1 April 1989
Russia begins in New York, at the Pan Am terminal of JFK airport. As one reaches the waiting line, one beginsÊhearing Russian. The man behind us is returning to Tbilisi and speaks no English, but the lady escorting him has been here ten years. "Russia will be different from what you expect" she says.
Audrey and I pass a tightly guarded security gate and enter an enclosure separated from the rest of the terminal by a thick glass partition. We are among the early arrivals and the plane is late: one last phone call to the parents in New York City, then we settle down and watch the room gradually fill up. Most of the arrivals speak Russian and wear shades of gray and black: the women have boots and fur hats, and two men in dark hats seem like secret policemen to Audrey.
A few Americans stand out by their bright shirts and by the lightness of their voices and manners. Unlike the returning visitors, they expect to be back here soon: young doctors returning an exchange visit, athletes going to attend a competition. One middle aged American sits apart: he introduces himslf as a businessman trading in mining machinery and railroad equipment. I ask him whether anyone has tried to sell to the Soviets refrigerator cars, to ease that terrible shortage of fresh vegetables about which one reads. He says Russia is well supplied with such cars: the bottleneck is not a shortage of equipment but a lack of organization. As for the equipment he is trying to sell: the Soviets have excellent research in those areas, but have not managed to translate it into practice. And concerning perestroika: he has been going to the Soviet Union for two years now and has not seen much change, "but there was probably great change before that." I ask about Russian hotels: was it true that they were terribly overheated? "Only if you cannot open the windows."
After a delay of almost three hours the airplane is ready for boarding, a huge 747 capable of taking about 500 people, the seats are packed tighter than any I have ever seen. It is a joint Pan Am-Aeroflot flight; plane and aircrew are American, but some of the stewards are Russian and the announcements and films are in both languages. Most Russians sit in the rear, in the smoking section, while we are well in front, among US athletes on their way to a contest in acrobatics. They converse noisily, lean over seats and joke among themselves, and show us photos of some remarkable feats, such as a handstand performed on a colleague's uplifted palm.
A while later the athlete-girl next to us exchanges her seat with an older but spry gentleman who introduces himself as Dr. Cooper, member of the president's commission on physical fitness. "Not the Dr. Cooper?" we ask, thinking about the original promoter of aerobic exercise. No, "but we are friends." He is on his way to an exchange of ideas with Soviet counterparts. He tells us the secret of dealing with leg cramps, a folk remedy which a listener of his radio program shared with him: grab your upper lip, the area where mustaches sprout, and pinch, hard. At first he thought it was absolutely crazy, but changed his mind after trying it on an athlete on the playing field. Why and how no one knows.
Later a call comes over the public address system: "is there a doctor in the cabin?" He jumps up and goes forward in a hurry. After a while he is back and I ask him how serious it was. "Not serious. It is a woman who thinks she is having a heart attack, but as a general practicioner I would say she is not."
The flight is long, nearly ten hours. Much of the way we fly above clouds, but the air clears as we approach the coast of Norway and we see bleak rocky islands and snowy mountains. After a while one makes out a few roads and cultivated fields, all appearing tiny from our great height, then forests that wear snowy fringes on their shady edges. By and large the landscape is clear of snow, giving hope that Moscow, too, will already be in its springtime.
But the weather is fickle. After crossing the Gulf of Finland the ground becomes again obscured by clouds and half an hour later the airplane enters those clouds as it begins to descend towards Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow. It breaks through the overcast at about 1000 feet and everyone can see that the ground is white and that snow is falling.
********
The beginnings of this trip go back about six years. In 1983 I decided to devote a major effort to "modeling" of the Earth's distant magnetic field, to devising mathematical representations for its average structure and its regular variations. That is the region shaped by the solar wind, the steady outflow of hot gas from the Sun's upper atmosphere, which confines the Earth's field into a long comet-like cavity, called the magnetosphere. All sorts of complex phenomena take place in the magnetosphere, giving rise to radiation belts, magnetic storms and polar auroras, but for a proper exploration of that strange region one needs good maps, which is what modeling tries to do, combining satellite observations and mathematical tricks.
In part I was drawn to that area because existing models seemed crude and inaccurate, making one feel "I ought to be able to do better than that." In part is seemed a safe applied field for a physicist in his fifties, useful and predictable, with no surprising new twists (little did I know). Just when I started, however, a new model was published by N.A. Tsyganenko and A. Usmanov of Leningrad State University, a fairly sophisticated one. Rather than devise new representations of my own, I decided to begin by studying the new scheme. The process taught me a lot about techniques, coordinate systems and computer graphics, and the resulting package of computer codes was distributed to many potential users.
