Boris Verkhovsky as a young man at the pilots' club
At the end of Stalin’s life, amid waves of anti-Semitic campaigns accusing ‘persons of non-indigenous nationality’ of all the mortal sins, it was more difficult for those ‘persons’ to get a higher education than for the biblical rich men to reach heaven. A camel, or even a larger creature, say, an elephant, had a better chance of getting through the eye of a needle than did a Jewish applicant of getting into a college of his choice...
No matter how endless the list of vices of the Soviet power is, one cannot reproach it for an absence of decorum. They observed all proprieties. You could complain about the decision of the college selection committee. Not by writing ‘To Moscow, to the Central Laundry,’ a street-talk variant in Odesa, Ukraine, of ‘In Care of Grandpa in the Village,’ as an unhappy country boy in one of Chekhov’s stories does, but by appealing to the specially created Commission. This ‘Commission’ was but one of the many heads of the hydra of the Soviet regime guided by the secret instruction, ‘Don’t let them Jews in!’
Few dared to grapple with this hydra in mortal combat. One of these stubborn people was my countryman, Boris Verkhovsky.
In the Spring of 1952, his last high school year, he, and his friend, both thin-necked Jewish youths (postwar hunger in the country wasn’t a joke) applied to the Higher Naval School. What Odesa boy doesn’t dream of the sea! There it is, a few blocks from their homes, wave after wave, beating against the shore as if teasing, ‘Hey, you who consider yourself genuine men! You’ll never be able to ride my waves, rush on them to faraway lands, and go wherever they take you!’ And boyish hearts filled with the romanticism of travel responded to this call. Young Odesans made their mothers let out their pants to make them look like sailors’ bell-bottomed trousers. They got, wherever and however they could, naval officers’ caps, with a ‘crab’, a cockade decorated with an anchor. They even tried to waddle a bit, as, after many days on the stormy sea, sailors moved along the Odesa sidewalks.
The first step after you submitted your papers was to face the so-called ‘Credentials Committee’. It was to find out what the person was like. Who is he? From what kind of family? What makes him tick? Since graduates of the highest seafarer school go abroad, the commission was afraid to accept those who could defect to the capitalist country, disgracing the honor of the socialist state.
Therefore, the interview was brief. After looking in their passports, at the notorious ‘fifth item’ identifying the passport holder’s ethnicity, the Credentials Committee no longer had any doubts about what was to be done. The most democratic constitution in the world guaranteed equality. It declared it one of the highest achievements of the revolution. So, neither Boris nor his friend was told anything about the Committee’s decision. They were just patted on the shoulder and sent to a medical commission.
There, they were both diagnosed with ‘conjunctivitis’ and barred from taking exams, being ineligible ‘for health reasons.’ Later, the same ‘conjunctivitis’ struck not only Boris and his friend but also other Jewish boys who dared to become sailors. ‘Conjunctivitis’ turned out to be a Jewish disease...
Not only the mysterious water expanse but also the celestial distance attracts romantically inclined young men. Along with the sea, Boris dreamed of the sky. For the last three school years, he studied at the DOSAAF (the Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force, and Navy) club. As Stalin designed it, the club prepared soldiers for future wars. Boris trained as a parachutist, an air gunner, a radio operator, and a glider pilot. To strengthen his body, he took to classical wrestling. So, when they turned him down at the seafarer school, he applied for the Kharkiv Higher Aviation Technological School.
More boys dreamed of the sky than the sea. The competition was horrendous: over forty people per seat. And you had to pass eight exams, twice as many as to be accepted into an ordinary institute.
They also knew that ‘unstable elements’ could escape in other ways than from a Soviet ship in a foreign port. Once at the helm of an aircraft, they could fly off to neighboring Finland. Boris knew already that, like other Jewish youths, he would be struck, if not by ‘conjunctivitis,’ then by some other ‘Jewish’ disease.
It was possible, however, to compromise with the Soviet regime. Aviation needed specialists of all levels, including aviation technicians. Many Jewish boys, tired of fighting for the dream of heaven, agreed to its down-to-earth variant.
Boris refused to compromise. By that time, there was a girl in his life, his first love. She bombarded him with letters, begging him to return to Odesa.
Fortunately, besides the sea and the sky, from his childhood, mathematics beckoned Boris with its unfathomable mystery – the ghostly science of symbols and numbers. From his early years, his Aunt Paulina cultivated in him an interest in this enigma. When the war began, along with him and his mother, she fled from Odesa beyond the Urals to the city of Barnaul. They lived and slept in the same crowded room. The aunt worked for many hours as a kindergarten teacher, but she did not lose her mental vigor. Instead of a bedtime story, she told her nephew about planets and stars, about other galaxies. Falling asleep, he thought about them. He was carried away from the meager life of the evacuees. There, in the bottomless night sky, there was another world, mysterious and endless. Then, for the first time, little Boris craved to learn how that distant starry world worked.
Mathematics was one way to understand that secret. At school, they taught him how much five times five would be. He was already thinking about what kind of number the ‘zero’ was. Why does it even exist? Why do you need to have it if it means nothing? (Years later, he would learn that the number ‘zero’ was one of the greatest inventions of Hindu mathematical science.)
