Maverick for Life: Without Parole

By HENRY ERIC FIRDMAN

-- I had no way to know that my
beloved bosses were active members of the infamous Rosenberg
ring. I learned this much later, -- two years after my
immigration to the States. I also learned then that in my ignorance I was in a
good company with the FBI that wanted Joel Barr (a.k.a. Joe Berg) and Alfred class=SpellE>Sarant (a.k.a. Phil Staros) since
the late 1940s, but had no idea forty years later where these people were.

The letter was delivered to class=SpellE>Shuysky, Khrushchevs personal assistant, who -- promised to
put it on Khrushchevs desk the day he comes back from his vacation.
Unfortunately, when Khrushchev came back -- he was no longer the First Secretary
of the Central Committee.

A young, Jewish-looking man came
out of the Consulate and looked at me. -- Three people surrounded me right away,
and one of them said: Lets go. The last thing I saw was the Americans
frightened face, and then he darted back through the door. -- Another KGB
operative with Lyalya at his side caught up with us.
-- Apparently, KGB had our pictures.

Now I had a chance to --
experience mundane, daily life in the United
States. I would finally live in the country
where everything was rational, logical, economically justified, and not prone
to any ideological perversions. I would finally not feel like Gulliver in the Land
of Idiots, as I characterized my
life in the Soviet Union, and live among people thinking
and acting like me. I was dead wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 4, 2004
• ISBN: 9781414050218

HENRY ERIC FIRDMAN

Eric Firdman has been fortunate to live three lives. His first life in the former Soviet Union was distinguished with outstanding scientific and engineering accomplishments and tainted with continuous struggle with Soviet bureaucracy and state-sponsored anti-Semitism. In his second life in the U.S., Eric worked as a research scientist, independent consultant and educator, information system development executive, and Internet consultant. In his third life as a writer, Eric describes the Soviet epoch through the prism of his family’s and his personal experience. He is currently writing a book about St. Petersburg, his beautiful and maverick birthplace.

Book preview

MAVERICK FOR LIFE

WITHOUT PAROLE

By

HENRY ERIC FIRDMAN

© 2004 by HENRY ERIC FIRDMAN. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 1-4140-5021-6 (e-book)

ISBN13: 978-1-4140-5021-8 (e-book)

ISBN: 1-4140-5020-8 (Paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003099380

The front cover is a copy of the reproduction of the painting Eternity by the Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Tchurlionis (1875-1911).

1stBooks-rev. 01/30/04

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Entrance to the World

Origins

My Birth

Childhood

First Recollections

What a Time to Be Born!

The Family Settles Down

Non-conformists R Us

Worker’s Paradise Interrupted

The War

Aggression Turned Defense

Escape to Siberia

Return to Home

School Years

First Adventures

Father and Son: The Beginnings

The Victory

The First Touch of Anti-Semitism

Do I Have Right Parents?

Non-Conformist in the Making

Stalin’s Anti-Semitism

Family at Its Best

Lessons of Life

Tragedy and Farce

So Long, Childhood!

College

Jazz Age

Stalin Was Wrong, a Little!

Magic Power of Art

From Learning to Doing

Where Is the Love?

Learning Myself

The First Marriage

Reflections about Abortion

Who Are These Czechs?

Founding the Soviet Microelectronics

The Amazing SL-11

First Reorganization

Tasting Bohemian Life

Big Fish in a Small Pond

Married Again … to the Same Wife

The Turning Point

Per Aspera Ad Astra112

Fight for The Center of Microelectronics

Celebrating the Woman Day

Reflections on Women’s Equality

Single Is Beautiful

Finally, a Vacation

Battle for a Space in Space

New Friends, New Ideas

Taste of Heroin

The Beginning of the End

Licking the Wounds Back Home

Haggling Marriage for Apartment

Knocking the Science Hall of Fame

Beginning of Friendship

The End of Space Program

School on Automata Theory

We Are the First!

Cleaning Up the House

Deferred Honeymoon

Planning Is Indispensable

Engineering Blues

Rooting for Jews in Siberia?

Meetings with Brilliance

Twice a Father

Against the Mafia

Under Water and on Brezhnev’s Desk

New Silver Bullet

The Project of My Life

Sleeping with the Enemy

We Won the Battle …

… But Losing the War

Next Turning Point in Life

At the Verge of Tragedy

The Setup

My One and Only Love

The End

My Brother, My Enemy

Not a Great Scientist, After All

Lea’s Curse

New Life

The Decision of My Life

Asylum … From Whom?

Cucumber for Son

Between Vladivostok and Leningrad

My Last Galatea

Robinson Crusoe … Sort of

Staros Blues

Together, Forever

My Favorite Daughter Natasha

Life in Vladivostok

Finishing AI Textbook

Requiem for the Loved Ones

Georgian Hospitality

Vacation with Children

Old Salt … Sort of

We Have Another Daughter

Meetings in Repino

Idiocy at Its Highest

The Last Straw

Let’s Do It!

The Favorite Russian Pastime

The Lull Before the Tempest

Enemy of the People

Welcome to the Club

Beware of Your Friends

Peculiarities of Life in Otkaz

Tomasso Campanella Sequel

Gorky Story178

Password to High Society

Friends Are Everywhere

Riding the System

People of All Countries, Get United!

Under the U.S. Government Protection!

Paid in Full

Russian Tragedy

Apple that Fell Far from the Tree

Riding the System, Part II

By Fair Means or Foul

Free at Last!

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

This book would not be possible without my parents, Mina Loytsanskaya and late Roman Firdman. Thank you, parents, for meeting each other, getting married, and glvlng blrth to me. I also want to thank all people ln my llfe who affected me one way or another and, to a certain degree, made me who I am today. I begin with my late aunt Lea who gave me more knowledge than I could dream about and my late uncle Leo who had been my lodestar and an example that I have been always wanting to follow. I also want to thank my second father and mentor, Philip Staros, an American who was a Soviet spy, the founder of Soviet microelectronics, and the man who convinced me that I could accomplish everything I wanted, including emigrating the way opposite to his. My eternal love goes to my wife Larissa who had been my inspiration for the last 30 years, made me a better person, and taught me more about life than she could imagine.