Gradually Tsyganenko's name became more than just a label on an article. A manuscript describing an improved version of his model was sent to me for refereeing, and I not only slogged through the calculations but also smoothed out his ragged English. A Russian emigre told me that the man was an upright and diligent scientist, and gave me his first name: Nikolai. Still later a US scientist who had met him in Moscow described him as young-looking, bearded and very pleasant.
In 1987 Tsyganenko submitted two abstracts to a session I chaired at the Vancouver assembly of the IAGA, the International Association for Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, but he was unable to attend. However, he was elected in absentia to be vice chairman of a committee which I headed, and my letter informing him of that election started a steady correspondence. He was scheduled to give the main talk in a symposium I organized for the next IAGA meeting, in England in the summer of 1989, and the IAGA organization had promised to finance his stay.
After the US and the USSR signed in 1987 an agreement to collaborate on space research, I suggested to NASA a collaboration on magnetospheric models, including a visit to the US by Tsyganenko, whom I was by now anxious to meet. NASA was seeking tangible areas of collaboration and reacted positively, but in the end it was the Russians who invited me to Moscow, in July 1988. They suggested a November visit, a time of the year when Moscow was likely to be cold and dark, and I was glad when NASA postponed the visit until spring, to coincide with a meeting of the Joint Working Group on Solar Terrestrial Research. As part of that meeting I was to propose a collaboration agreement on modeling, with Tsyganenko on the Soviet side. Audrey was eager to go along and the Russians agreed to let her accompany me, though we had to pay her travel costs.
A second link was Igor Alexeev of Moscow University whom I met in 1985 in Prague, at the IAGA assembly that preceded Vancouver's. I had used the cheapest available housing, a student dormitory of Prague's Technical University: it so happened that the place was not only located right next to the conference site, it also housed a most interesting collection of scientists from soft-currency countries.
The entire Soviet delegation stayed there, including Igor Alexeev who had arrived after a 32-hour train ride from Moscow. I had just worked out a representation of magnetic field by parabolic harmonics and found that Igor had also done so, though that work was published in Russian. We became friendly and since cafeteria food was downright awful, experimented with joint meals in the dormitory: I bought bread and tomatos in a grocery while Alexeev furnished Brazilian instant coffee and an immersion heater ingeniously modified to cheat Czech outlets.
That chance meeting led to another correspondence and I then invited Alexeev to the symposium on the quiet magnetosphere in Vancouver, as key speaker on "Where do Magnetic Field Lines go in the Quiet Magnetosphere?" The talk was to be later written up for journal publication and Alexeev asked me to become joint author. One month before the Vancouver meeting he however wrote that he was unable to come, and he promised to write up that talk and send it to Vancouver, to be presented by me.
A total of 15 Soviet scientists had submitted abstracts to the symposium but only one showed up: Yuri Galperin of the Soviet Academy's Institute for Cosmic Research (IKI). Yuri was a senior scientist and had entered space research by placing an instrument aboard Sputnik 3 in 1958. He did bring me a write-up by Alexeev; taking no chances, I had already prepared a talk, but I incorporated parts of Alexeev's contribution and the journal article carried both of our names and affiliations. If anyone at NASA (which paid publication charges) found this strange, I never heard of it. The article appeared shortly before the Moscow trip and I mailed a xerox copy to my co-author, expressing the hope we would meet.
Yuri Galperin, gray haired and somewhat diplomatic, proved to be an interesting person: Audrey and I spent a long evening in his company, taking in stories about the Soviet Union and the changes it was experiencing. We met again less than a year later, when Yuri visited Washington as member of the US-USSR Joint Working Group (JWG) of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, whose annual meetings alternated between Washington and Moscow. I called him at his hotel and asked if he would like to go out with Audrey and me, to see a Gaugin exhibit at the National Gallery and then dine together.
He said he would be delighted, but could we first take him somewhere else? It turned out that in Vancouver he had bought a second hand Atari computer, via a classified newspaper ad, and now he needed an interface to connect it to his printer. Russian travelers on foreign trips tended to hoard their dollar allocations for worth-while purchases and personal computers were high on Yuri's list.
