The Question That Should Not Have Been Asked

A note on context for readers unfamiliar with Soviet academic life: in the Soviet system, a dean controlled a graduate's path into a scientific career, but a university rector held far greater authority — and far greater exposure. Going over a dean's head to challenge his decision was not a bureaucratic formality. It was a real risk, in a state where ideology could reach into every academic appointment, and where a rector who intervened on the wrong side of an unwritten rule could pay for it with his own career.

There is another detail worth explaining before the story begins. Soviet identity documents recorded a person's ethnicity as a fixed legal category — a single line that could open doors or close them for life. Parents who could arrange it sometimes asked to have a different nationality recorded for a child, simply to protect that child's future. This was not deception. It was survival inside a system that had made ethnicity itself into a form of risk.

With that in mind, here is the story.

Young and ambitious — that was me back then. My days were full of students, one after another, and I was lucky with almost all of them, though the work itself was never light. I taught them to write science, prepared them for conferences, fought for the travel funds to get them there, and, when the time came, helped decide their path into research. For years, luck made all of this easy.

Until, one day, it didn't.

A brilliant student of mine was graduating. I recommended him for a research career without a second thought. He went to the dean's office to complete the paperwork. He was turned away at the door.

I went straight to the dean. "How can this be?" I asked.

He looked at me as though the answer were obvious. "You don't know his background," he said. "He's Jewish."

I was stunned. "I didn't know, and I don't see what difference it makes."

"Then go to the rector," he said. "It's out of my hands."

Before that meeting, I found the young man himself and asked him, gently, a question I never imagined I would need to ask: what was his family's background, really?

He turned red, then pale, and broke into a sweat before he answered. "When my parents registered me," he said, "my father asked the clerk to write down a different nationality. So that is what went into my papers."

That was the country we lived in. It reached into the most private facts of a person's life and decided, in advance, what those facts were allowed to cost them. 

I went to the rector and laid out the whole situation. "My best student is being blocked," I told him, "for a reason that has nothing to do with his work."

A different man might have looked away. He didn't. He overruled the decision and took full responsibility for doing so — in a state we can now say plainly was totalitarian in exactly this way. He was not afraid to be the one who said no to it. 

That student went on to earn the highest research degree his field offered. Together, over the years that followed, we helped lay the foundations of what is today a recognized field of study: the biomechanics of the heart. Our early work on how the heart's tissue bears mechanical stress, in health and after a heart attack, and on the acoustic signals produced when cardiac tissue tears, was among the first of its kind. He practices today as a respected cardiologist, far from where this story began.

 

I think of my rector often, and with real gratitude — not only for what he did for one student, but for what he refused to let a bureaucratic question become.

More about this topic can be found in "Biographies Perspectives focused on individual agency, socio-cultural dimensions, and personal narratives within health and science. To read articles in this area, visit: People"  in the Index.

Mykola Iabluchanskyi