Boris returned to Odesa and applied to the local university, the Department of Physics and Mathematics. Fortunately, it was not too late. He passed the exams. Although the general score was an acceptable one, when they posted the lists of those admitted, his name wasn’t there. And then, in the university’s corridors, he ran into a neighbor’s daughter named Mila with a ‘decent’ (Russian!) surname Arkhipova. She shared with him her news: she applied to the philological department, but she didn’t pass the competition, and they offered her to apply to the department of physics and mathematics. There was a shortage of students there…
No matter how much Boris wanted to rely on his wits, at seventeen years old, he had to turn to adults for advice. His father, alas, had passed away a long time ago. An electric welder at the Odesa sugar plant, he volunteered on the first day of the war. He rose to officer’s rank; they awarded him the Order of the Patriotic War of the First Degree. He died in February 1945, in the battle for the Polish city of Szczecin. Boris’s mom worked from morning till night at the Odesa jute factory. And she could hardly help since she had only five years of schooling. She was the daughter of a tailor who sewed at home and, therefore, belonged to the declassé elements according to the Soviet authorities – to the so-called ‘lishentsy,’ persons stripped of all social privileges reserved for the proletariat. To educate their children after the fifth grade, schools demanded full payment, and there was no such money in the family.
To find out how to help her nephew in trouble, Aunt Paulina bothered everyone she knew. An elderly Tatar, a professor of mathematics at the Odesa Pedagogical Institute, lived in their courtyard. He favored young Boris and felt his incipient talent. Quite in the spirit of the times, he said to Aunt Paulina that her nephew should believe in the ultimate triumph of truth. Although bad people try to distort the Soviet truth, there is still one place where it is cherished. And that place is Moscow...
The aunt sent a letter to the capital, to the Party Central Committee. So and so, the nephew received a passing grade, yet they refused to enroll him in the university. She didn’t write about her guesses as to why that abominable fact took place. She knew they could accuse her of slandering the Soviet authorities.
About two weeks later, an answer came signed by one of the deputy ministers of higher education. We’ll investigate it, and we’ll let you know in time...
The professor, Paulina’s neighbor, remained unshakable in his belief in the ultimate triumph of truth. He said to Boris, shaking his head: ‘Listen to me, kiddo, go to Moscow, to the Central Committee of the Party. There are real communists there. They’ll see to it… They’ll figure it out there.’
Unlike in America, where it is customary to blame the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. for all the shortcomings, in the Soviet Union, on the contrary, people pinned all their hopes on the capital. As in the old days, claimants from all over the immense land rushed to the capital to throw themselves at the feet of the tsar-father, who would judge everyone justly, and would protect his loving children, so, in Soviet times, Moscow, Moscow alone, was the only hope. As soon as the Soviet government somehow had gotten on its feet, petitioners from distant villages rushed to bow to Vladimir Lenin. After his death, since it was impossible to get to Comrade Stalin, who was overburdened with state affairs, they came in a shoal to the formal head of state, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin. They nicknamed his reception area the ‘Kremlin Sobbing Place’ (kremlevskaia rydal’nia).
And young Boris hit the road. His aunt and mother scraped together the money for the ticket. It wasn’t enough for a fast train. Despite the urgent business, he had to take a train that stopped at every station and whistle-stop.
When the train reached the Kyiv railway station in Moscow and Boris stepped onto the platform, the first thing he did was to ask the police officer what he had started his long journey for:
‘Tell me, please, where is the Party Central Committee?’
The cop looked him over from head to toe, and instead of answering, demanded his documents.
It was early October 1952. The 19th Communist Party Congress was about to begin. On the eve of the congress, the police removed any suspicious elements from the capital. And here some young man, a ‘person of Jewish ethnicity,’ came to the capital to seek justice. You must watch out for people like that... What if it comes into the fellow’s mind to throw a bomb at the Soviet government?
After examining the documents, the officer didn’t bother to choose his words, but so as not to arouse unhealthy public interest, he muttered through clenched teeth: ‘So, damn it, here’s the deal. Make it so that I don’t fucking see you in Moscow in twenty-four hours! I don’t know where the Central Committee is. You have no fucking reason to be here.’
Boris pretended to obey the guardian of order, but, turning the corner, he took to his heels. It was necessary to find shelter somewhere while he was seeking justice. Distant cousins of his mother lived in Moscow. They knew little about them back home in Odesa. Only their names and addresses. When Boris appeared on the threshold of their tiny room in a communal apartment, they didn’t have either an extra bed or even a place on the floor where Boris could settle for the night.
He found such a place in the corridor, on the rug. The next morning, blisters covered his body. Fortunately, in Moscow, it was already cool in the fall. The blisters, although itching, didn’t bother him too much.
Shivering from the cold, Boris reached the place where truth was concentrated in the country – the reception chamber of the Central Committee on Serov Square. The waiting area was an office with small windows cut into the wall, one per each all-union ministry. The windows were small, slightly larger than the embrasure of an anti-tank bunker. It was understandable: how else could one keep a perimeter defense against annoying citizens?
When Boris finally reached the window of the Ministry of Higher Education, they told him to go to the other end of the corridor, dial ‘25’ on the internal phone, and talk to Comrade Zaitsev.