Yuri's computer was nearly obsolete and it took some phoning to find a place that still sold the interface. Even "Toys are Us" no longer carried it, though a small store in Wheaton still did. After buying it, on our way to the museum, my car was rammed in the rear by a taxicab, at a traffic light. We both stopped, I walked out and exchanged addresses and insurance information with the driver, a woman from Annapolis. The damage seemed minimal. Meanwhile Yuri became excited: "What is happening?" Audrey explained, and Yuri said: "Would never happen in my country. There, both drivers would come out and would shout at each other, until a policeman arrived, and he would shout at both of them."
"And then?"
"And then the policeman would decide who is guilty. And the insurance might pay or might not pay." It was hard to tell in advance.
Yuri and I met again that summer, at a conference on the physics of the aurora at St. John's College in Cambridge, England. Also attending with him was Yuri's boss at IKI, Academician Roald Sagdeev. There existed some special quality about Sagdeev--a clarity of thought, a quickness of mind; and he was already well known (even to readers of the Washington Post) as spokesman for the liberal wing of Soviet politics. I sought him out for a special reason: at the time I was chairman of the Committee on the History of Geophysics, organized by the American Geophysical Union, and was in the process of compiling a "capsule history" of magnetospheric physics. It was a rather one-sided history, for to western scientists the work of their Soviet counterparts was almost a complete blank. Could IKI do anything, I asked Sagdeev one evening, to collect the record of Soviet space research before too much was forgotten--the real record, not what remained after official filtering. He seemed quite sympathetic and we discussed various steps that might follow.
But the follow-up never came, in part because I was soon replaced as chairman. Sagdeev, too, was replaced by his protege Alec Galeev, he already told me in Cambridge that he had planned to step down. He had been one of the 5000 or so delegates at the great congress which officially inaugurated "perestroika"', the restructuring of Soviet government. Previously party members had often held on to public posts to the day they died, and one resolution passed at that session limited all such appointments to 10 years. Sagdeev then proposed (so he told me) that those 10 years would be counted not from the time of the congress but from whenever the terms of such officials began. That of course would have meant the immediate dismissal of a great number of functionaries, and to no one's surprise the motion was overwhelmingly defeated, with only 200 votes in support. Sagdeev then decided that he would set an example and step down, since he had headed IKI for 15 years. That, anyway, was his story.
Sagdeev at that meeting also presented me with a souvenir pin marking the launch of the Phobos spacecraft towards Mars, a mission which intended to set down a probe on the planet's small moon Phobos. I carefully kept it and meant to wear it in Moscow (the Phobos II landing was set within the time frame of the visit). However, both Phobos spacecraft lost contact with Earth before reaching Phobos and the pin stayed in Greenbelt.
The letter inviting me was posted just a week after the Cambridge conference. It may not have been a coincidence.
In preparing for the visit Audrey and I went to great lengths. We bought language study books and I brushed up my poor skills in Russian, the residue of several incomplete attempts to learn the language. Audrey, who had no prior exposure, studied Cyrillic letters and key phrases. We bought a map of Moscow and guidebooks, and read Shipler's "Russia" and Andrea Lee's "Russian Journal."
We also picked up presents for our friends, making sure they were made in the US and represented US culture. We selected several books to give away, e.g. Richard Feynmann's autobiographical tales for Tsyganenko and Yuri. For the sons of Alexeev and Tsyganenko I bought "aerobies," those cleverly designed rings which had been hand-tossed to record distances. And also sweets, after Diane Rausch at NASA Headquarters advised me that if we were invited to anyone's home, we should bring chocolates or flowers to the lady of the house "who probably stood in line the whole afternoon for this." Audrey insisted on the best, three boxes of Godiva chocolates. For smaller gifts I bought Parker ball-pens and pressurized "space pen" refills, developed for astronauts and working well even upside down, and also Apollo pins, and pins with US flags. And finally, a large roll of gift-wrap: because customs might want to open packages, all wrapping had to be done at Moscow.
We also took survival equipment recommended by veteran travelers to Russia--toilet paper, instant coffee, an immersion heater and quick-snack edibles such as chocolate.
