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Golden Cage. The intellectual climate of the Soviet Union is conditioned to make a scientist out of every Russian boy who thinks he has the wit to qualify. Russia already turns out two to three times as many engineers as the U.S., and 59% of its 2,000,000-odd students in higher education are after science degrees. The 17-year-old graduate of the best of Russia's ten-year secondary schools is reckoned to be at least two years ahead of his American counterpart in scientific attainment; he has had ten years of mathematics, six years of biology, five years of physics, four of chemistry. Westerners have found that even children's toys point up the stress on science: while dolls and tin soldiers are shabbily made, such gadgets as toy TV sets, workshops, radios and telephones seem to have been manufactured with expert care.
Almost every university student is subsidized, and the freshly graduated physicist can count on making at least $200 a month, plus another $100 for research, which is good money in the land of the proletariat. The government thinks nothing of building whole "science cities," equipped modern villas, clubs, cinemas and stadiums for scientists. When an American asked Physicist Vladimir Vekser how much his huge accelerator at Dubna cost, Veksler replied simply: "I don't know. To get the money, all we had to say was that you had one." If the Soviet scientist lives in an ideological cage, the cage is a gilded one, and within it there is more freedom and luxury than almost anywhere else in Russia. In the past ten years not a single top Soviet scientist has defected to the West.
The New 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 and a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, he is anything but a dull-minded party hack. As a top member of the Soviet elite, he is friendly and debonair, with a squire's taste for boating and woodland walks, and an amateur's cultivated devotion to the theater. He also has a politician's sense of expediency.
Westerners who have observed him in action admire his gift, so useful in party matters, for being able to make speeches that no one can quite remember. But when he speaks for the academy, the Kremlin itself finds it imperative to listen. To be the president of the academy—or to be one of its 150 academicians, or even one of its 300 "corresponding members"—is to be a part of a favored—at times even pampered—caste upon which an entire nation has placed its hopes.