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The Spy Who Changed History

Page 11

by Svetlana Lokhova


  Soviet engineers had acquired valuable experience working with captured or purchased armoured vehicles since 1917, and they soon realised Christie had sold them a pup. His tank chassis did make a favourable impression, but over a ten-day field trial the turret-less tank could only cover a distance of ninety-three miles, breaking down many times. It was fast, clocking up an unprecedented road speed of 43 mph, but cooked the crew in the process to an internal temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Other flaws in the model were evident; the doors, for example, were so small that no full-sized man could climb inside. After the fiasco, Stalin ordered that there would be no more attempts to buy quick solutions from abroad.

  The unsuccessful field testing led the Soviets to reject Christie’s design and focus on a domestic solution. They adopted his chassis as standard and copied the innovative sloping front armour for their BT series of fast tanks. The BT series would evolve into the most famous Soviet tank, the T-34, Christie’s name entering Soviet folklore when the T-34 was referred to by Stalin as a ‘Christie’. But the trip had proved that the Russians’ perfect tank did not exist, even abroad.

  • • •

  An earlier mission to the US by the spy Abraham Einhorn (codename TARAS) had entirely random goals and was planned without consulting the leaders of the aviation industry. Einhorn’s most notable success had been to steal a blueprint for a Packard aircraft engine, saving in his opinion ‘a million dollars’.16 No one in Russia wanted the engine.17

  • • •

  The visit to New York had been an eye-opener for the arriving Russians. It was a glimpse into their future. They were completely unused to cities where human-made buildings obscured the sky. As the Boston party boarded the train to leave New York City, they were treated to one last modern miracle, Grand Central Station, the largest railway station in the world. The railway engineers were thrilled by the scale of the design of the immense central concourse and the two separate underground floors of tracks.fn4

  Five hours later, on arrival at Boston South Station, the Harvard party of six and their MIT-bound colleagues boarded a bus to their accommodation in Cambridge. The students had a date with the Dean, Dr Tryon. They could not be late for registration and the grand tour, but first they must make a stop to change their clothes. Shumovsky hurried to put on his new two-piece double-breasted suit in dark grey.18 A necessary initial step for any Russian visitor to America was to equip yourself un-ashamedly with all the fashion accoutrements of capitalism. A trip to a men’s outfitter was a prerequisite before meeting your first Americans. As an ambassador of a thriving new society, it was important to look the part, and to be taken seriously in business or around the campus one needed to make a good first impression. Contemporary photographs always show Soviet trade delegations wearing new double-breasted suits, bow ties and even on occasions pince-nez. A suit and tie were everyday dress even for students; the army of laboratory technicians at the Institute wore overalls and did all the heavy lifting. Only when smelting metals might a student remove his jacket.

  After completing individual registration inside the crush of Building 10, the students filed back outside into the calm and introduced themselves to Dr Tryon, who asked politely which course each was studying and dutifully enquired if they understood their class schedule for the following day. Formed into three lines, each man kitted out in his new elegant American suit – the preference overall being for light grey – the students then posed for a commemorative photo on the steps of Building 10, overlooking Killian Court. Builders had engraved the names of notable scientists and philosophers on the friezes of the surrounding limestone-clad buildings. A measure of the significance of the moment for the plans of the young USSR was that the photo appeared in many Soviet newspapers, and copies survive in the Belorussian state archive today.

  Shumovsky was in the front row near the Dean, as befitted his status in the party. Like the others, he is clutching his registration pack. Considerably taller than most of the rest of the group at over six foot, and looking like a serious academic in his glasses, he holds his head high. He is gazing into the distance as if reading the names of the famous scientists on the friezes, contemplating the challenges ahead.

  To the exhausted, travel-worn Russians MIT was an alien world. At first sight, the campus was an eclectic mixture of classical-style buildings, designed on a grand scale and housing modern laboratories and lecture theatres. Building 10 with its gigantic pillars, iconic dome and vast auditorium epitomised the attempt to impose old world architecture on the new. It was a shock to learn that the site had only been opened fifteen years ago. The campus had the appearance of a giant classical temple dedicated to the advancement of modern technology. The twenty-five Russians learned that they were the second largest contingent of foreigners after the Canadians among the 182 non-American students enrolled in 1931.19

  After their individual registration and photograph, Dr Tryon took the Russians to a nearby lecture theatre and showed them an hour-long silent movie introducing MIT and the excitement of an engineering career. Its familiar message, that ‘Engineers harness the great sources of powers in nature for the convenience and use of mankind’,20 was almost socialist in nature and could have come straight from the Five-Year Plan. The movie, one of Tryon’s innovations, designed to recruit students to the Institute in the difficult economic climate, illustrated the importance of engineers to society, showcasing suspension bridges, power plants, aircraft, factories and skyscrapers. Captured on film were the main departments of MIT and its latest investments in state-of-the-art research, such as giant Van de Graaff generators. Also featured was Vannevar Bush’s early analogue computer, termed ‘a thinking machine’, for solving differential equations. (A later version proved a failure at cracking Soviet espionage codes.)