My special thanks go to all those who offered me their friendship at the most difficult time in my life when I was a refusenick in the Soviet Union with little hope of ever getting out. Unfortunately, I have lost track of most of them but luckily I could find my notebook with their names and locations of that time. Thank you, my dear friends and your spouses and loved ones! The following list includes only people who helped our family in Russia, and I apologize if I missed someone: Allan Abramson of Syosset, NY; Rudy Appel of Woodbury, NY; Albert Azuelos of Paris, France; Brent Arnold of Nashua, NH; Linda Beck of Denver, CO; Nancy Cohen of Littleton, CO; Sid Duman of Denver, CO; Rose Eder of Huntington Station, NY; Selig Galter of Haverton, PA; Gillian Isaacs of Chiswick, London, England; Anne Kay of Sale, Cheshire, England; Cyndy Lessing of Chigwell, Essex, England; Pat Libman of Cheadle, Cheshire, England; Peggy and Solly Rosenblum, then of Beckenham, Kent, England; Marlyse Ucko of Paris, France; Shani Wilkins, Sale, Cheshire, England; Anita and Herbie Wyler, Hergiswil, Lucerne, Switzerland; and Sylvia Zuckerman of Plainview, NY. I am indebted to many members of the American computer science community who signed petitions and boycotted some of Soviet conferences on my behalf. I refer to many of them in the book, but would like to use this opportunity to especially thank Jack Minker, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland and Vice-Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, Dorothy Hirsh, the Committee’s co-Director, and Nils Nilsson, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University for their outstanding efforts and moral support.

This book is dedicated to my children, Philip, Polina, Natasha, Tanya, and Eric Jr. who may learn something new about their Dad.

Preface

The unexamined life is not worth living. It is a time to re-evaluate your past as a guide to your future.

Socrates

As an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist who started working in the field in the 1960s, I was always fascinated by the fact that all knowledge that might be acquired by an AI system could be stored forever and used by anyone. At that time, it was fashionable to compare artificial and human intelligence, and the comparison had not been always in favor of the human race. For example, it would not be an exaggeration to say that since I was a little kid, I was saddened that the knowledge that accumulated by human beings over their lifetime passes away along with them. Just think about this, a human being becomes smarter, more efficient in solving certain problems, some of them attain a high level of wisdom, and then it’s all gone. Isn’t it very unfair?

This may be one of the reasons why people write memoirs. The authors want readers to know about, and learn from, their experience. This is a poor man’s solution to a mortality problem. This is how we try to minimize the effect of knowledge disappearance accompanying an individual’s death. I firmly believe that everyone’s life has a story, in some cases more interesting, instructive, and even thrilling than whatever comes out of Hollywood scribblers’ word processors. Genetics and upbringing, a social environment, and millions of big and small, right and wrong decisions that an individual has to make during his (her) life all leave an impression making that individual a unique specimen. For the minority of people, many of them geniuses, good or evil, the genetics determines everything. Nothing in their environment can change it. But for most of us, personality is defined not only by genetics but also by our experiences, how we interact with other Homo Sapienses, and whether we are perceived successful in making our decisions and executing them.

I used the word perceived by no accident. Let’s say that you are at a decision point, and the decision you have to make is binary; in other words, you do either this or that, and no other option is available. In most real life cases, your decision is inevitably based on incomplete information. In other words, regardless of what alternative you pick, you cannot be sure that it is better than another one. So, you make your decision based on that information and your intuition, and then reap all the benefits and pay all the consequences, good or bad, of making this decision. But how do you know what would have happened if you had chosen another alternative? You simply don’t. Therefore, even if the decision you have made was good enough, it is only perceived as a better one (read: a success story). Could the alternative decision make you more successful? Possibly, but nobody will ever know. There is no way you could go back to the decision point and start that segment of your life anew.

Having made numerous decisions in my life, I came to a startling conclusion that it is not a decision itself but a process by which one makes one’s decisions that counts. But how do you learn the process? This is where other people’s experience comes very handy. While it is unlikely that you can find another person who had to make a decision in exactly the same situation as yours it is very likely that you can find one whose decision making process was so superior that the majority of his/her decisions was correct. I used to find this kind of people by reading biographies or memoirs of individuals I admired and wanted to learn from. This is why I decided to write about my life. Memoirs are about self-examination and preserving individual experiences for the future. I hope that by examining my personal experience with the benefit of hindsight, I could help my readers as much as my predecessors had helped me.

I believe that there are three conditions that aspiring memoirists have to abide by. First, they have to have a desire, perhaps, even a passion to let other people know how they lived their life, why and how they did what they did, how they became who they are, and what emotional, intellectual, and spiritual baggage they have acquired in the course of their life and come up with to its end. Everyone who wants to leave his/her experience and wisdom to subsequent generations is eligible.

As the second condition, an aspiring memoirist’s life should be somewhat interesting. One’s memoirs should tell the story others would like to read and relive with the author. I put my own story to this test and concluded that it might pass the test. I had witnessed a long gone epoch and participated in many important events in its course. I was born before, and lived through, the World War II in the Soviet Union, which sets me a mile apart from those born after it or in the different country. My childhood and adolescence were marked with the rampant Soviet government-sponsored anti-Semitism. Working in the defense industry, I participated in Soviet space and submarine programs and met people whose existence has been discovered in the West only recently. I was part of the team that founded the Soviet microelectronics, initiated, and led the first Soviet project of developing large-scale integration chips and microcomputers. While doing this, I had an opportunity to be an observer (and sometimes a part) of decision-making processes and politics in the Soviet military industrial complex. I founded one of the first artificial intelligence research labs in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and became one of the top three or five Soviet scientists in this exciting field. I applied for emigration and was held as a refusenick (and a hostage) for almost three years, while experiencing grave but interesting encounters with the Communist Party functionaries, prosecutors, and KGB.

