Word: scientist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Elite. No one better symbolizes the status of the Russian scientist than Aleksandr Nesmeyanov, 58, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and titular head of all Russian science. The son of a school principal, he became a distinguished chemist in his own right, headed the University of Moscow during the period when its skyscraper (39 stories) campus became the tallest structure in Europe east of the Eiffel Tower. With his wife, who was once one of his students, Nesmeyanov has a spacious apartment near the academy and a sizable dacha outside of town. Though a member of the party...
...Cardinal Sins. But while heaping reward after reward upon the scientist, Stalin increasingly demanded servility. In the '30s, the party waged war on "academic individualism," and in the great purge of 1936-38, nearly half of the academy's party members were either shot or shipped to forced-labor camps. Cosmopolitanism (the idea that science could be foreign or Jewish), objectivism (the refusal to interpret new research in the light of Marxism), and idealism (a catch-all indictment) became the cardinal sins. The era of "fatherland science" had begun. By official decree, Russia claimed so many retroactive scientific...
ASTRONOMY. Behind, but determined to catch up. The new Biurakan Observatory in Armenia has one of the world's largest telescopes, and one of the world's finest libraries in the field. The observatory's head: Viktor Ambartsumian, the first Soviet scientist since World War II to become a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
...Hold Aloof. Academy President Nesmeyanov seems the very model of the independent scholar and gracious host. But the academy's general secretary is a cop type named Topchiev, whose job it is to keep the "party character" alive within the academy. Through Topchiev, the party still belabors scientists with demands that they "must not hold aloof from the ideological struggle," and if deviating intellectuals no longer disappear from the face of the earth, they can still disappear from the pages of Vestnik. After accepting an invitation to The Netherlands recently. Physicist Landau asked if he might bring along...
...finding his way around outer space, German-born Missileman Willy Ley got out of orbit on the New Jersey seaside. Invited to address a dental society meeting in Atlantic City, Scientist Ley arrived four hours late, explained that he had circled for an hour in Asbury Park (65 miles away) before being set on course...