said, "I knew it.  They aren't any good.  But you will see, we will get better."  To which the other two nodded and eagerly mumbled agreement.  I had visions of young Soviets saying, "We will get better,  We will get better!"  They sounded very competitive though I think they never got the chance.

The next day I was taken to the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry*.   On the way we drove a bit on Vernadsky Prospekt.  Soviet scientists were treated handsomely, a least some of them as there now is also a Vernadsky Museum.**   At the Institute, I met my host, Prof. A.I. Tugarinov.   He was a squat man with a large black beard.  At a meeting in Switzerland, I had given a toast to him, calling him the Friendly Bear.  He seemed to like that.  There was a problem in giving my talk as I had to give it through an interpreter and slowly.  This threw me off, and I didn't do very well.  After a reception, I was to return to the hotel, but there was some confusion.  People were milling about and there was a delay.  Finally I was taken to the hotel and when I got to my room, I could tell someone had been looking through my things. I went to the bathroom and there was a cigar in the toilet.  I smiled.  They wanted to make sure I knew I had been searched, but nothing was missing.

The following day I went to the Vernadsky Institute to look at their facilities.  The chemical laboratories were primitive by Western standards of the time with rudimentary glove boxes.   The equipment was home made and not of high quality.  There were mass spectrometers, very complicated and sensitive weighing machines to separate isotopes of an element and measure their relative abundance.  I couldn't believe it, but the electricity was turned off in the building at night so the mass spectrometers lost their vacuum.  So the first thing to be done in the morning was to pump the mass spectrometer down to a hard vacuum, which took a couple of hours of lost time.  Later we were to visit a physics laboratory elsewhere that was better.  Their mass spectrometers were designed to hold a hard vacuum overnight, and I was quite impressed.  The two laboratories needed to get together.  Why was the electricity turned off at night?  The scientists were told they needed their rest, something you never hear in the West.   But I got the impression that they had a severe electricity shortage.  When we drove around at night, there were street lights, but they were turned off as well, for example.

* http://www.mathnet.ru/php/organisation.phtml?option_lang=eng&orgid=35
** http://en.travel2moscow.com/where/visit/museums/object1349.html