On top of this, my boss, mentor, and second father for 18 years was an American and a former Soviet spy who was involved in the Rosenberg ring and had to escape to the Soviet Union to avoid prosecution. While he and his friend and co-conspirator were considered vanished in the United States, in their new country they quickly achieved a celebrity status and became founders of Soviet microelectronics. I knew them as close as no one else in the world, and I can tell in detail their story that is not only very interesting but also instructive.

After a wait that seemed too long to be real, my family and I could eventually immigrate to the U.S. and start a new life in this country. Soon after my arrival, I was introduced to, and briefed by, the CIA as a walking history of the Soviet computer technology. In my more than 20 years in the U.S., I worked as a researcher, consultant, telecommunications industry executive, and a college professor. I had a unique opportunity to compare the ways business in all these areas is done in two opposite and, in the past, competing political systems. My experience in both systems led me to believe that in many ways, they were not so much opposite as similar.

To satisfy third and final condition for writing memoirs, their author has to be ready to expose himself. Memoirs have to be highly personal, but devoid of self-aggrandizement. The author should honestly lead a reader through his/her life, its highest and lowest moments, triumphs and frustrations, victories and defeats. Limiting the memoir to protruding the author’s virtues and successes and piling excuses for vices and failures kills the memoir’s very purpose.

It has been said that such thing as documentary non-fiction (of course, including memoirs) does not exist for a simple reason that their authors usually lie, whether intentionally or unwittingly. What is unacceptable is the author’s intentional role exaggeration or embellishment. What is unavoidable is personal interpretation of the events of which the author was a participant or a witness. It is up to a reader to be a judge of my compliance to this condition.

During my life in the Soviet Union, I have always been a non-conformist, not a dissident, mind you, but a maverick. To my amazement and in sharp contrast with my maiden enthusiasm about the U.S. (What a country as Yakov Smirnov put it), I found that a non-conformist is a non-conformist for life anywhere, regardless of the political, economical or cultural differences between the Soviet and American systems. Hence the title of this book, Maverick for Life without Parole. There is no parole for people like myself, and I am not longing for one. Nor do I care for heartless judgment or undeserved sympathy. Just sit down, relax, and relive my life with me.

Introduction

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

John Barth

I vividly remember that my desire to write memoirs burst through my subconscious resistance to do so on a beautiful May evening in Palo Alto, California. More accurately, it was May 1, 1998. I have just flown from San Diego to San Francisco, rented a car, and after uneventful drive on Freeway 101 (rare occasion!) parked it at the Rickey’s Hyatt. While I was checking in, the clerk asked me: Have you ever been to Rickey’s Hyatt? I said No to him (because I have never stayed at the hotel) and Oh yes! to myself because I had a dinner in its restaurant more than 15 years before.

Rewinding back to late 1982, it was a little more than one year since my family and I immigrated to the United States and I got a job at the Hewlett-Packard Computer Research Center. How it all happened is another story. In early 1983, I decided that HP is too a socialist company for my taste and that if I finally managed to come to the country of my love, I have to try something more adventurous, in other words, to pursue a famous American dream. My more experienced friends taught me that the road to fulfilling this dream starts with the first simple step, sending around a few hundred resumes, which I did. Then came this call.

The man who called me introduced himself as Leslie Dirks, Senior Vice President at Xerox. He told me that he received my resume, was now in Palo Alto on a business trip, and would like to talk to me if possible. I got extremely excited, especially because I knew a lot about Xerox PARC, and said that it was certainly possible. He suggested that we have a dinner at Rickey’s Hyatt where he was staying. At that time, we rented a three bedroom apartment on the Los Robles Drive, a walking distance to the Hyatt, at least for the guy who has not yet lost a Russian habit of walking for 500 yards away and not yet acquired an American habit of driving to a destination even that close.

So an hour or so later, we were sitting across each other doing a quick mutual study. Leslie was a tall, mildly mannered man with the long face that carried a somewhat sad expression. It came to me as a surprise because at that time I still believed that all Americans had to be happy all the time. After exchanging usual pleasantries, he bluntly told me that he read my resume and did not believe that with my background I could be happy at Xerox. It was clear to me that he meant it as a compliment, and with a benefit of my 20 plus years of experience in computer industry, I think that he was absolutely right. But then, I was a little disappointed because after all, I was looking for a job and apparently was not getting it. Before I opened my mouth to ask Leslie why he invited me for a dinner, he told me that he was interested to talk to me for a slightly different reason. Before joining Xerox, Leslie Dirks was a CIA Deputy Director but had never had a chance to meet a Soviet scientist face-to-face¹. Better late than never, I was his chance.

After that, we had a nice and long conversation. Leslie asked me a lot of questions, and I tried to answer them as well as I could. After the dinner, I invited him to our apartment, he accepted, and we spend the rest of the evening in a more social conversation with my wife participating and kids not interfering because at the time, they did not speak good English (they do now).

I remember this evening for two reasons. First, Leslie was a very nice man and an exceptional listener while I had the urge to tell more about my experience and myself. I will always have very warm feelings about him. (Simply said, I love you, man!) Secondly, thanks to his curiosity and encouragement and contrary to my belief, I realized that my previous life might interest people in this country simply because they do not know much about it. If some of the things that I told Leslie, the former number two or three CIA guy, came as a complete revelation to him, what to say then about an average American? How much do they know about my old country and how much do they want to know about my life?

Throughout the years that followed, in both business and social encounters, at hundreds of my consulting engagements and public seminars, dozens of receptions and parties, I have been finding the answers to these questions. At one extreme, people knew what I would call a common truth about the Soviet Union, which was not really the truth: almost all information they obtained was exaggerated by the Cold War paranoia, caramelized by the press, or distorted by the leftists and liberals. At another extreme, even when people had a more balanced view of what was going on, it was nonetheless a de-personalized or statistical one. I felt that people really wanted to understand life behind the iron curtain through the prism of personal experience, and that was what I helped them with. In the process, I had been becoming an American.

