Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

In, I think, early autumn 1955, a group of Soviet ministers for a variety of industries, including the chemical industries, led by A. N. Kosygin, then Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, visited Britain. The party went around the country seeing various industrial operations, and, at the end of their trip, they had a week-end in which to do sightseeing in London and pay a visit to Cambridge on the Sunday as guests of the university. The Vice-Chancellor at that time, Professor B. W. Downs, was also Master of my own college (Christ's), and he invited me to join the party for lunch in Christ's, largely on the grounds that he, a Scandinavian languages expert, was somewhat alarmed at having to entertain a group of technocrats. When I arrived for lunch, the Vice-Chancellor said he had learned to his horror that he was supposed to look after the party until tea-time and he had made no arrangements for such an eventuality. Could I find some way of looking after the visitors for him?

When I came to Cambridge in 1944 one of my conditions was that the university would give top priority to a new building for chemistry. The university was as good as its word, although, what with licensing problems and steel shortages we were unable to make a start until after 1950, and even then had to proceed very slowly. However, by the time of the Soviet ministers' visit it was approaching completion, and so I suggested to them that they might like to see the new laboratory. They said they would very much like to do so, so off we went and made a tour of it. At the end of it Kosygin said they had much enjoyed seeing it, but presumably we had another laboratory which was currently in use - could they see it? I said, 'Certainly,' and we all trooped off to the old chemical laboratory in Pembroke Street. In the course of walking around it, we passed through one of the research laboratories in which four young men were busily working, whereupon Kosygin remarked 'I see that you make your students work on Sundays.'

'Not at all. These men are not being made to work. They are, in fact, postdoctoral research workers who are here on Sunday afternoon of their own free will, because they want to get on with their research.'

Kosygin looked a bit doubtful so I added, 'Would you like to meet them?'

'Yes,' was the answer, so I called them over, introduced them and had them tell Kosygin what they were doing. It so happened that the group comprised an American, an Australian, a New Zealander and a Scotsman.

'You seem to have a very international group,' said Kosygin.

'Yes,' I said, 'I should think that about half of my research school comes from overseas.'

'That is very interesting, for you must have formed some opinion of the training of chemists in various countries. Where do you get the best people - from Germany perhaps?'

'No,' I said, 'my experience is that, in general, the German students are trained to do just what they are told by their professors, and are not encouraged to be original.'

'Oh! - then perhaps the Swiss - they have strong chemical industry too.'

'No, they are rather like the Germans in their attitude.'

'Well then, what kind do you like, and where do you get them?'

'I like them to display originality in approach, and that I find most often in Australians, Americans, New Zealanders and our own British students. Unfortunately, I can't really say anything about Soviet students.'

'Oh! Why not?'

'You know perfectly well why not. You never let them out.'

'Yes, we do!'

'Yes, to Bulgaria or Poland, etc. You don't send any of them here.'

'You wouldn't take them.'

'Who said I wouldn't take them? I couldn't take a hundred but I give you my word here and now that I am willing to take two of your young researchers whenever you care to send them to me.'

'Do you mean you will take our students?'

'Certainly. But I have three conditions - (1) they must be good chemists or I'll send them home to Moscow; (2) this is a chemical laboratory containing people from a variety of countries. We have nothing to do with politics, and your people must come here, live and work with the others in the laboratory, leaving politics alone; and (3) I don't want to have them under continuous supervision by your Embassy officials.'

'Fair enough,' said Kosygin. 'I'll think about this when I get back to Moscow.'

And we left it at that.

About a couple of months later a Soviet Academy of Sciences delegation led by the President, A. N. Nesmeyanov, came over to Britain as guests of the Royal Society, and I was asked by our President, Lord Adrian, to join him and a few others at a sherry party given by the Royal Society at the Athenasum in London to welcome the Russian party. When the Russians arrived Nesmeyanov promptly got hold of me and said, 'Todd, I want to talk to you.'

'Certainly,' I said, 'why not now?'

'Fine!' said Nesmeyanov. 'Kosygin has been to see me and told me that you would accept a couple of Russian research students. Is this true?'

'Yes - but subject to my conditions.'

'I know - Kosygin told me your conditions and we accept them. When can you take the two men?'

