Red Ice

The three sons were placed in the party youth organization, the Komsomol, and in a special school for peasants. The special school made good propaganda. Moreover, with the elimination of the feudal landowners, and then the kulaks, someone on the collectives had to know how to read the pyatiletka, the first five-year plan. Later, Sacha was inducted into the army and attended the Frunze Higher Military School. Pyotr followed by attending the Leninskiy Higher Naval School. Less robust, Yuri was chosen to study physics at a lesser-known university west of Moscow.

Yuri had little say in the matter, so it was fortunate it was a discipline he enjoyed. Unlike some of the other disciplines—genetics, for instance, under Lysenko—dealing in force, mass, velocity, and acceleration carried no politically charged baggage. Reticent, soft-spoken, but already hardened to the realities, he began to find subtle ways to challenge the new Soviet thought at his university. Though painfully shy, he became adept at counseling indirectly and at serving as a sounding board for his fellow students. Vyshinsky’s paternal influence was to change Kurganov’s life. They grew inseparable. Vyshinsky’s introverted, theoretical disposition complemented Kurganov’s vigorous, extroverted style. Among his many classmates—in peasant tradition—Vyshinsky had begun sowing seeds. In keeping with the trend of the new Soviet agriculture, there was little promise of a significant harvest.

Then came the Great Patriotic War. Yuri’s father and oldest brother, Sacha, died in defense of Rodina, the Motherland, in the first weeks of fighting after the German invasion. Still in school, Yuri Vyshinsky learned of the purges that had wiped away the cream of the Russian officer corps, just a few years before the attack, and which had helped to pave the way for German advances. The German planners had noted the purge carefully. As with the kulaks, the liquidation of the Russian officer corps resulted in the loss of millions of Russian lives.

Not long afterward, he was called up for service with a military intelligence unit that specialized in code-breaking. He demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for the work. Surprisingly, the secret lay not in his well-developed mathematical skills, but rather in his sensitive understanding of human nature and his ability to visualize and handle people—at a distance. It had to be at a distance. Something in him did not trust his ability to act directly. Like the Wizard of Oz, Yuri Vyshinsky was at his best hidden behind a curtain.

Eventually declining party membership, he advanced no further and was released at the war’s end.

Not long afterward he completed his degree and took a teaching position. Outside of the classroom, he was sought as a counselor by his students. Once again the shy physicist resumed his pattern of sowing seeds, as he called them, “of doubt and truth.”

By the ’Fifties, his brother Pyotr had risen to an important position in the Soviet submarine service. Pyotr’s influence brought Yuri an assignment to Lomonosov State University in Moscow, and secondarily won him tenancy in a communal apartment, a coveted privilege.

At Lomonosov, Yuri Vyshinsky’s students nicknamed him—with some warmth—krolik, the puppet, for his airy, disjointed mannerisms. They hypothesized that a stiff wind would tangle his strings and would send their professor flapping all the way to Gorky Park. The sobriquet held some truth, but would have been more accurate had it been the puppet maker, because his “sowing” was taking on more active aspects. Like a puppet maker, he created and inspired; but his was a gentle puppetry that guided, rather than controlled, the steps of his adopted charges. His method of pressing his dissension from behind a curtain was well suited for survival in the Soviet system.

By the mid-sixties, Yuri Vyshinsky had in his invisible way contributed to establishing the samizdat, the secret self-publishing network. Years later his brother Pyotr, now a captain, first rank, in the Baltic Fleet, came to him.

“There is no appropriate way I can think of, my brother, to convey the feeling of dying by millimeters. I am dying. Radiation sickness is now the official professional ailment of the Soviet submarine service. Through diligent application and loyal service in boats designed without people in mind, I have become an official casualty.”

He sighed with resignation. “When the choice is between the people and the state’s objectives, the people always pay for those objectives with their lives. The final joke is, the state’s objectives are never met anyway.”

Yuri, reticent as ever, spoke slowly. “You must leave the Soviet Union. You must get medical help. After Chernobyl it would appear the only reliable radiation-sickness treatment is to be found in the West.”