At the same time we collected contacts. Susan Kayser had two married cousins in Leningrad, and she gave us their addresses and also presents to bring. Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum, provided a letter of introduction to historians of space science and some specific queries to follow: so did Spencer Weart, head of the NY Center for the History of Physics. More names came from Bob McCutcheon, a space scientist at Goddard who had spent 7 months in the USSR, researching the 1936-7 purge of Soviet astronomers. We also carried the address of a Leningrad teacher who had spent the last three months of 1988 teaching Russian in Greenbelt's high school, as part of an exchange agreement. All those preparations--language, books, presents, names--turned out to be valuable.
*****
And now we had landed in Moscow and were walking through the empty arrival hall, past the passport control and to the conveyer belt bringing up our luggage. Ours was the only airplane arriving (a rather big one, true, though not full), and it still took over an hour for our baggage to arrive. Suitcases came up in fits and spurts, and kept toppling off the ill-designed conveyer. When that happened, or when a luggage jam developed, Russian passengers would unload the bags at any convenient spot, sometimes on the far side of the belt, and people kept hopping onto the belt and across it to reach their belongings.
Finally our suitcases emerged and were hauled to the line for the customs control. Guards watched us enter and asked for our currency declaration, marking it with a stamp. Another group of guards was huddled around a personal computer at the other end of the passage, making me wonder whether my personal KGB file was being flashed on the screen. Unobtrusively I moved towards them and peeked at the screen, then motioned to Audrey to look, and we both started to laugh. There was no file: the guards were playing a game resembling "pac-man."
We then reach the waiting hall, to which a milling crowd of Russians had come to meet the travelers. Some held up signs with names, and after a while we spot ours: "D. STERN O. STERN." Holding them is a wispy woman, her hair tucked into a large cap knit of bulky wool--Nadia Nikolaeva, the scientist who had written for my computer codes. Rather shy and apologetic, she rarely cracks a smile, but seems happy to have found us. We are even happier--had no one shown up, we would not have known where to go. It turns out that we are booked at Hotel Rossiya, right across from the Kremlin walls.
Nadia says she has brought a car and goes out to fetch the driver. She returns after 15 minutes: the car is parked right outside the door, but the driver is nowhere to be found. After 10 more minutes she is back again, still no luck, but then the driver appears spontaneously and soon we are on our way in an off-white "Volga," rather like a no-frills 1972 Dodge Dart.
The roads are slushy but the driver pushes on rather recklessly, passing cars on his left and right. A little gadget is clipped to the visor and through Nadia I ask what it is. The driver explains (as we have guessed) that it is a radar detector. "And what if a policeman stops you?" "Nothing."
Gradually we enter the city. By the time we pass the Bolshoi theatre the snow has almost stopped falling, and soon we are outside the Rossiya, a giant square building with an impressive entrance on each of its four sides, each with its own restaurant or two and its other facilities--a pool at one entrance, a movie theatre at another, and so on.
To keep the cold out, each entrance is provided with two sets of doors, inner and outer. In each set just one door is unlocked and those doors are as far from each other as possible, forcing people to weave through the entranceway. Guards at the inner doors only let hotel guests to enter: we are given identification cards to brandish as we enter. Each floor also has "key ladies" sitting at desks, and any hotel guest going out must exchange the hotel key (tied to a heavy wooden plug, like a child's top) for an identification card, and on returning the key is again swapped for the card.
The Rossiya is gigantic: when it was built, under Khrushchev, it was the world's largest hotel, and it might still be. Each floor has about 300 rooms and 12 desks with "key ladies," three to a side. On one occasion Audrey and I actually walked the whole way around, not by intent but because we had lost our bearings: it was a long walk. Indeed, the endless corridors remind one of the Pentagon. It is not an Intourist hotel intended for foreigners, many of the guests were Russians and only a few of the "key ladies" spoke English or German. The little Russian I had learned became extremely useful, and where it fell short one could always draw pictures--for instance, draw a shower curtain, to which the woman would vigorously nod "nyet, nyet" and motion with her hands to make clear none of the rooms had one and nothing could be done about it.
P.S. The Rossiya closed 1.1.2006 and was torn down.
Being forewarned about tap water--not even for brushing teeth, especially in Leningrad--we brought an immersion heater, and used it often. It later turned out that Leningrad hotels were aware of the problem and their "key ladies" would provide "kipyatok", hot water that had boiled. Maybe that was how the Russian samovar tradition began: water wasn't safe unless boiled, and as long as it was hot, one might as well make tea. We had however ignored the advice to bring a sink stopper and sure enough, none of the hotel rooms had any. When time came to wash underwear we improvised a stopper from a glass filled with water and used a plastic bag as a gasket.