Boris followed the instructions and pressed his ear to that telephone receiver for four days in a row from morning to evening. Comrade Zaitsev’s secretary used the full batch of replies prepared for the appellants, ‘He hasn’t arrived yet’ ... ‘He just left’... ‘He has a lunch break’ ... ‘He left for the rest of the day, call tomorrow’ ...
So Boris never saw the notorious Zaitsev.
Boris went to the Ministry of Higher Education on Zhdanov Street, the same Comrade Zhdanov who had attacked in the press two writers, Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, and the best Leningrad magazines. (It was such a glorious time: they decorated the streets of the country with the names not of talents, but of their stranglers). Since the ministry dealt with higher learning, order there was at the highest level. No need to call an unknown assistant. You just make an appointment with him.
However, it was difficult to do so. The corridors of the ministry were packed with young men and women seeking justice. They denied them all higher education for the same – unpronounceable aloud – reason. As they joked then, they all were ‘invalids of the fifth group:’ they had the bad luck of having the wrong ethnicity in the fifth column of their internal passport.
Boris was the only out-of-towner; the rest of those deprived by the powers that be were Muscovites. They made fun of him, with the taint of snobbery peculiar to the inhabitants of the capital. Although they lived on neighboring streets with the central government, they and didn’t succeed. And here he came from some God-forsaken Odesa...
As a youngster from the deep provinces, Boris, of course, suffered from an inferiority complex. But he did not back down. Every day, as if reporting to work, he came to the ministry and took his place in line; his number was ‘1864.’ Then, he trudged through the entire city (no money for the subway) to his relatives’ place. All evening, sitting down at the edge of the dining table, he wrote letters to all the higher authorities of the Soviet government. Seeking justice... There were no fountain pens yet. You had to dip your pen into an inkwell and, if a blot happened, you had to rewrite everything.
He wrote letters to Stalin, to all members of the Politburo, and to the editorial offices of all the central newspapers – Pravda, Izvestiya, and Labor (Trud). Given that he was the son of a deceased officer, he also wrote to Marshals Clement Voroshilov and Alexander Vasilevsky. And to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Navy, to boot….
He wrote, peeping at the text that Aunt Paulina had composed back in Odesa, her first letter to the Central Party Committee. It said that he passed all the exams and got an acceptable score. He doesn’t understand why they didn’t admit him to the university. Just like Aunt Paulina, he didn’t mention that he realized why they didn’t give him access to higher education... He had to follow the unspoken rules...
On the sixth day of standing in the corridors of the Ministry of Higher Education, fortune smiled at him. They summoned someone from the queue, but that person wasn’t there. Boris dived into the waiting room. The petitioners were let into the office in groups like soldiers in a garrison’s bathhouse. (The veterans dubbed the reception a ‘locker room,’ predbannik.)
At last, it was Boris’s turn. At the table sat a young administrative assistant. Like crows on a plowed strip in search of worms, all Boris’ letters written in the evenings on the edge of the table while staying with relatives flocked there, under the assistant’s elbow. All the letters to Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich... To the central newspapers... To ministries... To the Party’s Central Committee...
The assistant made a wry face, flipping the letters as if they were not the cry of a young soul, but cow cakes dried in the sun.
Waiting for the official’s decision, Boris tensed his entire body. Near the desk of the assistant in charge of the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University, a beautiful Jewish girl sat proudly erect. Learning about the refusal, she said to the administrative assistant with a gaze burning with anger: ‘I’ll become a lawyer, anyway. I’ll take to court people like you first.’
Like her, Boris was refused, and he realized it was useless to write letters to one Soviet official complaining about another.
Not knowing what else to do, hoping he would get to another, perhaps compassionate, administrative assistant, he kept doing the same thing. Daytime, he wrote letters to another member of the Central Committee, in the evenings, to another marshal.
ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. The halls of the ministry became empty. They got rid of all complainants. Boris was left alone. Like a ghost wandering along the passageways until late in the evening, he returned in his thoughts to the mystery that had long tormented him. What is zero if not the result of an elementary mathematical operation? That much remains of your dream when you subtract reality from it...
Occasionally, the assistants’ secretaries and typists appeared in the foyer. They already knew him. As women, they sympathized with the boy who dragged himself from distant Odesa to the capital to seek justice. Looking at his thin figure stuck to the wall of the lobby, they shared with him the sandwiches they had brought from home.
The secretaries told him to not go to the administrative assistants, wary of violating their instructions. He should go straight to the big bosses. If not to the Minister of Higher Education himself, then at least to his first deputy, Comrade Yeliutin.
However, a note on his door informed the deputy minister didn’t receive visitors until mid-October. What could he do? Eventually, Boris found out where the deputy minister’s car was parked. Hiding in the garage’s corner, so that Comrade Yelutin’s driver would not notice, he waited for hours for the deputy minister to leave for home.
In those days, all the ministries in Moscow labored until ten in the evening, or even later. Such was the mode of bureaucratic life. Everyone knew that Comrade Stalin worked at night. What if the leader of all progressive humanity needs some kind of help, and the ‘cogs,’ as he called the Soviet people, the ‘cogs’ – oh! – Instead of, as was expected of them, helping the state machine to spin, they sit at the family table, drinking tea. That was why, until late in the evening, ministry workers stuck it out in their offices. They often dozed, hands under their heads, on the covers of their desks, from time to time shuddering from phone calls. What if it was from the Supreme Leader himself?