  Arrival at MIT – Russian students with the dean outside Building 10, (Shumovsky is second left, front row)

  After the movie showing, the Dean gave Shumovsky and the other students a short tour of the excellent facilities, lecture halls and laboratories before they split into groups to visit their faculties. As the party fanned out the Russians gained a feeling for the open space and scale of the campus. With numbers in decline, there were only just over 3,100 students enrolled in the Institute. Russian universities, in contrast, were packed to the rafters; Shumovsky’s new aeronautics school in Moscow enrolled 5,000–7,000 students.21 In comparison, Course 16, on which Shumovsky was now enrolled – undergraduate aeronautics, then part of the mechanical engineering department – was limited to just thirty students per year. With an intake deliberately restricted to keep academic standards high, the course was extremely selective, being only for ‘specially qualified students who can assimilate in four years the essentials of mechanical engineering and at the same time, the fundamentals of aeronautical science with some introduction to its application’.22 It was a tough ask for an American student in four years; Shumovsky was given three. On top of the time pressure, he was required not only to complete the course in an unfamiliar language, but to master at the same time a reading knowledge of French and German.

  Nevertheless he was in the best possible place. MIT was training the world’s finest aeronautical engineers, and the teachers were industry leaders. While the course was kept small, the laboratory resources were state of the art. MIT was proud to be the first and the best in aeronautics, and was determined to remain so.

  In addition to the challenges presented by language, Shumovsky had to get used to the different approach to teaching he found at MIT. The institute followed the European polytechnic university model, emphasising laboratory instruction, not mass lectures. Russian university curriculums in contrast were dominated by hours of theoretical lectures for five months of the year, followed by five months of work on the factory floor. There were no tidy university laboratories with teams of assistants to clean up and set up experiments. The goal in the Soviet Union was quantity, not quality. The new factories needed engineers turned out in short or
der by the thousands. There was no place for an elite university teaching just thirty engineers to this high level. Stalin’s much bigger project demanded engineers who could fix an engine or maintain a machine.

  Soviet universities were attempting a social experiment of affirmative action in favour of workers and against those with a bourgeois or intellectual background. Student admission had been expanded, but standards were low thanks to the poor literacy that was a legacy of the Tsarist education system. There were no exams, either at entrance or during the course. Instead, students were awarded a pass or fail based on quizzes and a character reference from the professor.

  Perhaps the greatest difference between the two systems was the practice of open democracy. In Russia, despite the acute shortage of teachers, students could vote to remove a professor they felt was not up to standard. Many professors had emigrated, and those who had stayed found it hard to thrive in this heightened political atmosphere, which meant that any teacher who dared to ask challenging questions risked being accused of plotting the overthrow of the Soviet state. It was all a different world from MIT’s calm neoclassical temple, dedicated to technology and science.

  • • •

  In the 1930s, just as the Russians arrived, the prominent scientists President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush took charge of MIT. Compton’s reforms introduced a higher standard that allowed ‘the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering’. Technology in the 1930s never stood still: as the aircraft themselves got faster and more sophisticated, so did the pace of innovation.

  New planes were fitted with more powerful engines and routinely flew faster than any wind tunnel in existence could test. So MIT kept up to date by working hand in hand with the industry and the military to afford its investment in the latest equipment. Revenue from its research projects and inventions was as important as fees and endowments in this regard.23 America’s unique and dynamic aviation market was dominated by the civilian sector – especially orders for passenger airliners and cargo planes – rather than by its military. In the USSR, the demands of the military took precedence. At the time, the US lagged well behind the world in military air power despite having the leading civil aviation industry. As a result of the weakness of US armed forces Soviet assessments never viewed the US as a major military threat despite the intense ideological hostility.

  At no Soviet university could the facilities compare with those on offer at MIT. On his tour, Shumovsky learned that the Institute had been conceived as a ‘Conservatory of Art and Science’, founded on 10 April 1861 by William Barton Rogers to address rapid scientific and technological advances. This was the same year that, in Russia, many of the party members’ grandparents had been freed from serfdom.

  The fledgling school had suffered from chronic financial shortages and had only moved from its original cramped Back Bay location in 1916 to this spacious new campus on a mile-long tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. Funded primarily by donations from the industrialist George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak,fn5 the new site had space for sports pitches and tranquil gardens along the breezy bank. A glider could take off and land in the grounds.

  Aside from the superb academic facilities, Shumovsky looked on with open-mouthed astonishment at the decadence of student life, still in full vibrant swing at the start of a new academic year despite the Great Depression and prohibition. As in Russia, military service was still compulsory for MIT students, and the American freshmen they met during those first days had returned exhausted from a weekend under canvas and games in the woods. The military veterans among the Russians offered to give their classmates drilling on the campus a few pointers on the realities of army life. But while the Russians were at MIT to work, not to party, American students enjoyed a full social life of dances and sport. Drinking was the hot topic. With the end of prohibition, low-alcohol beer would reappear on campus in March 1933. The perplexed Shumovsky explained that excessive drinking at Soviet universities could lead to expulsion and treatment at a sanatorium. Glancing through contemporary editions of The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, Shumovsky was mystified by the range of leisure-time activities on offer to his fellow students. Tugs of war and bow-tied banjo bands were perhaps vaguely understandable, but wrestling in oil was completely incomprehensible.