Nadia registered us and handed me my allowance, 20 rubles a day, and we were then led to room 96 on the 7th floor, a small room with two beds. It had mirrors but no pictures, a telephone, a small refrigerator, black-and-white television and a radio that refused to work, and it was hot though the window, thanks God, did open. It overlooked the inner yard of the hotel which was covered with snow.
We unpacked and went down to find dinner.
It was not easy. Each restaurant had its doorkeepers who examined would-be patrons and then either admitted them or turned them away. In the weeks that followed we were often turned away. Once we tried to get into the best eatery of the Rossiya, on top of its tower, and were told that reservations were needed, but we would be allowed in if we paid in dollars. Whatever restaurants we managed to get into had undistinguished food, typically costing 7 rubles per person.
The only dish which was consistently good was borshch (borsht), a rich soup of beets and cabbage with a dollop of sour cream and pieces of what Audrey got to call "mystery meat." Only some of the dishes listed on the menu had their prices listed, and most of those were generally unavailable: one soon learned to ask "what do you have?"
There existed little awareness of a healthy diet. Food was oversalted and rich in cholesterol, people consumed huge servings of butter and one (to Audrey's dismay) had for his breakfast a large amount of sour cream, eaten with a spoon. Smokers were everywhere, even next to signs "we don't smoke (here)."
Luckily the Rossiya also had many small cafeterias, tucked into the corners of the building on even-numbered floors. They were rather plain but also cheaper and faster than the downstairs "restaurants." A typical meal cost 1.5 rubles and included tea or coffee, bread and butter and whatever happened to be available: cheese, hot dogs, fried eggs (very rare), jam, Cuban oranges (greenish and hard), different kinds of baked goods and also mineral water from Armenia or Georgia, often with a rather odd taste. The bread was dense like German pumpernickel and all the baked stuff seemed rather stale: it was best late at night, just before closing time, when new shipments generally arrived, not exactly fresh but less stale. Each such buffet (t not silent) was staffed by three women who rarely smiled and who only spoke Russian, but they generally understood what we wanted.
Our favorite eatery was on the 8th floor in the corner facing the Kremlin. It had huge windows, two storeys tall, and through them one saw just a short distance away St Basil's cathedral and its fancy onion domes, the red-brick Kremlin walls and the Moscow river. At breakfast the sun would iluminate the scene and throw a long shadow of the Rossiya across the parking lot, where tourist buses disgorged tight groups which then proceeded to Red Square. It was on this parking lot that Matthias Rust landed his Cessna plane; he had originally planned to land on Red Square but too many visitors were standing there.
Behind the lot rose the Kremlin wall with its towers, topped by large red star lit up at night, and each hour the clock on the Spassky tower would loudly strike. Beyond the walls one could see golden domes and various public buildings. We never grew tired of this picture-card view.
On our first evening we were lucky. Perhaps because it was early in the evening, we managed to be seated in one of the large restaurants of the Rossiya, quite close to its Sunday night floor show. It was a rather good one. Four dancers (usually two at a time) presented a number of short performances, each with its elaborate costumes, and between their acts a chubby but vigorous blond woman belted out Russian songs with vivacity and verve.
On her way out Audrey was loudly chastised in Russian by one of the female patrons, apparently for wearing pants. We then walked to Red Square, which was brightly lit. Snow plows were starting to clear away about 6 inches of fresh snow and few people were to be seen.
Monday, April 3
Nadia had told me she would arrive with an official car at 10:30, but in the morning she phoned to say she was unable to get any car; later I learned that drivers used their official vehicles to moonlight as cabbies for their own profit and no one stopped them. I said "How about the subway?" She answered: "Would you ride the subway?" The upshot was that she picked me up around 11 and we walked 5 minutes to the nearest station at "Ploshchad Nogina."
On the Moscow subway, no matter what the time of day, it always seemed like rush hour. The station next to the Rossiya, in particular, always had a steady inflow and outflow of people, like two rivers flowing side by side in opposite directions. The fare is symbolic, just 5 kopeks, and mechanical machines (which always worked) changed coins of larger denominations. Passengers drop their coins into slots next to the entrance passages and walk through: once by mistake I dropped a 50-kopek piece and steel arms at once clanged shut in front (the coin came back). Escalators are incredibly long (subways run very deep), crowded and rather fast: going down one stands to the right to avoid the young people who run down past you. And at the bottom one learns to step off quickly before the next person arrives.