When Yeliutin finally left the ministry building late in the evening and headed for the car, Boris called out to him by his first name and his patronymic, ‘Vyacheslav Petrovich!’
The deputy minister shuddered in surprise. Boris apologized for scaring the big man. Trying to stay away from the driver, already armed with a tire iron, he explained he could not wait for the visiting days in the office. He was running out of time. In Odesa, at the university, the classes have then begun... Again, taught by his aunt, he did not utter a word that he knew why he could not study his favorite science – mathematics. It was some misunderstanding, he said, an ‘accidental error.’
The deputy minister said he should turn to the head of the department that deals with universities: ‘Go to him and tell him I spoke to you.’
This was a revelation for Boris. If you say you talked to one of the big shots, they will listen to you. For fear of doing something wrong that the boss wants them to do, they would try to help you.
The next day, the head of the department’s assistant listened to Boris and wrote a letter to the rector of Odesa University. Something like ‘the boy is the son of a deceased officer who was a distinguished Party member... Please reconsider the decision and enroll him.’
The assistant patted Boris on the shoulder and said: ‘Go home, young man. Everything will be okay.’
The train from Moscow arrived late in the evening. In the morning, Boris already stood in the rector’s office, Comrade Ivanchuk, with a carbon copy of a letter from Moscow.
The man read it. Scratched the back of his head and said, mixing Russian words with Ukrainian ones, with that lazy annoyance with which they say, ‘I just washed the car yesterday, and here you have it, it’s raining’: ‘Yes, there was a mess. But nothing can be done. No more space left. Why won’t you go to Moscow, to the Ministry of Finance? Let them give us additional funds to accommodate you.’
To go to Moscow again! What funds did they need? He lived at home; no need to have space in their dormitory. All he needed was an extra chair in the classroom. Nothing more…
Instead, the rector offered Boris to follow a fantastic scenario. An unknown young man will come to Moscow, show up at the Union Ministry, and they would abandon their weighty matters of state and rush to rummage through the budget articles of a vast country – to scrape together enough money to train the dear applicant...
Ivanchuk believed he had gotten rid of the stubborn boy once and for all... But he was wrong. Without wasting time – the classes at the university had already begun – the next morning, Boris again climbed onto the third shelf of the same mail train, which again dragged him to Moscow.
Of course, he didn’t follow the rector’s advice. Instead of the Ministry of Finance, he began beating down the doors of the Ministry of Higher Learning again.
This time, strangers, friends of his girl, sheltered him. They also had little free space, but, behind their wardrobe, they had a large old coffer, on the lid of which, curled up in a ball, Boris slept.
The trouble was that, shortly before his arrival, the hosts had bought a TV set. It was a novelty and a luxury. In the evenings, until late, the neighbors from all over the communal apartment gathered in front of it, bringing their stools. Tired after a day of standing in line at the ministry, Boris couldn’t get enough rest. Sometimes, feeling guilty that he troubled the hosts, he spent the night on the bench of the waiting room of the Kyiv railway station, the one where trains came from Odesa. Before settling down on the bench, he looked around, wary of the cop who had driven him from Moscow. To sleep stretched out on a bench was possible only in fits and starts. At night, they swept the waiting room, driving passengers from place to place.
One night, a young boy, a neighbor, among those who came to watch TV, took pity on him and invited him to sleep in their room, in a rocking chair.
Boris spent several nights that way.
But he held out. He got an appointment with an official one more time. Soon, another letter signed by the deputy minister left Moscow for Odesa. Taught by hard experience, Boris no longer rushed straight to the train, leaving for Odesa. He sent a carbon copy of the letter to Aunt Paulina and asked her to see the rector.
The precaution was not in vain. The rector took the letter from his aunt and, in a practiced way of getting rid of the petitioners, he said, ‘We’ll answer you when we can.’
Back in Moscow, the very sight of the stubborn Odesa boy became an eyesore for the deputy minister’s assistant. He sent another letter to Odesa, an order leaving no room for any objections. It produced the desired effect. On October 8, 1952, on his birthday, Boris received a telegram from his aunt in Odesa:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! CONGRATS ON BEING ENROLLED IN THE UNIVERSITY
DESPITE ALL HIS TRAVAILS AND AGONY, Boris Samuilovich Verkhovsky got a higher education more easily than had, back in the eighteenth century, the famous Russian scientist Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, who is a household name now. Though Boris, like Lomonosov, also traveled to Moscow to get that education, he did it not as Lomonosov had done it, on foot, but by riding a train, albeit a slow one.
Unlike Lomonosov, Boris didn’t become a polymath who made important contributions to Russian literature, education, and science. However, having emigrated to America twenty years later, he grew into one of the world’s foremost authorities in computer information. He taught at Princeton University and worked on the staff of the most prestigious scientific centers – IBM and Bell Labs. They conferred on him many awards and distinctions, including the Millennium Prize and the Medal for Excellence in Computer Science. The European Academy of Sciences decorated him with the Blaise Pascal Medal and elected him its Vice President in 2004. One year, Boris Verkhovsky headed the commission for the nomination of Nobel Prize winners in his field.
