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ZILS & Rubles. Comrade academicians, the majority of whom are not even party members, eat at special restaurants, whiz about in big, two-tone ZILS, spend their summers at a Black Sea Riviera resort of their own, are allowed to subscribe to any foreign publications they please and to buy luxury goods denied others. By Russian standards, their salaries are princely; Nesmeyanov makes 30,000 tax-free rubles ($7,500) a month, besides thousands more for teaching, lecturing, appearing on TV or writing books. Even after an academician dies, his privileges continue. His widow may get a pension and a lump sum of 75,000 rubles, his grandchildren may get extra allowances while in school. A British visitor noted that the chief topic of conversation among Soviet scientists, aside from their work, is the servant problem.
Tanks to Its Moon. Though the party is supreme in Russia, a surprising degree of independence is allowed the academy in scientific matters. With notably few exceptions—mostly in nonscientific fields —the academy elects its members on the basis of merit. It not only directs the policies of the twelve "sister academies" of the various republics, it runs at least 126 research institutes, and to a large extent governs the work of more than 200,000 scientists and technicians. Its institutes probe into everything from weather control and ionospheric explorations above the Antarctic icecap to elaborate schemes for landing electronic-guided tanks on the moon. It sponsors as many as 100 field expeditions at a time, one of which last year discovered in Siberia what may be the largest diamond field in the world. It is the goad, guide and guardian of Russia's most impressive national effort.
Viruses & Reflexes. Before the reign of Peter the Great, who founded the Imperial Academy in 1724, Russia's cultural life lay smothering under a blanket of religious orthodoxy that considered everything non-Russian as heresy and the work of such men as Copernicus as "the craft of the Devil.'' The first academicians were mostly from the West, but whether Russian or not, they soon acquired the special place in society that they hold today. Though a practical man, Czar Peter fully realized the value of research that might not bring immediate benefits. As a result, from the days of the early academy's great all-round genius Mikhail Lomonsov —poet, pioneer physical chemist, physicist, reformer of the language, and "father of the new Russian literature"—Russian science has flourished even under the most stifling of dictatorships.
"It is remarkable how few people realize that the Russian scientific tradition goes back so far," says Mathematician Richard Bellman of the Rand Corp. "In some fields, we've always been behind." It was the 19th century Russian Botanist Dmitry Ivanovsky who discovered the first plant virus. Dmitry Pryanishnikov originated soil research, and world-famed Dmitry Mendeleev charted the elements and drew up the periodic scale still found in every high school laboratory. Had Aleksandr Popov worked a bit faster, he might well have wrested from Marconi credit for inventing the radio. In 1904 Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his work on the conditioned reflex, and four years later, Ilya Mechnikov won another for his studies of the destruction of bacteria by white blood cells.