Some Nobel prize winners - founders, lectures and the best friends of my university

Source of this article (non-canonical PhysTech site)  

Phystech - A Secret Soviet Weapons Forge

Peter Kapitsa, who had been forcefully extracted by Stalin from Rutherford's laboratory, was able to persuade the dictator in the necessity to create an exclusive educational institution that would produce the scientific elite for the country. By that time dozens of thousands of intellectuals had emigrated or had been expelled from the country. These had been the lucky ones. Among them were Zworykin, Sikorsky, Gamow... Many thousands of others had been liquidated by the Communist regime in the NKVD cellars and concentration camps or set up in the research prisons.

The Nobel Prize winner Landau was arrested but later released thanks to Kapitsa's intervention.

The famous inventor of the first electronic musical instrument Theremin was kidnapped by KGB from Manhattan and the Soviet Kangaroo court convicted him, based on his own confession for "sending signals from New York to Sankt-Petersburg in Russia to detonate a bomb" when a Stalin's crony would approach a certain object in Russia. (The professor had some sense of humor!) He spent 7 years in the same Research Prison as Solzhenitsin.

The above links lead to heavily Kommi-sanitized bios of Kapitsa and Landau. More complete stories see in the Russian, on Landau.

Having chopped off enough heads the rulers yet realized the necessity to have scientific elite that would serve their military purpose.

For some arcane (or perhaps quite clear) reason education and research have been divorced in the Soviet Union unlike their traditional marriage known as a university everywhere in the world. The old Russian universities were turned into teachers colleges (with the exception of two or three). The numerous new technical schools of higher education gave narrow vocational training producing the foremen for militarized industries.

But the rulers needed to have the scientific elite to continue on the path of increasing the military power. The two or three first grade universities that still provided for top quality education were not sufficient. The idea of Phystech was to do a very careful preselection and selection of students who would be taught fundamental sciences of Mathematics and Physics and then sent out to finish their education in graduate and post-graduate departments in the so called base institutions. These base institutions would be the cutting edge of the modern science and technology.

In Phystech the bonds of education and research would be even tighter than a regular marriage known as a university.

Thus, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT or Phystech) was conceived by Stalin with such unusual partner as Peter Kapitsa in 1938. The delivery was delayed because the immediate plans to conquer Europe required creation of very simple mass weapons like light tanks, gliders, simplified bombers, etc. , and these plans were soon outsmarted by Hitler himself attacking in the East. It was not the time to create the super-science forge. Phystech would have even been aborted, had Stalin's plans for the World Revolution (aka the Second World War) succeeded.

The delivery occurred only in 1946 when the Cold War started, to assist in the achievement of superiority over the Free World in the weapons area: from biological weapons to atomic warheads, missiles and spaceships.

Kapitsa himself blandly refused to participate in the Atomic Bomb development and Stalin decided to leave him alone.

This goal and the concept of Phystech made it outstanding from all other educational establishments both in the USSR and elsewhere in the world.

Phystech was originally created as a secret division in the Moscow State University but soon the country�s rulers decided to conceal it even deeper. Phystech was hidden in a restricted suburb of Moscow, Dolgoprudny, and was designed like a spider web - a distributed university with a college teaching the fundamental sciences at the core spreading the graduate education and specialization threads to the most important research institutions outside the campus. Thus, after the separation, Moscow State, acknowledgingly the best university in Russia, turned out to become a branch of Phystech as many of its faculty and institutes became the faculty and base departments of Phystech. The same happened to all the research centers of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the military research centers hidden in Moscow and Moscow Province as P.O.B. enterprises.

This kind of organization allows us to call MIPT not simply a technical university but a system. So, here we are dealing with the wide spread, hidden Phystech Super University System.

Something analogous to MIPT was created in the US in the same 1946 and named Associated Universities, Inc.  AUI combined the educational and research resources of the US North Eastern Great Nine: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, The Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, University of Rochester, Yale University.

AUI's primary goals were to coordinate inter-university research using the faculty of the best American schools, to cooperatively run super-expensive nuclear accelerators and astronomic centers, which was impossible for each individual university. While AUI operated in the open, MIPT was much less known and dedicated more to the education for military applications using the faculty and equipment of a hundred of the best Soviet research centers. Perhaps AUI actually was the model for Phystech.

The first president (rector) of Phystech was General Petrov influential enough to define the position of Phystech vis-�-vis the government. The Chairman of Military Education in MIPT was appointed the famous General Belyakov, who was the navigator in the first non-stop Arctic flight Moscow--Vancouver in 1937 with the most famous Russian pilot Chkalov (in whose honor quite a few streets are named in America and who was allegedly assassinated by Stalin because the beautiful wife of the KGB Chief Yezhov preferred Chkalov over Stalin).

Normal people in the Soviet Union have always disliked the military. For a young man to be drafted in the military service meant (and means) to be turned into a worthless slave with a possibility to be thrown into unjust war abroad or against his own people. The Military Reserve education was a kind of protection for university students against the senseless waste of time and life.

To spare Phystech students and graduates from the hardships of regular military service, thanks to influential people like Generals Petrov and Belyakov, the graduates were commissioned not like ordinary platoon or battery commanders but a special qualification No. 5211 was created for them that read "rocket scientist in strategic missile forces". This definitely spared the Phystech graduates from becoming gun fodder of the Red Army.

Although the word best has been absolutely devalued in the modern English language, and the reader may be offended with it's use, we dare say, without hyperbole, that Phystech System has become the best technical university in the world in the time of the Cold War. It sort of combined the educational capacity of the 9 North Western American universities under one strongly centralized and coordinated roof. Regarding the days after the Cold War, the importance of MIPT plummeted as the constellation of the base institutions disintegrated.

MIPT's situation was quite controversial. It served both the forces of Evil and the forces of Good.

Phystech used to produce the best researchers in the Evil Empire who unwittingly, wittingly or unwillingly helped it fight in the Extended World War II. Just think of some of the hot battlefields: Berlin, Korea, Malaysia, Budapest, Viet-Nam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, Afghanistan, Kuwait, ... and recall the Erfurt Triangle aimed at the heart of Europe. Many of the weapons used, and their support infrastructure, were forged by the Phystech faculty and alumni. �

Here is what Frederick Forsyth (A very factual writer on:-- How to Assassinate General De Gaulle - The Day of the Jackal; How to Take Over an African Country - The Dogs of War; How to Assassinate the Chief of KGB - Devil's Alternative; How to Make an A-Bomb - The Fourth Protocol; How to Overthrow Saddam Hussein - The Fist of God; How to Take Power in Russia - Icon) writes in his book "Icon" (page 170):

"...
At eighteen he went to Moscow to seek entry into the most prestigious technical establishment of higher education in the USSR, the Physics/Technological Institute. To his surprise he was accepted. Despite his humble circumstances, the father's fame, the mother's dedication, maybe the genes, and certainly his personal efforts had tripped the balance. Behind its modest name, the institute was the forge of the most sophisticated designers of nuclear weapons.
..."