'Anytime you wish.'

'All right, I'll send them to you in September 1956 and they can stay with you till April 1957.'

And so it was. In September the first Russian research workers (both postdoctorals) to come to this country after the war - N. K. Kochetkov and E. A. Mistriukov - came and worked in Cambridge. The experiment was most successful; the two young Russians fitted in well, and were popular members of the laboratory. They became and remain my close friends; Kochetkov, now an Academician, is Director of the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry in Moscow, and Mistriukov is a staff member of the same Institute.

In this way contact with Russian research was re-established, and since then a two-way exchange traffic in research workers between the Soviet Union and this country has developed much, I believe, to our mutual benefit. An interesting sidelight on this matter of scientific exchanges with the Soviet Union prior to my intervention is cast by a conversation I had with Nesmeyanov not long afterwards. He asked me how I had managed to arrange it with the British authorities to get the young Russians admitted, because they had tried for some years through scientists known to be friends of the Soviet Union (e.g. Blackett and Bernal) to get exchanges started, and had failed completely. I pointed out that, bearing in mind the somewhat uneasy relations between our two countries over nuclear matters in those days, there would seem to be little hope of success if he and his colleagues tried to set up things via physicists with well known left-wing affiliations! Had they simply approached the Royal Society, matters would probably have been quite different.

Shortly before our Russian students left for home, my wife and I were invited to visit the Soviet Union as guests of the Academy of Sciences, and, accordingly, we made our first visit to that country at the end of May 1957. A visit to Russia in those days still had an exotic flavour, but was not without its problems. We could get little or no information about our trip, received visas only at the last moment and set off from London by Finnair not knowing where we should stay or who, if anyone, was to look after us on arrival in Moscow. As it turned out, of course, we needn't have worried. We were greeted on the tarmac at Vnukovo airport by a large Academy group bearing masses of flowers for my wife. All formalities were attended to by an official on our behalf, and we were lodged in a comfortable Edwardian style suite in the Hotel Moskva in the centre of the city near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi Theatre. I lectured at the Zelinsky Institute, and we had the full treatment of sightseeing, opera and ballet. Our visit coincided with one by Sir Malcolm Sargent, who lodged in the British Embassy with our ambassador Sir Patrick Reilly and his wife. All of us visited Leningrad together, and attended there a concert conducted by Sir Malcolm and enthusiastically received by a large audience. The Russian visit was very interesting, and we made a number of new friends, but Moscow, and even Leningrad, despite its elegant buildings and the Hermitage Museum, struck me as drab and with a rather oppressive atmosphere. The drabness was emphasised by the obvious shortage of consumer goods and the indifferent quality of those that were available, and by the monotonous appearance of the rather poorly constructed box-like buildings which had been springing up all over Moscow and Leningrad since the war, to try to cope with the housing problem, which had arisen, partly from the war, and partly as a result of the movement of population from the countryside to the cities. I felt it oppressive, because we seemed to be under continuous surveillance; indeed, only during a day's picnic with several friends at Academician Nesmeyanov's dacha or country house outside Moscow, did we feel ourselves in really relaxed surroundings. Even when we went to Sochi on the Black Sea coast for a few days with our guide-interpreter, I had the same feeling of regimentation, which only left when we were on a brief excursion into northern Georgia. It is only fair to say that, in numerous visits I have since paid to the Soviet Union, matters in these respects have been steadily improving, although I feel that, even today, the Russians accept, as a matter of course, a degree of regimentation through their all-pervading bureaucracy, which most people in England would find hard to accept. One beneficial effect of this first visit to Moscow was that it caused me to do something about my Russian. I had learnt a bit of Russian many years before, largely because it seemed a rather interesting language, but, in the years that followed, I had never had occasion to use it. As a result, when I was in Moscow in 1957, I found, to my dismay, that I had almost wholly forgotten it, although, after a few days, I began to recall odd words and phrases. This experience caused me, on my return to England, not to start formal lessons but to persuade a friend, Mrs Natasha Squire, who taught Russian in the university, to submit to the trial of holding (or trying to hold) regular conversations with me. Slowly this worked, and over a few years I recovered much of what I had lost; this greatly added to my enjoyment of subsequent visits to the Soviet Union.