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It was two years after Stalin's death, at a scientific summit conference in Geneva in 1955, that Westerners first realized that a great change had come over their Soviet colleagues. At previous conferences, the Russians spoke only Russian, kept to themselves, and if asked a specific question, were apt to feign ignorance. But at Geneva, they were magpie-ready to talk. Aerodynamic Expert Gunther Bock, one of the German scientists taken to Russia after the war, went home to report that "in branches of science where Marxism-Leninism is not directly applicable, there is no feeling of oppression. I could discuss my field with no sense of being in Russia or America or Brazil." Adds U.S. Meteorologist Gordon D. Cartwright, who recently spent some 18 months on a Russian scientific expedition to the Antarctic: "These were unique people—warm, friendly and full of fun." Politics almost never raised its unscientific head.
Internationalism & Practicalism. Nowhere is the confident new sense of relaxation more obvious than in the academy. The violent personal attacks on scientists for unorthodox ideas have disappeared from the academy's monthly magazine, Vestnik. The cry of "cosmopolitanism" is no longer heard, and President Nesmeyanov himself has declared that "internationalism is a specific of science." On this all scientists would agree. Except for what is military and secret, a scientific advance for one nation is an advance for all. As for the party's former insistence on practical results, Nesmeyanov simply turned the tables on the West. It is capitalism, not socialism, said he, "that places science within the framework of practicalism."
The Russians made good use of the West in their all-out effort to surpass the West. The academy's All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, which Nesmeyanov founded in 1953, publishes, 48 times a year, a periodical of abstracts of major scientific papers from all over the world. The companion Institute of Scientific Information puts out 400,000 abstracts a year. U.S. efforts in the abstracting field are puny by comparison: of the 2,200 science journals published in the Soviet, the U.S. translates only 200. Americans who have been to Russia consider this scientific clearing house, which employs 1,800 translators, as one of the major Russian achievements.
The Dangerous Delusion. The Russians are often incorrigible copycats: if they want something, but do not want to go to the effort of designing one of their own, they merely copy it (the Russian cash register, based on early National Cash Registers, even has National's own seal design on the back). But in the areas that matter to them, they stand on their own, and nothing bothers Western scientists more than the widespread delusion that Russia got where it is today solely because of its captured German scientists and its stolen secrets.
Hungarian-born Theodore von Karman, chief of NATO's AGARD in Paris, insists that in atomic and missile research the Germans were used only on a low technical level, points out that almost all have long since been sent home. "The Russians,'' says President Andrew G. Haley of the International Astronautical Federation, "didn't get as much from the Germans as we did."