We must agree: it is not too shabby an achievement for a representative of a ‘non-indigenous nationality…’
Few dared to grapple with this hydra in mortal combat. One of these stubborn people was my countryman, Boris Verkhovsky.
In the Spring of 1952, his last high school year, he, and his friend, both thin-necked Jewish youths (postwar hunger in the country wasn’t a joke) applied to the Higher Naval School. What Odesa boy doesn’t dream of the sea! There it is, a few blocks from their homes, wave after wave, beating against the shore as if teasing, ‘Hey, you who consider yourself genuine men! You’ll never be able to ride my waves, rush on them to faraway lands, and go wherever they take you!’ And boyish hearts filled with the romanticism of travel responded to this call. Young Odesans made their mothers let out their pants to make them look like sailors’ bell-bottomed trousers. They got, wherever and however they could, naval officers’ caps, with a ‘crab’, a cockade decorated with an anchor. They even tried to waddle a bit, as, after many days on the stormy sea, sailors moved along the Odesa sidewalks.
The first step after you submitted your papers was to face the so-called ‘Credentials Committee’. It was to find out what the person was like. Who is he? From what kind of family? What makes him tick? Since graduates of the highest seafarer school go abroad, the commission was afraid to accept those who could defect to the capitalist country, disgracing the honor of the socialist state.
Therefore, the interview was brief. After looking in their passports, at the notorious ‘fifth item’ identifying the passport holder’s ethnicity, the Credentials Committee no longer had any doubts about what was to be done. The most democratic constitution in the world guaranteed equality. It declared it one of the highest achievements of the revolution. So, neither Boris nor his friend was told anything about the Committee’s decision. They were just patted on the shoulder and sent to a medical commission.
There, they were both diagnosed with ‘conjunctivitis’ and barred from taking exams, being ineligible ‘for health reasons.’ Later, the same ‘conjunctivitis’ struck not only Boris and his friend but also other Jewish boys who dared to become sailors. ‘Conjunctivitis’ turned out to be a Jewish disease...
Not only the mysterious water expanse but also the celestial distance attracts romantically inclined young men. Along with the sea, Boris dreamed of the sky. For the last three school years, he studied at the DOSAAF (the Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force, and Navy) club. As Stalin designed it, the club prepared soldiers for future wars. Boris trained as a parachutist, an air gunner, a radio operator, and a glider pilot. To strengthen his body, he took to classical wrestling. So, when they turned him down at the seafarer school, he applied for the Kharkiv Higher Aviation Technological School.
More boys dreamed of the sky than the sea. The competition was horrendous: over forty people per seat. And you had to pass eight exams, twice as many as to be accepted into an ordinary institute.
They also knew that ‘unstable elements’ could escape in other ways than from a Soviet ship in a foreign port. Once at the helm of an aircraft, they could fly off to neighboring Finland. Boris knew already that, like other Jewish youths, he would be struck, if not by ‘conjunctivitis,’ then by some other ‘Jewish’ disease.
It was possible, however, to compromise with the Soviet regime. Aviation needed specialists of all levels, including aviation technicians. Many Jewish boys, tired of fighting for the dream of heaven, agreed to its down-to-earth variant.
Boris refused to compromise. By that time, there was a girl in his life, his first love. She bombarded him with letters, begging him to return to Odesa.
Fortunately, besides the sea and the sky, from his childhood, mathematics beckoned Boris with its unfathomable mystery – the ghostly science of symbols and numbers. From his early years, his Aunt Paulina cultivated in him an interest in this enigma. When the war began, along with him and his mother, she fled from Odesa beyond the Urals to the city of Barnaul. They lived and slept in the same crowded room. The aunt worked for many hours as a kindergarten teacher, but she did not lose her mental vigor. Instead of a bedtime story, she told her nephew about planets and stars, about other galaxies. Falling asleep, he thought about them. He was carried away from the meager life of the evacuees. There, in the bottomless night sky, there was another world, mysterious and endless. Then, for the first time, little Boris craved to learn how that distant starry world worked.
Mathematics was one way to understand that secret. At school, they taught him how much five times five would be. He was already thinking about what kind of number the ‘zero’ was. Why does it even exist? Why do you need to have it if it means nothing? (Years later, he would learn that the number ‘zero’ was one of the greatest inventions of Hindu mathematical science.)
Boris returned to Odesa and applied to the local university, the Department of Physics and Mathematics. Fortunately, it was not too late. He passed the exams. Although the general score was an acceptable one, when they posted the lists of those admitted, his name wasn’t there. And then, in the university’s corridors, he ran into a neighbor’s daughter named Mila with a ‘decent’ (Russian!) surname Arkhipova. She shared with him her news: she applied to the philological department, but she didn’t pass the competition, and they offered her to apply to the department of physics and mathematics. There was a shortage of students there…
No matter how much Boris wanted to rely on his wits, at seventeen years old, he had to turn to adults for advice. His father, alas, had passed away a long time ago. An electric welder at the Odesa sugar plant, he volunteered on the first day of the war. He rose to officer’s rank; they awarded him the Order of the Patriotic War of the First Degree. He died in February 1945, in the battle for the Polish city of Szczecin. Boris’s mom worked from morning till night at the Odesa jute factory. And she could hardly help since she had only five years of schooling. She was the daughter of a tailor who sewed at home and, therefore, belonged to the declassé elements according to the Soviet authorities – to the so-called ‘lishentsy,’ persons stripped of all social privileges reserved for the proletariat. To educate their children after the fifth grade, schools demanded full payment, and there was no such money in the family.