Now fast forward to May 1, 1998. That was the day when having recalled my meeting with Leslie Dirks, I decided to write this book (Thanks, Leslie, wherever you are.) By this time, I had 17 years of experience in the U.S. and could better put both my lives in perspective. In 1983, I had a lot of maiden enthusiasm about the U.S.: everything in the Soviet Union was bad, and everything in the U.S. was good.

However, as I went on with my life in this country, my views became more balanced. I could see fewer differences and more similarities between the two seemingly opposite systems. It has not made me a nihilist or a pessimist. I am still convinced that I live in the best country in the world. I just realized that there are some universal laws of human nature that work almost the same way in a communist or capitalist society. If you want to survive and prosper in either society, you have to understand these laws and use them to your advantage. Having come to this conclusion, I became more confident than ever that I could write memoirs that are not only entertaining but also instructive. I knew I could write the good ones.

However, as they say, there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, and it took me another four years before I could begin writing on a regular basis. First of all, I had absolutely no time to do it: I was still in consulting business, and in order to be a good consultant (and not just a consulting blabber), I had to work for 12, sometimes 14 hours a day. More importantly, to speak up one’s mind (and that’s what the memoirs are all about), one has to be outside of the system regardless of what one means by this: the company one works for, one’s neighborhood, or social circle. As long as one is within the system, the rule is political correctness: one should always think about the consequences of what one says or writes. As Nikolai Berdyaev, the famous Russian philosopher, said, Any organized group … is hostile to freedom and inclined to disregard an individual ²

The rule for being out of the system is quite different. Free at last could be the shortest description of it. Few people experienced this freedom and many people are even afraid of having it. The chosen ones, such as Nikolai Berdyaev quoted above, dedicated their life to fighting for it. He wrote: I was constantly in opposition and conflict. … I have never yielded to the plague of collectivism. Blending with any group is unknown to me. ³

I have been lucky to experience a wonderful feeling of complete personal freedom twice in my life. Paradoxically, my first experience was when I applied for emigration from the Soviet Union and was refused (I’ll describe this experience later in the book). The second one happened when I went into retirement and decided to write. Although my retirement has formally commenced on July 1, 2001, it took me another half a year to decide what to write and how to organize the process of writing.

So here I am on January 3, 2002, sitting at my desk, free at last, with all barriers eliminated, and no excuses left for further procrastination. It is time for telling you the truth, only the truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God!

Entrance to the World

"All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts…"

William Shakespeare

Origins

Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear.

William Shakespeare

I was born in 1936, at the time of Stalin purges, concentration camps and forced labor, great optimism about the future under the sun of Stalin’s Constitution, and self-assuring songs, such as From taiga to the British seas, the Red Army is the strongest of all.⁴ Both my parents were Jewish but very proud of, and happy about, their assimilation into the Russian culture. The country was in the middle of a strange truce historically unusual for Russia: Jews were equal, mixed marriages were in, and the time of unbridled anti-Semitism was yet to come back. As Comrade Stalin said at the time, there are no Jewish people, there are Soviet people.

Both my parents were born in St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, since 1926 Leningrad, and now St. Petersburg again. This was very unusual for Czarist Russia and made them as close to Jewish aristocracy as they get: the Jews were supposed to live behind the Pale of Settlement that excluded big cities and especially St. Petersburg, the nation’s capital. My ancestors from both sides were an exception.

My paternal great-great-grandfather was drafted into Emperor Nikolai I’s LifeGuards and served 25 years protecting him (the legend went that he was 6’6’’ tall and lived to 104 years old), and therefore both he and all his descendants were granted the right to live in St. Petersburg. When the city governor office attempted to kick my grandfather out of St. Petersburg, he went to the court, and, amazingly, won the case. I saw myself the old document cherished by my father and confirming the Firdmans’ right to live in the St. Petersburg forever. (Stalin tried to violate this promise but his timely death precluded him from doing it.) Unfortunately, the document was lost when my brother emigrated to the U.S. in 1979: for the hardly understandable reason, the Soviet Customs had not allowed him to take the document with him.

I know very little about Alexander Romanovich Firdman, my paternal grandfather, and his family. A part of explanation is that he died long before my birth, when my father was less than 15. But I feel that there was something else that I can only speculate about. I do not think that his family was an ideal one. My father have never told me much about him, and I received most information about my grandfather from my mother who in turn got it from her mother-in-law, Eva Abramovna Firdman (maiden name Fleishacker) in one or two months before she died of cancer. I was less than two months old when she died so I could hardly participate directly in these conversations.

Alexander and Eva had three children of which my father, Roman, was the youngest. I know only that his older brother, Iosif, joined the Red Army and was killed in Civil War. My recollection is that their only daughter whose name I do not remember died in her childhood.

Alexander Firdman owned a drugstore and was in friendly relations with the sailors of the nearby Navy Guard Equipage supplying them with pure alcohol, which in Russian tradition has always had a disproportionally higher value than vodka. According to Eva, he often spent time with them in drunken parties while she had to run the drugstore. There were also some vague hints that Alexander was not a faithful husband. When my mother, the product of the new Soviet era, naively asked Eva why she did not dump him, Eva said that she had nowhere to go without a passport. (Apparently, Alexander had her passport in his possession and thus, for all practical purposes, possessed her, too.)

Roman was very fond of his mother and therefore disliked his father. When my brother was born in 1946, my parents could not decide how to name him, and I made my valuable contribution to solving the problem. I said, Is it not obvious that his name must be Alexander? His grandfather was Alexander Romanovich, you (my father) are Roman Alexandrovich so he must be Alexander Romanovich to make a dynasty. They did name my brother Alexander but I was, and still am, surprised why my father did not suggest this name himself.