The high speed of the escalators invites accidents and a woman often sits in a booth near the bottom, ready to stop everything should anyone stumble. There is however hardly a need to hurry, because trains follow each other about two minutes apart. Once I missed a train and timed the next one at 38 seconds later--probably ahead of its schedule, for later we had to wait a while in a tunnel. Each station has a militia man posted at the top and if anything interrupts the train service he quickly closes the station: a disaster could easily follow if people continued to pour down the escalator.
The Institute for Space Research (known by its Russian acronym IKI, stress on second vowel) stands on the edge of the city and the subway to it runs all the way underground, probably to make it independent of weather. Our carriage was quite crowded: women as a rule wore boots and everyone had a heavy coat. Soldiers and policemen were sprinkled through the crowd, many of them apparently working in government offices, their uniforms neater and newer than the clothes of civilians: heavy gray coats, hats of imitation fur, big emblems on everything and stars on most epaulettes--little ones were common, but large stars apparently marked officers.
After a ride of 20 minutes we left the train at Kaluzhskaya station, right next to IKI. The institute is housed in a long gray office building of about 13 or 14 floors--7 regular floors and 6 or so intermediate floors for machinery, some of which are now being converted for regular use. About six different institutes share the building, side by side: the first (judging by uniforms and vehicles) has some military connection, the second was our goal. "Institut Kosmicheskich Issledovanii" says the plaque and adds "Ordena Lenina"--the order of Lenin, an award that probably meant a great honor.
As in the hotel the entrance has two sets of doors, and one zigs and zags through them to the lobby. Inside is a booth with guards and a turnstile which one must pass. On the outside wall of the booth hangs a huge panel of numbered buttons: Nadia pushes the buttons of her own combination code and in the booth a badge is dislodged and falls onto a small conveyor belt, which carries it to the guard. The guard then compares her face to the photograph on the badge and if they match releases the turnstile and lets her in. Today of course she was bringing in a visitor--who wore a US flag in his lapel just to make everything clear--and there was an extra delay while the guard checked his visitors' file for the right name.
It is a dingy building, though still fairly new: stairways and hallways are poorly finished, dusty and dimly lit, the grimy linoleum floor is broken in patches. The bathrooms smell and have neither paper nor seats: standard seats (like those in the hotel) were made of thin plastic which tended to crack and then break. In IKI, the flushing levers were also usually broken: the tops of the cisterns were therefore removed and to flush one lifted manually the wire shaft attached to the outlet valve, then dropped the wire again after enough water had gone into the bowl.
Later in the week I visited the second floor, the one with the director's offic and the large conference room. That was where foreign visitors were generally taken and where the NASA team worked the following week. On that floor all the toilets were clean and worked, they had custom-made plywood seats, heating radiators and even three blow-driers for drying the hands. But on that first day we rode the small elevator to the 6th floor, to the long narrow office of Konstantin Gringauz (himself on travel abroad) where our meetings were to be held.
My instructions were to negotiate a collaboration on magnetospheric models. Rather few people work in that area: I may be the main practitioner in the US and Nikolai Tsyganenko may have this role in the USSR, but apart from us there is hardly anyone else. My goal as I understood it was to seek an open exchange of information on models, which could benefit both sides about equally: a major stumbling block was NASA's international office, which drew the line at exchanges of computer programs. In addition I wanted to encourage workshops where new people could learn about modeling tools, and exchange visits by scientists.
Three people were waiting in the room. One was Tsyganenko, slim and with a large and serious face ringed by a beard, like a young Solzhenitsin. In his lapel he wore a small silvery pin with a cross, emblem of a Christian fellowship; it was given to him by Serge Sazhin, now an emigré in England. He always wore it.
The other two were Yuri Galperin and Pyotr Israelevich, a skinny young man with stubbly cheeks who was to be my counterpart in the negotiations. Israelevich was formerly with Podgorny's lab, which used to conduct terrella experiments, model experiments in a vacuum tank that imitated on a laboratory scale the interaction of magnetized planets with the solar wind.
As an experimentalist he had also worked on the Bulgarian satellite "Intercosmos 1300" and had studied auroral electrodynamics. When Podgorny's lab was disbanded and Podgorny was forced to retire (after a great deal of internal maneuvering and turmoil, as Yuri later told me), he joined the group of Pissarenko, concerned mainly with cosmic rays but allied with Yuri's group.