  Equally puzzling was American humour. Shumovsky was horrified to read in The Tech in 1935 that ‘Agent 001’ of the NKVD had infiltrated MIT. The paper said that a Russian secret agent had discharged a tear gas grenade in a chemical warfare lecture, after which the talk had descended into chaos. Tear gas is mixed with other poison gas to force a victim exposed to the mixture to remove their gas masks to rub their irritated eyes, allowing the poison gas to do its work. The Tech identified the editor of Voodoo magazine, a monthly satirical rival on campus, as the Soviet agent responsible.24 No one believed at the time that a representative of the much-feared Soviet secret service was actually walking the campus.

  None of the Soviets joined the myriad of sport or social clubs on offer. None became fraternity members. As a married man with a young family, Shumovsky was less interested than some in a dance with the coeds from Wellesley. He could not risk jeopardising his vital mission with a romantic entanglement. Many, like Shumovsky himself, did however join the societies relating to their academic specialisation, attracted by the range of ‘smokers’ – as talks and discussion groups with experts were called – on offer.

  • • •

  After an exhausting day the Russians walked back to their boarding houses for their first night as the sun was setting. The MIT students were boarded in two houses close to the campus, 8 Bigelow Street25 and 294 Harvard Street, Cambridge.26 Within five minutes’ walk of each other and fifteen minutes from campus, the properties were both large, newly built townhouses. The accommodation was luxurious relative to the barracks-style conditions at Soviet universities. The students continued living communally, as was typical of their homeland. All this was arranged by AMTORG.

  Now for the first time they had a few moments to unpack personal possessions, photographs and books, and write a letter home after weeks of travelling. All the Russian students were married, and they were due to be away from their young families for a long time. For an unknown reason, one student was however recalled after just a week. Four more left after completing their studies in a year. Only eight would study for three years, and none stayed as long as Shumovsky.27 The students divided themselves between the two houses in a way that reflected their characters. The dozen in the Harvard Avenue house with Shumovsky contained the serious members of the group, his friends. Like him, they were eager to learn all that MIT could teach them. His closest friend in this group was the mechanical engineer Ivan Trashutin, from Shumovsky’s home city of Kharkov.28 Trashutin had been fiddling with diesel engines since his childhood. One of only two children to survive from the seven produced by his parents, from a young age he had experienced extreme poverty bordering on deprivation after his father marched off with the Red Army and disappeared in the Civil War. Aged just eight, young Ivan went to work in the Kharkov railway factories. He received no formal education for a decade afterwards but possessed a natural ability with engines, and by the time he arrived in Cambridge he was the number-two diesel engine designer in the Soviet Union. The youngest of the party, he was blessed with infectious enthusiasm and a ready smile. Ivan was a joy to teach, rolling his sleeves up to get to work. His proudest moment was achieving his Master’s degree, and he treasured his parchment certificate, signed by Karl Compton, for the rest of his illustrious life.

  It is doubtful that any alumnus of MIT contributed more individually to the Allied victory in the Second World War than Trashutin. As his professors at MIT found, when it came to engines Ivan had the rare gift of making the complicated simple. Trashutin deservedly won many awards in his lifetime – although, surprisingly, there has so far been no recognition from MIT. Even the Nazis christened him
‘Ivan Diesel’ in awe of his achievements. He designed the power unit that drove the victorious Red Army’s armoured divisions from the gates of Moscow to Berlin. His was the engine inside every Soviet tank from the T-34 to the T-72. The engine was powerful, lightweight and easy to manufacture and maintain, demonstrating the talent for simplicity identified in his years at MIT – and, running as it did on diesel, it was a lifesaver. Thousands of Soviet tank crews, including my own grandfather, owed their lives to the extra moments they had to escape from their wrecked vehicles, as diesel catches fire less easily than petrol. Trashutin learned at MIT how to mass-produce engines the American way.

  As the students unwound in the evenings over endless cups of tea and cigarettes, Shumovsky got to know Eugene Bukley and Yefim Medkov, who were studying electrical and transport engineering. As the elected leader of the Communist Party cell formed by the students, Medkov was responsible for organising the monthly Party meetings, communicating the latest bulletins from Moscow – it was his job to pass on the new orthodoxy in a time of great political change and debate in Russia – and maintaining discipline.

  Communists were expected to behave properly at all times. Poor personal discipline could lead to the miscreant’s expulsion from the Party, a disaster for a person’s career. That ultimate sanction was not in Medkov’s power, but he could write reports to the Party leader in New York about the progress of the students and report his concerns about ill discipline.29

 

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