Apparently, my grandfather owned not only the drugstore but also the multistory residential building on Lermontovsky Prospekt, and the family lived in a big apartment in that building. This had all quickly changed after the revolution. The building was taken away, and the apartment turned into a communal one shared by Eva and my father (after my grandfather’s death) with two or three more Jewish families that moved to Leningrad from Jewish shtetls. The relationships in the apartment were very strained, and on a couple of occasions, my father had to defend himself and Eva from a neighbor’s physical attack. This part of my father’s life has left him bitter for the rest of his life and even anti-Semitic towards shtetl Jews.

Hiding his bourgeois extraction, my father put on a leather jacket and joined Komsomol⁵, mostly as a self-defense measure that made his cohabitants fearful of his newly acquired power. Since he was a pretty good speaker, to his own surprise, he climbed up the Komsomol ladder fairly quickly and by 1933 or 1934 became the Secretary of Komsomol organization at the big shipyard. He was one step from making a brilliant career as a Party official that would most likely end up in a concentration camp or in front of a firing squad in the forthcoming Stalin purges. However, his common sense took the best of him: he quietly left both the shipyard and Komsomol and had never had second thoughts about joining the Communist Party.

While saying almost nothing about my grandfather, my father told me a lot about his aunt, Eva’s sister Maria Bick and her family. Even as a little kid, I could understand how much he would like to be a member of that rather than his own family. Right after the revolution, Maria and her three children (I believe that she was a widow by that time) moved to Tallinn, Estonia, and my father visited them around 1925.⁶ For Roman, it was like magic to come from the land of permanent hunger and shortage of everything to the land of milk and honey. Twenty five years later, he enthusiastically kept describing smorgasbords in Estonian restaurants. He remembered that visit throughout all his life, and Tallinn remained his most favorite place to go to although the Soviet Estonia was very different from the independent one.

Maria was Eva’s older sister, and all her children were grown-ups. Her oldest son, Hermann, was a famous pianist and symphony orchestra director. He was married and had a son, Lyolik, who was of about the same age as my father. Roman was probably spending most of his time with Lyolik and Hermann’s family because he told me very little about Maria’s other children. I remember only that she had another son, named Edward, and the daughter named Lilia.

This visit was the last time Roman saw his only relatives. In 1940, just before the Red Army liberated Estonia, the Bick family moved to Europe. Hermann and his family settled in London, where he continued his director’s career. Because of the Communist paranoia about relatives living abroad, their trace had been lost for good.

After his short Komsomol career, Roman decided to get higher education. He enrolled in the Institute of Communication and went through the entire programin radio engineering but had never written and defended his diploma. He left the Institute in 1936, just after he married my mother.

In those years, Roman was passionate about adventure. (That was probably part of the reason why he married my mother.) The most fashionable adventure was crossing the Arctic ocean from Murmansk all the way to Bering Strait in the summertime while the ocean was not entirely frozen. The memory of Tcheluskin, the Soviet ship that could not do it in 1934 but made heroes out of the entire crew was still alive two years later. So in summer of 1936, my father joined the crew of Evgenov, another ship that attempted but also failed to cross the Arctic Ocean. When he came back from his journey, his passion for adventure was gone, his mother was dead, and his first son, I, was born.

I know much more about my maternal grandparents. My maternal grandfather, Gershen Davidovich Loytsansky, his wife Bertha Yakovlevna, and their older children were born and lived in Kaunas, Lithuania (then Kovno). However, my grandfather was a first-class typesetter and proofreader, and as an artisan, he and his family were allowed to move to St. Petersburg. The catch was that unlike him and his wife who were granted the right to live in St. Petersburg, their children could live there only until they were 16 years old unless by that time they were enrolled in an institution of higher education. The revolution had solved that problem for my mother since she was born in 1908.

Gershen and Bertha had six children. The oldest, Sonya, was educated first abroad, in the Bern University, and continued her education in the Tartu University, in Estonia, then part of Russia. I do not know if she graduated with the physician diploma but I do know that she served as a nurse during the World War I. After the revolution, she joined the Red Army and was killed in the Civil War.

The second, Lea, joined the so-called Bestuzhev Courses, a free institution of higher education, and graduated with a degree in both jurisprudence and education. After the February revolution of 1917, she worked as a Secretary of the Directorate of Petrograd Militia under Prince Batysh-Kamenski. After the Bolshevik coup, her legal education was worth nothing. As much as I remember her, she always lived with our family and was my first mentor and second mother. It is impossible to overestimate her influence on my development. Unfortunately, I realized how much I missed her only after she passed away at the age of 86.

Gershen’s and Bertha’s third child, Raisa, died when she was 7 years old, 8 years before my mother was born. The fourth one was their first son, David. He was Bertha’s favorite. To his parents’ regret, he burned the candle at both ends:⁷ he was a gambler, womanizer, and on top of that, he had tuberculosis, a typical Jewish decease of that time. In spite of all their efforts, they could not save him: he died when he was 21.

The last two Loytsansky children were children of the 20th century. Leo, their second son, was born in 1900 and became a world-renowned scientist. He was my second mentor and my first model for imitation. As much as I remember myself, I always wanted to be like him. No matter how much I write about him in this book, it is not enough to describe this really great man. He lived a long productive life and passed away in 1991. The youngest child was my mother Mina.

As I mentioned, Gershen originally worked as a typesetter and proofreader. In 1907, in partnership with one Anderson, he purchased a relatively big printing house. Anderson provided most of the money, and Gershen all of the know-how. This is how the family became bourgeois. It lived comfortably, occupying a big 7-room apartment in the area close to his business. Right after the February revolution, Gershen sold his share in the printing house and invested most of the proceeds in a so-called Freedom Bond issued by the Provisional Government. According to my uncle Leo, Gershen put the purchased bonds in the State Bank safe deposit box. Bertha who was more practical than my grandfather was against buying the bonds and turned out to be right. After the Bolsheviks came to power, the Freedom Bonds could still be used as currency for some time but putting them in the safe deposit box was a fatal mistake: all securities stored in the bank were immediately expropriated.⁸

My mother’s version of the story is slightly different although it might be overlapping or even complementing the first one. She told me that before the revolution, she had about 800,000 rubles worth of French bonds in her name that she could become a proud owner of at 21. In the course of one November night of 1917, all these bonds turned into nothing.

