In summer of 1956, a long line of American-made
limousines glided towards Tito’s palace at lake Bled. They were Buicks, Chevrolets and even a few Cadillacs out in
front. They carried two important
communist potentates, Soviet co-premiers Khruschev and Bulganin, and of course
their host - Tito.
Seeing important communists in capitalist-made cars
was not an unusual sight for me. Tito
had several residences near Kranj, my home town. We knew when he was coming.
Our house was along the highway and police always alerted us hours
before, by posting guards at dense intervals along the road. What the guards could not do is prevent
anybody from admiring these magnificent American automobiles with all that
chrome.
And, to dream.
Easy for a twenty year old. For,
one day, socialism will be completed and no longer will class distinction be
defined by the rich who own a pair of bicycles, and the poor, who own a pair of
shoes. Or even a better dream (if you
dared): socialism will collapse one day and we will all have cars like in
America.
The first decade of socialism was getting us
nowhere. While citizens in Western
Europe even those who were bombed into oblivion, were already searching for
parking places, a private car in Slovenia was almost unknown. What war and confiscations did not take out
of circulation, the wear and tear did.
By 1956, there was not a single traffic light in the whole country, to
say nothing about the parking meter.
And a traffic jam was called when a crowd stood around a 1956 Plymouth
with big tail fins.
Let me return to the Soviet chiefs; what were they
doing in Slovenia? Did their visit mean
a reconciliation? Did they want to
patch up the break Tito-Stalin of 1948?
Stalin was now dead and discredited and Tito was dealing with the
West. Yugoslavia had little else to
offer to the West but its somewhat strategic position and for this
“non-alignment” Tito was receiving annually several billion dollars of aid from
America. The aid came in several forms:
military aid, luxury products (as the limousines attest), cash, technology and
even some food for the people. What
were the Soviet communists after?
In a few months I found out what Soviets
wanted. But it took me another seven
years to find out why: political correctness finally caught up with the
Marxists. Here is how it happened.
Ancient Greek skeptics believed that all knowledge is uncertain. That led them to keep asking questions rather than becoming silenced by the certainty. That’s how we discovered the world is round and that the sun does not revolve around the earth. Vatican’s unacceptability of such “politically incorrect” knowledge prevented appearance of another Galileo on the Italian peninsula for several centuries that followed. Creativity simply moves where it is welcomed. And so it did; to France, Holland and England, where such minds as Newton added quantum jumps to our knowledge.
But let me return to 1956. A few months after Khruschev & Bulganin visit to Tito I had my first “professional” summer job. Entering the fourth year of electrical engineering, the assignment was at the company called Iskra, a state-owned manufacturer of electrical goods, a Yugoslavian General Electric. I was hoping to expand my interest in electronics but there was not much of it in these pre-transistor days and the first week was spent watching electro-mechanical telephone switching gear being built.
Then came an interesting change. My boss, who knew that I was following American electronic technology closely (without knowing my secret agenda), asked me to work on a new assignment. The job was more theoretical than practical, which suited me just fine. It was called something like Soviet Technological Assistance (STA) to Underdeveloped Nations. My job was to fill up many forms provided by STA program, describing in detail our manufacturing processes for several American devices that Iskra was manufacturing under license. I also had to copy all the mechanical parts used in manufacturing and provide electrical diagrams.
So this was the result of the visit by Khruschev and Bulganin. I could just hear the proposal to Tito: “The Soviet Union will provide you with this great technological assistance. And how will we do this you ask? You will take the Amerikanski device that you are building under license. You will copy the parts. Here is the machine that will do that; you put the part here, below the glass, focus the lens, put tracing paper on the flat glass, and trace the outline of the part. Add all the dimensions. Complete the forms, put together a package, and send it to the Minister of Industry in Moscow. Our experts and commissars will review your process and advise you where you can make improvements.”