To find out how to help her nephew in trouble, Aunt Paulina bothered everyone she knew. An elderly Tatar, a professor of mathematics at the Odesa Pedagogical Institute, lived in their courtyard. He favored young Boris and felt his incipient talent. Quite in the spirit of the times, he said to Aunt Paulina that her nephew should believe in the ultimate triumph of truth. Although bad people try to distort the Soviet truth, there is still one place where it is cherished. And that place is Moscow...
The aunt sent a letter to the capital, to the Party Central Committee. So and so, the nephew received a passing grade, yet they refused to enroll him in the university. She didn’t write about her guesses as to why that abominable fact took place. She knew they could accuse her of slandering the Soviet authorities.
About two weeks later, an answer came signed by one of the deputy ministers of higher education. We’ll investigate it, and we’ll let you know in time...
The professor, Paulina’s neighbor, remained unshakable in his belief in the ultimate triumph of truth. He said to Boris, shaking his head: ‘Listen to me, kiddo, go to Moscow, to the Central Committee of the Party. There are real communists there. They’ll see to it… They’ll figure it out there.’
Unlike in America, where it is customary to blame the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. for all the shortcomings, in the Soviet Union, on the contrary, people pinned all their hopes on the capital. As in the old days, claimants from all over the immense land rushed to the capital to throw themselves at the feet of the tsar-father, who would judge everyone justly, and would protect his loving children, so, in Soviet times, Moscow, Moscow alone, was the only hope. As soon as the Soviet government somehow had gotten on its feet, petitioners from distant villages rushed to bow to Vladimir Lenin. After his death, since it was impossible to get to Comrade Stalin, who was overburdened with state affairs, they came in a shoal to the formal head of state, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin. They nicknamed his reception area the ‘Kremlin Sobbing Place’ (kremlevskaia rydal’nia).
And young Boris hit the road. His aunt and mother scraped together the money for the ticket. It wasn’t enough for a fast train. Despite the urgent business, he had to take a train that stopped at every station and whistle-stop.
When the train reached the Kyiv railway station in Moscow and Boris stepped onto the platform, the first thing he did was to ask the police officer what he had started his long journey for:
‘Tell me, please, where is the Party Central Committee?’
The cop looked him over from head to toe, and instead of answering, demanded his documents.
It was early October 1952. The 19th Communist Party Congress was about to begin. On the eve of the congress, the police removed any suspicious elements from the capital. And here some young man, a ‘person of Jewish ethnicity,’ came to the capital to seek justice. You must watch out for people like that... What if it comes into the fellow’s mind to throw a bomb at the Soviet government?
After examining the documents, the officer didn’t bother to choose his words, but so as not to arouse unhealthy public interest, he muttered through clenched teeth: ‘So, damn it, here’s the deal. Make it so that I don’t fucking see you in Moscow in twenty-four hours! I don’t know where the Central Committee is. You have no fucking reason to be here.’
Boris pretended to obey the guardian of order, but, turning the corner, he took to his heels. It was necessary to find shelter somewhere while he was seeking justice. Distant cousins of his mother lived in Moscow. They knew little about them back home in Odesa. Only their names and addresses. When Boris appeared on the threshold of their tiny room in a communal apartment, they didn’t have either an extra bed or even a place on the floor where Boris could settle for the night.
He found such a place in the corridor, on the rug. The next morning, blisters covered his body. Fortunately, in Moscow, it was already cool in the fall. The blisters, although itching, didn’t bother him too much.
Shivering from the cold, Boris reached the place where truth was concentrated in the country – the reception chamber of the Central Committee on Serov Square. The waiting area was an office with small windows cut into the wall, one per each all-union ministry. The windows were small, slightly larger than the embrasure of an anti-tank bunker. It was understandable: how else could one keep a perimeter defense against annoying citizens?
When Boris finally reached the window of the Ministry of Higher Education, they told him to go to the other end of the corridor, dial ‘25’ on the internal phone, and talk to Comrade Zaitsev.
Boris followed the instructions and pressed his ear to that telephone receiver for four days in a row from morning to evening. Comrade Zaitsev’s secretary used the full batch of replies prepared for the appellants, ‘He hasn’t arrived yet’ ... ‘He just left’... ‘He has a lunch break’ ... ‘He left for the rest of the day, call tomorrow’ ...
So Boris never saw the notorious Zaitsev.
Boris went to the Ministry of Higher Education on Zhdanov Street, the same Comrade Zhdanov who had attacked in the press two writers, Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, and the best Leningrad magazines. (It was such a glorious time: they decorated the streets of the country with the names not of talents, but of their stranglers). Since the ministry dealt with higher learning, order there was at the highest level. No need to call an unknown assistant. You just make an appointment with him.