Another story confirming that my grandparents were relatively well-to-do was that when Gershen’s sister Esther failed to obtain the permission to live in St. Petersburg, Gershen told her, You have nothing to do in this country, bought her a ticket to the United States, and gave her some money to settle down over there. By the way, she came back to visit the family in the mid-20s, the fact that my mother carefully concealed for the next 50 years to avoid big trouble not only for my parents but even for me and my little brother who were not even born at the time of her visit. The combination of being Jewish and having relatives abroad was lethal, depriving a victim of any opportunity in the Soviet Union, and there were not many in the first place.

Unlike his partner, Gershen used to work alongside his employees and treat them as equals, having deserved their respect and admiration. When the Bolshevikscame to power and began to exterminate the bourgeois, Gershen’s employees not only protected him but also voted him into the trade union thus making him a legitimate proletarian. Piggybacking on this, my mother had faithfully described her father simply as a working printer in numerous anketa (resume) that the Soviet authorities demanded her to fill out on a regular basis: it was too dangerous to disclose one’s bourgeois extraction.

Another family legend went that Gershen’s printing house was about to start printing one of Lenin’s books when the police came with the warrant for search. Gershen saved the only manuscript of this book from the police and passed it back to Ilyich. After the revolution, the grateful leader’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, came to the printing house, thanked Gershen for what he did, and gave him mandat (a credential document) protecting him from raging Red Guards. When the family ran out of money in 1918, Gershen wrote a letter to Lenin himself asking for his help in obtaining the expropriated Freedom Bonds. Lenin appended the instruction for Nikolai IKrestinsky, then People’s Commissar for Finances, to give Citizen Loytsansky G. D. 10,000 rubles worth of Freedom Bonds under the condition that he grants the remainder of his bonds to the people. I see my grandfather saying Better something than nothing and taking the bonds. In 1918, 10,000 rubles were not worth a lot, anyway.

Unlike Bertha who was initially overexcited about the revolution, Gershen used to refer to the Bolsheviks as bandits⁹ so when my mother told me the story about Lenin’s manuscript the first time I asked her: Why in the world did he do it? The answer was: Because he respected the written word more than he hated the Bolsheviks.

After the revolution, Gershen continued to work in the same printing house, but the family life changed dramatically. Some people took their apartment away and told my grandparents: You used to live here, well, now is our turn. They had finally found the apartment in another part of the city but another round of expropriation had turned it into a communal one, with shared kitchen, toilet, and bathroom. Gershen’s family was left with three rooms. Lea who was always sacrificed for the sake of her younger siblings lived in the same room with her parents. Leo and my mother each had their own room, a luxury for those times.

Given the circumstances, young Loytsanskys lived a fairly good life. In fact, their life in the Soviet Union in the 1920s was probably better than what it could have been in Czarist Russia. This was the time of big optimism for all Jews. They were in majority in almost all state organs (including, alas, the fearful Cheka¹⁰). The first time in Russian history, they were equal and free from traditional anti-Semitism, oppression, and pogroms. It is true that the equality was material rather than spiritual: they could live and work where they wanted (no more Pale of Settlement), get whatever education they wanted, provided, of course, that they could prove their proletarian origins, but not freely practice their religion. This quickly made the young generation of Jews, especially those now living in big cities, convinced atheists. In the case of Loytsanskys, it has required no difficult transition: both Gershen and Bertha were Jewish by birth, not by religion¹¹: they have never taken their children to a synagogue or attended it themselves even before the revolution.

Lea had followed in her father’s footsteps: she went to work as a proofreader to Partiydat, the Publishing House of the Communist Party. One of her jobs there was proofreading of the first edition of Lenin’s Complete Works. This edition was probably the only definitive collection of his works since as the history was being continuously remade under Stalin’s wise leadership, so was changed the scope and sometimes even the contents of Lenin’s writings. Among other things, Lea told me as a big secret that the first edition contained the evidence that while in exile in Siberia, Lenin caught syphilis that eventually caused his progressive paralysis and death. Allegedly, his decease was not sexually transmitted but was the result of some mysterious epidemic.

It always seemed to me that Lea used to be some sort of the family’s designated virgin saint. As I mentioned above, she was always expected to sacrifice herself for others. She used to take care of her parents, Leo, and Mina when they needed it because, as the explanation went, she was single. In fact, she was not always single: at the age of 33 or 34, she got married, but her married life was finished in a few months when her father came over in a cab, picked up Lea and her belongings and brought her back home. The family decided that her husband was not a good fit for her.

I tried many times to find out what was wrong with the guy. Apparently, it was one of the family’s skeletons in the closet. (I do not even know for sure what his name was.) I was told that he was very talented but lazy to the point of being a neurasthenic while Lea was very punctual and dependable. His major crime, as my mother described it to me, was that one time when he and Lea were to meet at thetheatre to see some play, he showed up during the play’s third act. (I am not the one to throw stones at him: on two or three occasions when my would-be girlfriends took me to the theatre, I fell asleep as soon the lights were turned off.) Both my mother and Lea herself used to deny vehemently my cynical comment that the family needed her too much to give her to somebody else. Still, in musings about her life, I cannot help but think that she may have been denied living a normal life and forced to devote her entire life to others, first to her parents, then to my mother, and finally to me and my brother.