Technology transfer from USA to USSR through Yugoslavia! I could not believe it. I never stayed around long enough to know if anything came back from Moscow. I decided that one month of this was enough and made a firm decision that I will never work under socialism again. It was time to get ready to skip across the border.
Seven years later I was working for IBM in San Francisco and lived in Berkeley. In mid-sixties, Berkeley was not yet polluted by left wing radicals, perversion activists and minority rights mafia. Often called the Athens of the West, the place had more Nobel Prize winners than potholes. It was one gusher of creativity that eventually made America the sole superpower -- and thus ensured pax Americana, the longest known period of peace since pax Romana.
In Berkeley I got to know one of the Nobelists, Emilio Segré. Professor Segré at that time headed the famous Department of Physics at the University of California. Once during a game of scrabble at Segre’s home in Lafayette, our conversation turned to the embargo of IBM computers to the Soviet bloc and then to how Soviets are stealing our secrets. I told him about my experience with Soviet Technological Assistance.
Professor Segré got up: “Let me show you why they need to do it.”
“Political correctness prevents invention.” He walked to his bookshelves and pulled out a book.
“This was given to me by Piotr Kapitsa[1]. It’s in German, translation of a Russian college physics textbook”, he said and pointed to a page which he obviously had kept well marked. Here it was, a sentence in bold letters, stating that according to Lenin, the foundation of Marxism is dialectic materialism, which conflicts with belief in God. “Therefore, the Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty is unacceptable to Marxists.”
I believed right away that this book was no fake. Soviets indeed provided translated school books to the nations of Eastern Europe under their control. I remember well my history books in Slovenian high schools. They were all translated Soviet history books. Here it was again --- a reverse form of the Soviet Assistance.
Let me repeat it: “Therefore, the Heisenberg’s Principle
of Uncertainty is unacceptable to Marxists.”
This Marxist dogma
delivered such an insidious blow to the Soviet state that revelation of Soviet
technological misery was uncovered only during the détente of the early 1960’s,
when some scientific exchange was allowed and Piotr Kapitsa brought this
innocently looking book through the Iron Curtain. But the revelation was not
known to many, for, few people read books written by physicists. Although the widening technological gap
between the two superpowers was apparent to most, the reason for it remained a
mystery for some time, perhaps even to CIA and the highest officials of US
government.
“I think I know why Soviets would pay any price for your computers ”, said Segré. “Schrödinger also wrote about Soviets transistor industry blunder” I remembered[2], and Segré commented that the cause of this gap between USA and the Soviet Union may not become apparent to the public for several decades.
Indeed. Almost thirty years later the damning evidence of what damage political correctness can do became apparent. Nevertheless, the credit for the collapse of USSR was given to the Soviet Secretary of Communist Party Mihail Gorbachev for allowing Glasnost and Perestroika[3] as well as to pressure from Strategic Defense Initiative, US military, and Reagan’s diplomacy. All these surely played a part, but a secondary part. The primary cause of Soviets’ demise was in a single word -- atheism.
The Soviet Union officially ignored the discoveries of several Nobel Prize winning physicists because it was politically incorrect, in violation of Marxism, “against dialectical materialism”, in short, too close to affirming God. Who were these men whose God sank the Soviets Empire?
Six Nobel Prize winners play a role in the
description of Soviet blunder. All six
are physicists: Werner Heisenberg
(Nobel prize 1932), Erwin Schrödinger
(1933), William Shockley (1956), Emilio Segré (1959), Lev Landau (1962), and
Pyotr Kapitsa (1978). All six
discovered undisputable laws of nature that opened development of the
cornucopia of electronic products we know today.
But not all scientific endeavors are
politically correct. In the Soviet
Union, discoveries had to conform strictly to the Party dogmas, such as the
dogma pronounced by Friederich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism who declared
in the 19th century that the law of conservation of energy was to be
forever fundamental to science[4]. (so far he’s been right, but that does not
excuse his pretense to play God.)