The ranking soon became evident. Yuri was evidently in charge and Pyotr echoed him (and the following week, with Yuri out of town, Lev Zelyoni called the shots). Pyotr in turn oversaw the two women who did much of the work--Nadia, who hardly said anything, and Viktoria ("Vika") Prokharenka, who joined us later and who was responsible for computer graphics and orbit calculations. Pyotr referred to her as "Dr. Orbitova."
Tsyganenko--he insisted that I call him "Kolya"--was among them an outsider: the University of Leningrad was in a different city and belonged to a different bureaucracy, to the ministry of education rather than to the Soviet Academy. He struck me from the start as absolutely straight and candid, and I resolved very early to try to negotiate with him alone. I distrusted the others: there seemed to be something slippery about both Yuri and Pyotr. Later I saw on the wall above Pyotr's desk a red flag and a picture of Lenin, confirming my suspicion that he was a party man, an "apparatchik." Yuri, after I told him of my interest in Soviet Space History, set up a meeting between me and Beloussov, though he must have known that the man had no interest in history. Maybe he did not fully realize that, or maybe it was a gesture to give a feeling of importance to someone of the old guard who still had some clout: one can never be sure.
Anyway, even that first day I already wrote in my notes: "Yuri is very political. He... suggested that Interball and ISTP [planned magnetospheric missions of the USSR and US] adopt a uniform model--'maybe not the best, but if we do anything wrong, we do it the same way'"
I resisted. A uniform model would invite arguments over whose model was to be chosen--and different models fit different conditions or regions. I would not have minded using Tsyganenko's 1987 model with some of my own modifications, but preferred to emphasize the improvement of those models, the addition of new people to this line of research and the organization of summer workshops in the US and USSR, where new methods could be taught and discussed.
Yuri did not favor this approach, "it is hard to expand research in the USSR." Tsyganenko belonged to a different league than the IKI people, who according to Yuri were linked to the Moscow Technical Institute, a university "like your Caltech, one of the best." Galeev had a "cathedra" (university position) there and Zelyoni some professorship. Yuri felt that "maybe something could be arranged" with Nadia and students from the Technical Institute, but the academy could not support a university workshop in which Leningrad took a leading role.
I am not sure whose view prevailed in the end. On Wednesday I closeted myself with Kolya and we came up with a 2-page agreement along the lines I proposed, and Kolya translated it into Russian the next day. But after I gave it to the NASA delegation to incorporate in the agreement I was never consulted again, and when I asked Mary Mellott to see it, she said it was "not yet ready for you." A month after returning from Moscow Mary sent me a copy of the draft signed in Moscow, which by then was already going through the NASA approval cycle. In the section on models, Yuri's "common model" was item #1.
I then protested to Stan Shawhan, head of the delegation, but only succeeded in getting Stan to appoint Bob McPherron of UCLA to head the US "implementation team," rather than me. Tom Armstrong, in charge of the magnetospheric sector at NASA HQ, assured me that the exact wording meant very little. Maybe he was right, although in principle the Soviets could try to hold us to the words of the agreement: if that happens, other people would have to decide what to do. Nearly one year later NASA still has no people to match what Vika and Nadia have been doing for Interball.
Yuri was also cool to my suggestion about lectures at IKI: "maybe one" (I did not realize that he never received my letter). And making as for copying the lecture notes I had brought, that was out of the question, IKI only had a few xerox machines and their dry ink was purchased with precious foreign exchange. Visitors who wanted to distribute copies were always advised to bring them along.
He was however quite willing to tell me about the structure of IKI and provided enough details for a rough organizational chart. IKI consisted of about 6 divisions, but only one held interest for me, the one concerned with plasma physics. It was headed by Lev Zelyoni who had recently replaced Alec Galeev, a dark small man who was promoted to director of IKI. Sagdeev, who used to hold that post, then moved down to head the "Center for Analytic Research," nominally co-equal with Zelyoni's domain.
Zelyoni supervised 7 labs, each (it seemed) the fiefdom of some principal scientist who pretty much decided what the lab did. Yuri's lab dealt with "magnetospheric processes", Pissarenko's with solar cosmic rays and X-rays, Oleg Vaisberg's with the solar wind interaction with the magnetosphere and so on: even 70-year old Gringauz in whose office we met had a lab, devoted to plasma and cosmic rays. Podgorny used to head a lab but was squeezed out 3-4 years earlier. Yuri said that 7 years back when he helped set up Podgorny's lab "people said I would be sorry and in a year I agreed they were right." I asked about the story that Podgorny at age 16, in south-eastern Ukraina, had collaborated with the Nazis. Yuri gave an evasive answer--it did not happen that way, was not so.