There is one more skeleton in the closet regarding Lea and Leo. I have already mentioned that David, Gershen’s and Bertha’s older son, had tuberculosis, and as a last resort, he went just before the revolution to Simpheropol, Crimea, whose hot and dry climate was hoped to save or at least prolong his life. At some point, Lea and Mina joined him, Lea to take care of David and Mina, and Mina who was 9 years old at the time just to live in a better climate. My mother told me that there were four of them living together: Lea, Mina, David and his mistress, a married woman whose son used to come to play with Mina. She loved David so much that she decided to be with him knowing too well that he was to die soon. My mother claimed that after David’s death, his mistress returned to her husband who was aware of his wife’s affair.

How come that the children, especially little Mina, lived in Crimea while the parents stayed in Petrograd? First, Gershen had to work to support the family, and Bertha stayed with him. At the same time, like many other people in St. Petersburg, Gershen and Bertha did not believe that the Bolsheviks would keep the power for a long time and sent their children to a nice and relatively safe place to wait through the troubled times. They turned out to be wrong on all accounts. David had eventually lost his battle with tuberculosis. The Bolsheviks kept their power for another 74 years. And Crimea was very far from being a safe place.

The children were not entirely on their own. Bertha’s two cousins lived in Simpheropol with their families. One cousin was married to a wealthy physician named Kagarlitsky and had one daughter. Another one was married to the poor man named Khluser and had three sons, one of them of Lea’s age, and a daughter of Mina’s age. (One of the Khluser boys, Michael, was later Molotov’s assistant in the Soviet government.) The children of all three families were spending a lot of time playing together.

However, by late 1918, the Loytsansky children ran out of money, and Leo had been sent to join them to help with the money and some stuff for sale. Very soon, he met one of his schoolmates who was in the position important enough to get Leo a job and a worker’s ration card with it. Now all four children were together but apart from the parents.

In those days, the life in Crimea was far from dull. The authorities replaced each other with kaleidoscopic speed. The Whites were succeeded by the Greens that in turn were succeeded by the Reds, and that may have gone through more than one cycle. Color-neutral armed thugs filled the intervals between them and represented the greatest danger. In the 1960s, the old inhabitants of Balaclava, a fishing village in Southern Crimea still remembered the Ermolaev night. Right before another retreat by the Reds, the drunken gang led by sailor Ermolaev decided to slaughter all bourgeois. Many innocent people were killed that night. Ermolaev and his gang were executed but it has not brought their victims back.

Even with the legitimate authority in power, the raids, arrests, and executions used to be part of a normal life. In one of such raids, the Greens patrol arrested Leo because they found a dagger under his mattress. He faced a short shrift, but Lea came to the rescue, begging to let him go and offering everything to spare his life. The next morning, Leo came back home unharmed. What was everything Leo’s prosecutors took in exchange for his life remains a mystery, and the incident has never been discussed with me in spite of my persistent attempts to open the closet with the hidden skeleton.

Both Lea and my mother told me many years later that the noble Whites did not behave better than the worker and peasant Reds. Loytsanskys lived on the second floor of the big house, with the guesthouse and the toilets in the backyard. The guesthouse was occupied by the White Guard officer and his mistress, a nurse in the hospital. The officer was a pugnacious anti-Semite who had fun yelling at Mina, "You little %hidovka"12 every time she went to the toilet and passed by the guesthouse. The revenge came from an unexpected direction. The nurse got pregnant and gave birth to a baby-son who developed very painful phimosis.¹³ The situation was critical, and the doctor ordered the circumcision. The entire neighborhood made fun of the anti-Semitic officer that he had a circumcised son. My mother was still finding this story very funny 85 years later.

The Whites especially mistreated the indigenous populace, Crimea Tartars. Tartars warmly welcomed the Reds when they seized Simpheropol and were especially joyful when the fire squad publicly executed the poor Whites that could not manage to escape. Tartars could not know at the time that their turn would come some 25 years later.

In spring of 1919, David died. With big difficulties (the railroad services were almost paralyzed and travel was dangerous), my grandparents came for his funeral. There was a lot of grief and some finger pointing. Bertha accused Lea that she has not taken enough care of David. It has been the story of Lea’s life: in spite of her sacrifices, she was conveniently used as a scapegoat if things were not going toowell. Bertha’s accusation was ridiculously unfair because Lea did whatever she could but David was a grown-up, but he did not care of himself. As an example, he entered a voluntary patrol and spent nights in cold and dump places protecting citizen. He caught cold, and with his tuberculosis that was fatal.

After a while, my grandparents had to go back to Petrograd. They left an empty apartment and were concerned that someone might have occupied it. (Indeed, no laws protecting private property existed at that time.) Their concern was well justified: when they came back they found their apartment full of strangers. As I mentioned above, the new occupants told them that the bourgeois time was over, and it was their turn to take advantage of things they were deprived of before. The good news was that there were a lot of vacant apartments in Petrograd: the hunger, cold, and Bolshevik thugs forced many people to run away from the city and, for the lucky ones, from the country. So my grandparents found a new apartment that was empty and said to belong to the Provisional Government’s former minister.

Lea, Leo and Mina kept on staying in Crimea for another two or three years. In order to be able to come to Crimea, Leo had to drop out of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute that he just joined as a sophomore. In 1917, he graduated from the private gymnasium with gold medal (the highest possible honor) and joined Mathematical Section of the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the Petrograd University. He studied there for one year, and partly on his parents’ insistence (they wanted to see him an engineer rather than a scientist) and partly induced by his friend, he transferred to the Polytechnic Institute.

In Simpheropol, Leo was lucky in at least two respects. First, the Yalta division of Kiev University had just moved to Simpheropol and was renamed into Tavrida University. It had the Department of Physics and Mathematics so Leo could immediately join it and continue his education. Second, many outstanding mathematicians and physicists moved to Simpheropol because, like Gershen and Bertha, they also believed it to be a safe place to live and work. In 1921, Leo graduated from the Tavrida University and after working there for another year as an assistant professor he came back to Petrograd. In 1922, he joined the Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Physics and Mathematics, and at the age of 25 became one of its youngest professors. With the only interruption for the World War II, he stayed and worked there until his death.

