Thread by @akoz33

@CathyYoung63 @moutet It was also over this issue that Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was expelled from Moscow University because of his refusal to condemn Pasternak. I think I translated that fragment of Ivanov’s memoirs (I can’t find it so I might do it later). He describes how not even one

@CathyYoung63 @moutet colleague, even one professor, dared to defend him. (The same thing happened when my father was expelled for refusing to publicly condemn other Jewish professors in 1968 in Poland). There was one brave person, his student who owed his entire career to him, who abstained. The Dean

@CathyYoung63 @moutet oor rather Rector, of Moscow University was the famous mathematician Ivan Georgevich Petrovsky. He asked Ivanov to his office. This is how a Ivanov describes it:
“The rector, a very good mathematician and a good man, Ivan Georgievich Petrovsky called me to his office.

@CathyYoung63 @moutet During his tenure the new building of Moscow State University was constructed. And in this gigantic building he sits - a little old man. When I entered, he was sitting at a huge table. He gets up, he doesn’t want to stay there, he sits with me at some small, almost

@CathyYoung63 @moutet dressing table and tells me to write a penitent letter that I am ready to reconsider my views on “Doctor Zhivago”. I refuse. He says: “You understand, no man can do anything, no matter what post he holds.”

@CathyYoung63 @moutet But what happened then was also amazing, and typical of the paradoxical nature of the Soviet Union. Here is again Ivanov:
“They expelled me because of two different stories that connected together. And then in the justification they wrote:, firstly, because he refused to share

@CathyYoung63 @moutet the people’s assessment of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”, and secondly, because he supported the scientific views of an enemy, Roman Jacobson, at conferences. In fact, I was accused of being an accomplice of an American spy.

@CathyYoung63 @moutet Well, the expulsion was what was called a “wolf ticket”. But a “wolf ticket” in a country of computers and global schizophrenia mean nothing. That’s why I was easily accepted to various cybernetic institutes, where all the work was secret

@CathyYoung63 @moutet and where they absolutely did not care about any “wolf ticket”. Since the regime was completely cynical, absolutely no one cared that I was expelled as an American spy from the university. As far as my getting access our most secret computers, everything was in order.”