About my history interest, he was not sure whether I could see Sagdeev or Kardashev: "will see." But he suggested going to the Soviet Geophysical Committee which was "intelligent on history"; its president was Beloussov, its vice president Valeria Troitskaya. I asked if Beloussov had now finally accepted the theory of plate tectonics (he was the last holdout after Sir Harold Jeffreys had passed away the preceding month.) Apparently not. And he also suggested that I contact the Institute for the History of Technology.
IKI had a large cafeteria on the ground floor--a rather dark place, but with fairly good food. That first day, however, Yuri took me for lunch in the executive dining room next door, nicely furnished in wine-red with big solid chairs and with about 20 tables. He argued with the counter lady until she brought us lunch there, but we were the only ones in the room, Pyotr and the others went elsewhere.
In the afternoon Tsyganenko described his most recent work. He let me see a carbon copy of a long review on models which he had submitted to Space Science Reviews, after a quick scan I wrote "dense like Russian bread." But I could get no copy, because he had no access to a xerox. He also described a new model for the geomagnetic tail which he had just published, based on disks instead of straight elements. Unlike his previous models, he said, the plane of symmetry in this one could be warped in response to tilting of the Earth's magnetic axis--and I suddenly realized that the warping method which I had found and implemented, the one I had thought Tsyganenko had discovered first, was in fact different. I had some reservations about the disk model, it was not intuitive and was only marginally better than the old one. He also described a somewhat strange model of Birkeland current fields, published in Russian.
He hoped that by June he would have analyzed the data of the ISEE spacecraft which he had received from Greenbelt, after which he would send the results back to NASA as promised. Leningrad lacked a good computer, but Kolya had a friend, M.V. Malkov, in charge of the computers of the Polar Geophysical Institute at Apatity in the Kola peninsula, near the arctic circle. Malkov was working under Sergeev towards a doctorate in magnetospheric physics and had agreed to analyze ISEE data whenever his computer was free, first copying the NASA tapes from a density of 1600 bits per inch to 800, to fit Soviet computers. The two would get together for a few days at a time and scan the data, locating boundary crossings and unusable segments. Now, at last, the job was close to completion.
[Alas, it wasn't. Kolya later wrote that throughout the analysis he had used "average Sun" positions instead of "true" ones; the job had to be redone, though the repetition was much easier than the original scan.]
I asked why his models never used Soviet data of the Prognoz satellites, only data of US and European spacecraft (I had planned to propose the addition of Soviet data as part of the collaboration). He gave valid reasons: the Prognoz 7 magnetometer saturated everywhere except in the boundary layer, Prognoz 8 and 10 only recorded two field components, Prognoz 9 went into the deep tail and only completed 1-2 orbits, and so on. I was however promised by IKI that one year after the Interball launch the data would be made available.
Afterwards I spoke for a while about Euler potentials and about models of Birkeland currents, but soon it was 5:30 and we called it a day. We agreed that next day I would come to IKI on my own, by subway.
Back in the hotel I met Audrey who had gone to the Kremlin and had met some interesting people (but that is her story). In the evening we called Alina Yeremyeyeva, a historian of astronomy recommended by Bob McCutcheon. She seemed to perk up when I mentioned McCutcheon, but since she spoke neither English nor German, I had to converse in broken Russian. She then suggested that I talk to her cousin Natasha who spoke English well, and gave me the number.
I waited a while and then dialed Natasha, who spoke excellent English and sounded quite matter-of-fact, even though (it later turned out) she was still a high school student. After introducing myself I gave her McCutcheon's message: had Alina received from Chandrasekhar the pictures of Gerasimov? I also told her I was seeking contacts with Soviet historians interested in space science. A while later she rang back: Alina was sending her greetings to Bob and his family, she had received no pictures, and to me she recommended that I contact Dr. Aleksander Gurshtein, a former IKI astronomer turned historian, at such-and-such a phone number.
I also called Igor Alexeev. He was rather excited--he did receive my letter and the copy of our joint article, and said he would like to invite Audrey and me to dinner. We agreed that he would pick us up the following evening in front of the Rossiya, at the east entrance.