The free world was not constrained by any such
dogmas. Suffice it to say that
discoveries made by Heisenberg (principle of uncertainty) and Schrödinger
(quantum theory) allowed Shockley to invent the transistor, the device that,
from the late 50’s on, has been improving and extending our life in millions of
ways and forms.
While the transistor technology wildfire
spread throughout the free world, it could not jump the Iron Curtain. Political correctness of atheism simply did
not allow the 1927 Heisenberg’s discovery[5]
to be taught in schools. It was too
much for the Marxists that behavior of an electron could be predicted only on
the basis of probability. This was
close to admitting that God is the ultimate authority rather than Man, a
destructive idea in the society that was built on In Party We Trust
instead of In God We Trust.
The first evidence of this devastating twist
of political correctness appeared in early sixties in a book by Erwin
Schrödinger. In it he describes the
reasons for the ever-widening technology gap between USA and USSR. While USA was producing computers, TV,
radios, medical instruments, airplane navigation, etc., that used transistors,
the USSR continued to build the same circuits with vacuum tubes devices that we
remember glowing inside the radio sets of our grandmothers.
Years passed, and by 1970’s the Soviet economy fell
so far behind they would do anything to steal or buy transistor technology. Wisely, most of it was embargoed, so, many Soviet vice consul was
assigned to obtain designs, plans, and techniques from American semiconductor
industry in any way possible. The Party
would rather steal than directly acknowledge the existence of God.
But it was too late. This simple mistake could no longer be corrected[6]. They could never catch up. Emilio Segré compared the damage of
political correctness exercised by the Soviets in 20th century to that of
Vatican in the 16th century when they made Galileo recant. For three centuries that followed, science
simply left Italy and moved to friendly countries, England, France and
Holland.
In both cases, it was not God but organized
Religion that chased away Galileo’s and Heisenberg’s discoveries and stalled
the civilization.
Therefore, we must not confuse God and Organized Religion. To equate the two is like equating sky with airline schedules. Our judiciary will perhaps understand this and leave God alone. Only God knows where and when the next magnificent law of creation will be found.
You just cannot plan invention.
[1] Kapitsa--one of the few Soviet scientists to receive a Nobel Prize. Pjotr Kapitsa was born in Petrograd in 1894, attended Petrograd Polytechnic and in 1921 went to Cambridge. He worked with Sir Rutherford and became an assistant director of magnetic research at Cavendish laboratory, fellow of Trinity college and a member of the Royal society. In 1934 Kapitsa went to a professional meeting in Moscow from which never returned. When the American atomic secrets were passed to Soviets in the fifties, Kapitsa was one of the few scientists in the Soviet Union who understood Quantum Mechanics and was therefore placed in charge of developing the Soviet atomic bomb. But the importance of physics that gave birth to transistor was still not understood by the Party.
[2] Erwin Schrödinger: My view of the world, Translated from the German by Cecily Hastings, Cambridge, University Press, 1964.
[3] Russian for “free speech” and “change”, a novel concept for Soviet citizens who used to be shipped to Siberia by the thousands for even thinking such thoughts.
[4] … and Landau was severely castigated in the local [Soviet] papers for his (temporary) blasphemy … and eventually arrested by KGB. Landau’s students and colleagues were scolded for supporting Landau in his preaching “against dialectical materialism, and even against the theorem of energy conservation” . Ref. Secret World of Lev Landau, Scientific American, August 1997, page 74 - 75.
[5] In short, the Uncertainty Principle states that any attempt to measure the velocity of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, will confuse the simultaneous measurement of its position.
[6] "U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union proceeds on the assumption that the maintenance of power by the Soviet regime rests ultimately on force and that Soviet external aggressiveness stems in part from the nature of the Soviet political system,". [Richard] Pipes began [the forty-three-page secret NSC paper]. Pipes went on to quote Khruschev's conclusion that if a real arms race took place, it might "bring about the collapse of socialism and a restoration of capitalism in our country." Reagan’s War, by Richard Schweizer , Page 156.