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Not long afterward, her son Alexei was rejected by Moscow University. He was an excellent student, winning a prize in the math Olympics and graduating first in his class. But during his junior year at a new school he refused to attend the standard "Lenin class" that led to automatic Komsomol ((Communist Party youth organization)) membership. I urged him not to jeopardize his future for a minor formality. Alexei answered, "Andrei Dmitrievich, you allow yourself to be honest. Why do you advise me to behave differently?"
We later learned that one Moscow University examiner had received a direct order to flunk him: "He won't be accepted anyway, and you'd just be fired." Alexei's story is not unusual. Anti-Semitic discrimination in university admissions is part of a deliberate policy of squeezing Jews out of the country's intellectual establishment. The Central Committee is said to have asked Mstislav Keldysh, then president of the Academy of Sciences, when its Jewish membership would fall to zero. It would take about 20 years to solve the "problem," he replied. I must note that Keldysh did not reduce the number of Jews in the institutes he directed and was not anti-Semitic.
Notoriety at Home and a Nobel in Oslo
On Aug. 15, 1973, Mikhail Malyarov, the Soviet Deputy Procurator-General, telephoned and asked me to come see him. At his office on Pushkin Street, Malyarov said that meeting with the foreign press, as I had been doing in behalf of dissidents, could be regarded as a violation of my obligation not to disclose state secrets. To make it clear that I was determined to go on speaking out, I decided to hold a major press conference.
Some 30 Western correspondents crowded into our apartment on Aug. 21. I said I supported detente, since it reduced the risk of war, but added that caution, unity and firmness of purpose were necessary on the part of the West as it embarked on a new and more complex relationship with the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union, I said, is a country "behind a mask," a closed, totalitarian society capable of dangerously unpredictable actions. Detente would promote international security only if the West avoided letting the U.S.S.R. achieve military superiority and at the same time tried to promote a more open Soviet society. I reminded my listeners that the ingrained conservatism and inertia of the Soviet system militated against any rapid change. A few hours after the conference, Western radio stations and newspapers began carrying reports.
On Aug. 28, newspapers carried a letter signed by 40 academicians denouncing me for actions that "discredit the good name of Soviet science." It marked the beginning of a press campaign against me that included the obligatory letters from scientific research institutes, writers' and artists' unions, individual scientists, authors, physicians, war veterans, steelworkers, miners and milkmaids.
The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also included in many of these attacks. The vital truths expressed in his extraordinary literary works and keen polemics had made him the object of virulent party and KGB hatred for several years; now there were claims that I alone, or the two of us, were engaged in a slanderous assault on Soviet society and its guarantees of work, free medical care and an unrivaled educational system. The main charge was that we were enemies of detente, working against peace.