“...But with gratitude: there were...”

The poet said this about friends who moved to another world. Nostalgia for times is an alien feeling to me. But for the people. by atmosphere. I never visited Akademgorodok, where in the second half of the 60s I was often invited to give lectures, stay, or just breathe different air - my teachers, friends, and colleagues lived and worked there. But then I was seriously ill for a long time, so the matter was limited to correspondence and meetings in Moscow.

I recently managed to partly immerse myself in the atmosphere of Academy Town of those years, reading the memoirs of T.I. Zaslavskaya (“My Life. Memories and Reflections.” M.: Economics, 2007) [1]. But long before that, back in 2002, with completely different feelings I read the article “Formation of the ethos of the scientific community in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, 1960s,” published in the Sociological Journal (No. 4, 2001) [2] .

Here I do not intend to once again criticize its authors and therefore I will not mention their names. Another thing is curious: this article is large and detailed, with a bibliography, materials from archives and memoirs, in general, it is quite scientific. But the further I read it, the stronger was my feeling of dissonance and reflection in a distorting mirror. I couldn’t help but think that the authors of this text were some very young people for whom the Academy Town of the times of M.A. Lavrentieva, A.A. Lyapunov and the “Under the Integral” club by 2001 had become as much a thing of the past as, for example, the 1905 revolution is the past for all of us.

You read the author’s text - and it’s like a knife on glass: it seems like this, but not that. And you’ll get to quotes from the memoirs of my almost contemporaries Yu.A. Levada, M.I. Cheremisina or V.N. Shubkina - yes, that’s how it was.

I hope the reader will not suspect me of illusions regarding the advantages of memoirs over historical writings themselves, or, even more so, of doubts about the capabilities of historical science as such. The authors of the article under discussion conscientiously wrote “their version” of events, especially since they did not have to go far for this - both of them worked at the Institute of History of the SB RAS, and back in the 90s, each of them had already published a monograph on similar topics.

Another thing is remarkable: our own, domestic history appears before the reader as someone else’s past. Most often, foreign scientists write about us this way. It would also be ridiculous to think that it is precisely the contemporaries of these events who write adequately about events - this would mean denying history as a science. And it would be completely strange to contrast memoir texts (in the terminology of Lydia Ginzburg - the genre of “intermediate literature”) with scientific works. But still…

M.L. Gasparov in “Records and Extracts” tells how he complained to his colleague that it was much easier for him to write memoirs about his childhood than about later times. The interlocutor explained this by the fact that there is no one to check the stories about our childhood, while in the future the memoirist sets out facts, the reliability of which can be disputed by many contemporaries. I assume that the reason lies deeper: the same facts are interpreted completely differently even by contemporaries, since for people of different generations these facts fall into a qualitatively different context.

When in the mentioned article the authors write that the concept of Akademgorodok and the creation of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences “could count on the support of scientists from various social strata,” I can only shrug my shoulders. There were and could not be any social strata in the scientific community, so to speak, de jure and de facto: in Soviet society there were groups fighting for state support, and in this aspect those who were paid to do science were no different from those , who was paid, for example, for the exploration of new diamond deposits.

It is even more strange to read the description of the value system of the inhabitants of Academy Town as “a combination of communist ideologies and social opposition.” What kind of “social opposition” could people be talking about when the state has provided them with unique opportunities to do what they love? But social illusions during the “thaw” were shared by people of different ages and preferences, including, for example, the hereditary Russian intellectual A.A. Lyapunov, to whom my entire generation, who studied with him both before and after his departure to Akademgorodok, owes so much. But social illusions are far from the same thing as “communist ideologies”!

Scientism and belief in the omnipotence of science, especially mathematics and cybernetics, were characteristic of an entire era, and the inhabitants of Akademgorodok were no different in this aspect from their colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not to mention Moscow, Leningrad and even Kyiv. Another thing is that thanks to the fact that M.A. Lavrentyev was on short terms with N.S. Khrushchev, the distance from any project to its implementation in Akademgorodok was much smaller than, say, in the capital, and there was more freedom (for the time being), which is understandable. This is especially clear from the comparison of the spirit of scientific and intellectual freedom and openness to the world, described in the memoirs of T.I. Zaslavskaya, as well as in the memoirs of the famous Novosibirsk sociologist R.V. Ryvkina, and the situation that back in the mid-60s I observed in such an amazing scientific center as the Institute. Pavlova in Koltushi. The latter's employees mostly lived not in Koltushi, but in Leningrad, i.e. lived under the shadow of the “Big House,” whose influence on St. Petersburg culture and the intelligentsia greatly exceeded the influence of the then Lubyanka on a similar environment in Moscow.

Many factors and trends that are sometimes portrayed as specific to Academy City were characteristic of many large scientific institutions of the era, because that was the era. Should the second half of the 60s be described “in a foreign style” – as “neo-conservative revenge”? And do those born in the 80s know that the most innocent forms of not only protest, but even “disagreement” entailed very severe consequences? For signing a letter addressed to Brezhnev (!) in defense of MSU associate professor V.D. Duvakin, who acted at the trial as a public defender (!) in the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, people from academic institutions in Moscow were everywhere deprived of their jobs, and only in the best cases, “merely” the right to defend their dissertations, not to mention the opportunities for foreign business trips.

The same article published excerpts from three documents that speak for themselves. Thus, the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences preserved the text of the speech of the then President of the USSR Academy of Sciences M.V. Keldysh (this is April 1968, i.e. before the invasion of Czechoslovakia), from which we learn that the flower of Soviet mathematics, world-famous scientists not only signed a letter in defense of the human rights activist Alexander Ginzburg, who recently left us, but some of them Leontovich, Gelfand, Shafarevich also persisted in their opinion, and Keldysh consistently condemned this. But Lyusternik and Sergei Petrovich Novikov, who is connected with Keldysh through family relations, also signed. As the legend goes, after this shameful story, Novikov said to Keldysh: “Still, Slava, I didn’t expect this from you.”

Maya Ivanovna Cheremisina in her memoirs dispensed with any words about “neoconservatism”, and described the famous “letter 46” on February 19, 1968 (TrV: about it, see comments to the interview with V.E. Zakharov) as “very modest” and “almost servile.” Yes, probably - after all, the one that two years earlier, among 600 other Moscow scientists, I signed (in defense of Duvakin), generally appealed to the Soviet Constitution. Only…

In the third document from 1970, KGB Chairman Yu.V. Andropov reports to the CPSU Central Committee about inscriptions in defense of dissidents “made with oil paint” on some public buildings in the Novosibirsk Academic Town back in the winter of 1968. The times were relatively vegetarian, the organizers were still just boys - they were expelled from wherever they could, but they didn’t put them in prison, they just ruined their lives. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 only marked the end of utopia... ♦

Notes:

1. Essay by R.M. Frumkina about the memoirs of T.I. Zaslavskaya, see on the website “Polit.ru” http://www.polit.ru/author/2008/02/22/zaslav.html (Part 1), http://www.polit.ru/author/2008/ 02/29/zaslav.html (Part 2).

2. The article can be read on the website “Sots. magazine" http://www.socjournal.ru/article/467