In 1927, Leo put his eyes on a beautiful brunette, the sophomore student in the Department of Engineering and Economics. Another version said that she picked him up. My mother played the role of a matchmaker and invited Nina Shabad (that was the brunette’s name) to Leo’s birthday party. This was the beginning of their love and partnership that went on for 61 years. In summer of 1928, they got married, and five years later, Nina gave birth to Irina, their only daughter and my only cousin.

In the meantime, my mother enrolled to the Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Physics and Mathematics and graduated as an electrical engineer in 1930. She was lucky to study under many famous Soviet scientists, such as academician Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, the founder of the Russian school of theoretical physics. The list of her college professors and classmates reads as a roster of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. For example, one of her teachers was the young assistant named Igor Kurchatov who was to become the father of the Soviet A-bomb. Many of her classmates became major contributors to that project. I remember that at some point in my student years at the same Polytechnic Institute, I thought about specializing in nuclear physics and asked my mother to call one of her classmates, Professor Rusinov, the Department Head at Physics-Technical Institute, for the advice and, perhaps, recommendation. They talked for about an hour, and Rusinov whom my mother called just Lyova (diminutive from Leo) told her that going to nuclear physics would be a big mistake, both career-and health-wise. Two or three months after that conversation, he passed away. He could not be much more than fifty.

By her big brother’s insistence, Mina also studied English at the Phonetic Institute and graduated with flying colors, praised, among others, by the British consul for her command of language and flawless London pronunciation. Knowledge of English helped her on many occasions in her life, from moonlighting in the Soviet Union to her new life in the United States.

After graduation, Mina joined Lenenergo, the huge utility supplying electricity for the entire city of Leningrad and the adjacent region. Her specialty was High Voltage Techniques, and her research was mostly in developing reliable insulation for high voltage power lines and transformers. With one interruption caused by the World War II, she worked at Lenenergo until her retirement in 1963.

My mother was a petite pretty redhead with innocent (sometimes we called it sheepish) eyes. As many professional women of that time, she did not have much time for love life: her work has always been her highest priority. Besides, Mina used to be dominated by her mother. Bertha gave her a lot of advice on how to deal with men. One of her wonderful advises was: As soon as a man touches your blouse’s upper button, slap him in the face. Judging by the fact that my mother had many friends and very few suitors, she used to follow this advice faithfully.

The naïveté with which Mina turned down her potential boyfriends has always amazed me. One was redhead (No way!), another had a wart on his cheek (I could not even look at him!), the third one was too meek, the fourth was too impudent, the fifth one tried to take her by her hand the first day, and so on, and so forth. In summer of 1935, she had finally found the man of her life, my father Roman. They met at the dacha (summerhouse) that both families rented in the same big house in Shuvalovo, a Leningrad suburb. Apparently, he satisfied all thecriteria: he was handsome, played piano, worked as an engineer, and made no attempts at her blouse.

They married in October of that year. Typical of those times, there was no engagement or even wedding. They made an appointment at the local ZAGS (Russian abbreviation for a marriage and death registration office), and that was it. They had made it only with the second attempt: one of them was too busy to show up the first time. At the wedding ceremony, my mother appeared in a dirty, oil-stained dress since she was late from testing another batch of high voltage insulators and did not have time to change. Nobody cared.

The day their first ZAGS attempt fell through, Bertha prepared a wedding dinner. In spite of the failure, the dinner was served, and Roman suggested that he would move in with Mina, and they could get the marriage certificate some other time. Gershen got furious: to him, it smelled of free love, and he did not tolerate all these new Communist tricks. An old Russian saying goes, First marry, then eat even with a spoon.¹⁴ My father was offended that Gershen did not trust him, and before the wedding dinner celebrating the second, more successful attempt, he put the marriage certificate under Gershen’s plate. Gershen got furious again, this time taking Roman’s demonstration as an insult (which it meant to be). Since then Gershen and Roman did not like each other very much.

My Birth

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare

The stage for my birth has been officially set. My mother got pregnant, and my arrival at this world was expected in late October. What was happening during those prototypical nine months that I was expected? How could the world be the same if I did not yet exist? I hope that these questions, seemingly extremely egocentric, come to anyone’s mind, at least, during one’s childhood. I bring Vladimir Nabokov as my powerful ally. He starts Speak, Memory, his famous autobiography, with these words:

… Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for . . I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken afew weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence.

I had seen no homemade movies taken before my birth so let me make a peek into my pre-existence. I see my arrival as if I were an heir to a small country’s throne. What room are we going to put the baby in? (As if there was a lot of choice.) Is it sterile enough? (The baby can catch some decease.) Should we buy the cradle and diapers now or later? (It is a Russian superstition to buy these things before a baby’s birth.) Oh, what color should his diapers be? (Of course, they should be blue if the baby is a boy and pink otherwise.) And by the way, what sex will the baby be? Indeed, in those years, it was impossible to determine a baby’s sex before the birth. Did I say in those years? I did not know the sex of my children before they were born, either.

For some reason they had been sure that the baby would be a boy. (Remember the heir thing?) Therefore, they were picking the baby’s name. My mother had just finished reading the saga of the Viking prince named Eric Blue-eyed so she decided that her son would be Eric. Besides, ERIC was the abbreviation for (in Russian) This is a real communist growing.¹⁵ This was certainly politically correct, not unimportant in those horribly enthusiastic and enthusiastically horrible years. Enters my aunt Nina and says that the baby’s name should be Genrikh. Why? all other relatives cry. Genrikh is not from Henry (that would be Englishlike, a bad idea) but from Heinrich (German-like which is even worse). Someone asks, I hope it’s not after Yagoda, is it?¹⁶ They are immediately scared, that was a stupid question, they look around, can we trust each other? (In those times, it would not be unusual for people to race to NKVD¹⁷ so that whoever comes first could inform on those running slower.) Yes, we can. But Genrikh? What a stupid idea!

Many years later, Nina told Mina in my