However, it was difficult to do so. The corridors of the ministry were packed with young men and women seeking justice. They denied them all higher education for the same – unpronounceable aloud – reason. As they joked then, they all were ‘invalids of the fifth group:’ they had the bad luck of having the wrong ethnicity in the fifth column of their internal passport.
Boris was the only out-of-towner; the rest of those deprived by the powers that be were Muscovites. They made fun of him, with the taint of snobbery peculiar to the inhabitants of the capital. Although they lived on neighboring streets with the central government, they and didn’t succeed. And here he came from some God-forsaken Odesa...
As a youngster from the deep provinces, Boris, of course, suffered from an inferiority complex. But he did not back down. Every day, as if reporting to work, he came to the ministry and took his place in line; his number was ‘1864.’ Then, he trudged through the entire city (no money for the subway) to his relatives’ place. All evening, sitting down at the edge of the dining table, he wrote letters to all the higher authorities of the Soviet government. Seeking justice... There were no fountain pens yet. You had to dip your pen into an inkwell and, if a blot happened, you had to rewrite everything.
He wrote letters to Stalin, to all members of the Politburo, and to the editorial offices of all the central newspapers – Pravda, Izvestiya, and Labor (Trud). Given that he was the son of a deceased officer, he also wrote to Marshals Clement Voroshilov and Alexander Vasilevsky. And to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Navy, to boot….
He wrote, peeping at the text that Aunt Paulina had composed back in Odesa, her first letter to the Central Party Committee. It said that he passed all the exams and got an acceptable score. He doesn’t understand why they didn’t admit him to the university. Just like Aunt Paulina, he didn’t mention that he realized why they didn’t give him access to higher education... He had to follow the unspoken rules...
On the sixth day of standing in the corridors of the Ministry of Higher Education, fortune smiled at him. They summoned someone from the queue, but that person wasn’t there. Boris dived into the waiting room. The petitioners were let into the office in groups like soldiers in a garrison’s bathhouse. (The veterans dubbed the reception a ‘locker room,’ predbannik.)
At last, it was Boris’s turn. At the table sat a young administrative assistant. Like crows on a plowed strip in search of worms, all Boris’ letters written in the evenings on the edge of the table while staying with relatives flocked there, under the assistant’s elbow. All the letters to Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich... To the central newspapers... To ministries... To the Party’s Central Committee...
The assistant made a wry face, flipping the letters as if they were not the cry of a young soul, but cow cakes dried in the sun.
Waiting for the official’s decision, Boris tensed his entire body. Near the desk of the assistant in charge of the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University, a beautiful Jewish girl sat proudly erect. Learning about the refusal, she said to the administrative assistant with a gaze burning with anger: ‘I’ll become a lawyer, anyway. I’ll take to court people like you first.’
Like her, Boris was refused, and he realized it was useless to write letters to one Soviet official complaining about another.
Not knowing what else to do, hoping he would get to another, perhaps compassionate, administrative assistant, he kept doing the same thing. Daytime, he wrote letters to another member of the Central Committee, in the evenings, to another marshal.
ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. The halls of the ministry became empty. They got rid of all complainants. Boris was left alone. Like a ghost wandering along the passageways until late in the evening, he returned in his thoughts to the mystery that had long tormented him. What is zero if not the result of an elementary mathematical operation? That much remains of your dream when you subtract reality from it...
Occasionally, the assistants’ secretaries and typists appeared in the foyer. They already knew him. As women, they sympathized with the boy who dragged himself from distant Odesa to the capital to seek justice. Looking at his thin figure stuck to the wall of the lobby, they shared with him the sandwiches they had brought from home.
The secretaries told him to not go to the administrative assistants, wary of violating their instructions. He should go straight to the big bosses. If not to the Minister of Higher Education himself, then at least to his first deputy, Comrade Yeliutin.
However, a note on his door informed the deputy minister didn’t receive visitors until mid-October. What could he do? Eventually, Boris found out where the deputy minister’s car was parked. Hiding in the garage’s corner, so that Comrade Yelutin’s driver would not notice, he waited for hours for the deputy minister to leave for home.
In those days, all the ministries in Moscow labored until ten in the evening, or even later. Such was the mode of bureaucratic life. Everyone knew that Comrade Stalin worked at night. What if the leader of all progressive humanity needs some kind of help, and the ‘cogs,’ as he called the Soviet people, the ‘cogs’ – oh! – Instead of, as was expected of them, helping the state machine to spin, they sit at the family table, drinking tea. That was why, until late in the evening, ministry workers stuck it out in their offices. They often dozed, hands under their heads, on the covers of their desks, from time to time shuddering from phone calls. What if it was from the Supreme Leader himself?
When Yeliutin finally left the ministry building late in the evening and headed for the car, Boris called out to him by his first name and his patronymic, ‘Vyacheslav Petrovich!’
The deputy minister shuddered in surprise. Boris apologized for scaring the big man. Trying to stay away from the driver, already armed with a tire iron, he explained he could not wait for the visiting days in the office. He was running out of time. In Odesa, at the university, the classes have then begun... Again, taught by his aunt, he did not utter a word that he knew why he could not study his favorite science – mathematics. It was some misunderstanding, he said, an ‘accidental error.’
