Ukrainian Science is Contraband
I spent forty years of my remunerative career — all of it — managing scientific cooperation with the former Soviet Union. Early next year, Indiana University Press will publish my book, The Great Experiment: A Critical History of Scientific Cooperation Between the United States and the Former Soviet Union. The book is part historical analysis, part oral history (with excerpts of sixty-two interviews with scientists, diplomats, and government leaders from the U.S. and former Soviet Union), and part personal memoir. The book is rich with stories, many of them quite funny (and others appalling), about my discussants’ experiences, dating back as far as the 1950s. as well as some of my own.
Here’s something that happened just yesterday.
During my last visit to Kyiv (December 2015), I interviewed ten senior Ukrainian scientists and others. One of the scientists, a prominent astronomer and member of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences, Yaroslav Yatskiv, subsequently invited me to be on the Editorial Board of his popular science Ukrainian-language magazine, Svitohlyad. I had known Yaroslav for many years and was quite honored to be invited, even though my role on the Editorial Board was to be more symbolic than operational. Since then, Yaroslav has periodically sent me copies of Svitohlyad in the mail. It is always a secret thrill to go to the last page and to see “Г. Шер” among the list of the Editorial Board.
Yesterday, I received a new package of Svitohlyad issues in the mail from Yaroslav. Humorously, the package came in a plastic wrapper from the U.S. Post Office apologizing that it had been damaged in transit The “damage” was simply that it had been opened. They didn’t even bother to tape it shut again. Clearly, Svitohlyad is a suspect publication!
And that reminds me of another story. While I was in college, being a Russian Studies major, I had taken out a subscription to Izvestiya so I could study modern, official Russian. One summer (1967), I joined an excellent program at Indiana University in which we spent five weeks studying Russian in Indiana, and then another five weeks traveling around the Soviet Union. That included my first visit to Kyiv, for about three-four days.
When I got home, my father told me that he had been contacted by the Postmaster of my home town, Teaneck, New Jersey (near New York City). The Postmaster and he were friends. The Postmaster said to him with concern, “Phil, I need you to come down to the Post Office and see something.” So my dad went to the Teaneck Post Office and the Postmaster opened up a safe (a secure vault). In there was a huge pile of thin brown envelopes addressed to me, each with a red-ink stamp from the U.S. Department of Justice saying that the contents were subversive publications from a hostile country. There must have been about thirty or forty of them. My dad laughed and explained what they were and why I was receiving them. I think the Postmaster had a laugh too, though he was obviously worried that his Post Office might have been an object of suspicion by the Justice Department and the FBI.
I continued to receive Izvestiya for the next two years, though I changed the address to my mailbox at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I don’t think that the FBI took much notice of what went to the Yale Post Office, since Yale was a known haven of leftist intellectuals and subversive students. And from my Russian teacher, I learned the important phrase:
В Правде нет известий, а в Известии нет правды. (In Pravda there is no news [the literal meaning of the word izvestiya is “news”], and in Izvestiya there is no truth [pravda]).
But in Svitohlyad, even though I can read it only with difficulty, aside from seeing my name listed in Ukrainian, the good news is that science in Ukraine is still a broad object of broad interest, even though, in Ukraine’s war economy, it is struggling, along with everything else.