The deputy minister said he should turn to the head of the department that deals with universities: ‘Go to him and tell him I spoke to you.’
This was a revelation for Boris. If you say you talked to one of the big shots, they will listen to you. For fear of doing something wrong that the boss wants them to do, they would try to help you.
The next day, the head of the department’s assistant listened to Boris and wrote a letter to the rector of Odesa University. Something like ‘the boy is the son of a deceased officer who was a distinguished Party member... Please reconsider the decision and enroll him.’
The assistant patted Boris on the shoulder and said: ‘Go home, young man. Everything will be okay.’
The train from Moscow arrived late in the evening. In the morning, Boris already stood in the rector’s office, Comrade Ivanchuk, with a carbon copy of a letter from Moscow.
The man read it. Scratched the back of his head and said, mixing Russian words with Ukrainian ones, with that lazy annoyance with which they say, ‘I just washed the car yesterday, and here you have it, it’s raining’: ‘Yes, there was a mess. But nothing can be done. No more space left. Why won’t you go to Moscow, to the Ministry of Finance? Let them give us additional funds to accommodate you.’
To go to Moscow again! What funds did they need? He lived at home; no need to have space in their dormitory. All he needed was an extra chair in the classroom. Nothing more…
Instead, the rector offered Boris to follow a fantastic scenario. An unknown young man will come to Moscow, show up at the Union Ministry, and they would abandon their weighty matters of state and rush to rummage through the budget articles of a vast country – to scrape together enough money to train the dear applicant...
Ivanchuk believed he had gotten rid of the stubborn boy once and for all... But he was wrong. Without wasting time – the classes at the university had already begun – the next morning, Boris again climbed onto the third shelf of the same mail train, which again dragged him to Moscow.
Of course, he didn’t follow the rector’s advice. Instead of the Ministry of Finance, he began beating down the doors of the Ministry of Higher Learning again.
This time, strangers, friends of his girl, sheltered him. They also had little free space, but, behind their wardrobe, they had a large old coffer, on the lid of which, curled up in a ball, Boris slept.
The trouble was that, shortly before his arrival, the hosts had bought a TV set. It was a novelty and a luxury. In the evenings, until late, the neighbors from all over the communal apartment gathered in front of it, bringing their stools. Tired after a day of standing in line at the ministry, Boris couldn’t get enough rest. Sometimes, feeling guilty that he troubled the hosts, he spent the night on the bench of the waiting room of the Kyiv railway station, the one where trains came from Odesa. Before settling down on the bench, he looked around, wary of the cop who had driven him from Moscow. To sleep stretched out on a bench was possible only in fits and starts. At night, they swept the waiting room, driving passengers from place to place.
One night, a young boy, a neighbor, among those who came to watch TV, took pity on him and invited him to sleep in their room, in a rocking chair.
Boris spent several nights that way.
But he held out. He got an appointment with an official one more time. Soon, another letter signed by the deputy minister left Moscow for Odesa. Taught by hard experience, Boris no longer rushed straight to the train, leaving for Odesa. He sent a carbon copy of the letter to Aunt Paulina and asked her to see the rector.
The precaution was not in vain. The rector took the letter from his aunt and, in a practiced way of getting rid of the petitioners, he said, ‘We’ll answer you when we can.’
Back in Moscow, the very sight of the stubborn Odesa boy became an eyesore for the deputy minister’s assistant. He sent another letter to Odesa, an order leaving no room for any objections. It produced the desired effect. On October 8, 1952, on his birthday, Boris received a telegram from his aunt in Odesa:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! CONGRATS ON BEING ENROLLED IN THE UNIVERSITY
DESPITE ALL HIS TRAVAILS AND AGONY, Boris Samuilovich Verkhovsky got a higher education more easily than had, back in the eighteenth century, the famous Russian scientist Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, who is a household name now. Though Boris, like Lomonosov, also traveled to Moscow to get that education, he did it not as Lomonosov had done it, on foot, but by riding a train, albeit a slow one.
Unlike Lomonosov, Boris didn’t become a polymath who made important contributions to Russian literature, education, and science. However, having emigrated to America twenty years later, he grew into one of the world’s foremost authorities in computer information. He taught at Princeton University and worked on the staff of the most prestigious scientific centers – IBM and Bell Labs. They conferred on him many awards and distinctions, including the Millennium Prize and the Medal for Excellence in Computer Science. The European Academy of Sciences decorated him with the Blaise Pascal Medal and elected him its Vice President in 2004. One year, Boris Verkhovsky headed the commission for the nomination of Nobel Prize winners in his field.
We must agree: it is not too shabby an achievement for a representative of a ‘non-indigenous nationality…’
Boris Verkhovsky in America as a professor of computer science
Professor Emeritus of Russian at Hunter College in NYC, Emil Draitser is the author of seventeen books of artistic and scholarly prose. A three-time recipient of the prestigious New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellowships and Laureate of the International Mark Aldanov Literary Award, he also published his work in the Los Angeles Times, Partisan Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. His new book, Laughing All the Way to Freedom: Americanization of a Russian Émigré, is due the coming Spring from McFarland Publishers. (The author’s website: www.emildraitser.com)
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