FROM RUSSIA WITH BRAINS

Mother Of Genius.
“Not by bread alone…” (Matthew 4:4.)
A great nation is measured by two special criteria, besides her wealth, economic output, and military might. The Nietzschean criterion of how such a nation treats its geniuses is a sort of moral evaluation of its spirit, and here, perhaps, Russia gets mixed reviews: invariably great for public appreciation, and mostly poor for their treatment by authority. But in the sheer output of genius in every sphere of creative endeavor, which may well be the most important criterion of national greatness, Russia is unsurpassed.
(In my book, this entry is followed by a large cluster of supersized entries intended to provide some modest, and very incomplete, testimony to that. Offering just small excerpts from my book on this blog, I am not putting those out here, but the following entry gives a little taste of them.)

From Russia With Brains.
…Continuing our discussion of the illustrious Russian names, we come to the lot that can be best described as Russia’s loss and America’s gain: Russian-born talents who chose to flee Russia and to come to America, where they contributed their geniuses to the greater glory of the American nation.
Mind you that I wouldn't be counting among them a Rachmaninoff, or a Stravinsky, or a Chagall, or even a Nabokov, none of whom, even having left Russia, had really stopped being Russian for posterity, but only those among the émigrés who were predominantly scientific and technological prodigies, and thus were giving direct boost to their adoptive country.
This entry, however, ought not to be misconstrued as a lamentation over Russia’s brain drain to the West, in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, or at any other time, including the most recent. In fact, Russia has enough genius to spread around, and it is such intellectual and spiritual generosity, which determines, among other things, a nation’s world-historical greatness outside of its borders.
The greatest Russian-American scientific genius to date may have been Vladimir Kuzmich Zworykin who is credited with the invention of television. Born in 1889 in the old Russian town of Murom, the same one that gave birth to the greatest hero of the Russian epos Byliny Ilya Muromets, he studied at the highly prestigious St. Petersburg Institute of Technology and later served in the Russian Signal Corps during World War I. He left Russia in 1918 and came to the United States in 1919. He filed his first patent for the television systems in 1923, and for the “kinescope” in 1929. He died at the age of 92 in Princeton, N.J. in 1982. He is the only one in this entry to be included in the Hart Greatest 100, which certainly speaks to his colossal importance.
But he is not the only giant among the smaller fry in our account. Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (1889-1972), the aviation pioneer and the creator of the helicopter, is ranked second in importance after the Wright Brothers, in the history of aviation, and this is saying a lot!
And what about another great aviation pioneer, Alexander Prokofiev-Seversky (1894-1974), the inventor of air-to-air refueling (1921). To his credit also goes the Seversky P-35 fighter aircraft, developed in 1937.
Next we go to Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff (1867-1952). Lieutenant-General in the Red Army, he went over to the US to become the father of the US petroleum chemistry. And yet another Russian-American, Alexander Matveyevich Poniatoff (1892-1980), was an engineer-inventor who in 1944 founded the AMPEX Company, named after himself (Alexander Matveyevich Poniatoff +Excellence) Company. In 1956 AMPEX created the first rotary tape recorder, the VR-1000 videotape recorder.
Next comes Otto Struve, (1897-1963), a Russian of German origin, a scion of the prodigious Struve family, who was to become an American. A prominent astronomer himself, his very famous family counted several generations of astronomers. Having settled in the United States in 1921, he got his PhD in 1923, becoming a professor of astrophysics and director of the Yerkes Observatory operated by the University of Chicago in Wisconsin. He was also the longtime editor of the Astrophysical Journal, and President of the International Astronomical Union.
Next in this very incomplete but telling list we have Wassily Leontief (1905-1999), the recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics, whose contribution to this rather un-Russian science has been huge. It makes no sense to retell the specifics of his achievement in a few words, which should be impossible, or at length, which would be a waste of space here, as the reader is welcome to obtain adequate information from any standard reference source.
And, finally, it may be worthwhile to mention the avalanche of Russian prodigies descending on the United States in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. I could still go on and on, of course, with more Russian-American names in the same category, but it makes sense to stop here, because the point which I have been attempting to make is, hopefully, made. Why, then, a sensible person ought to ask, was the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik, the first man-made object in outer space, such a colossal shock to the American nation? Was there a gross underestimation of Russia’s native creative spirit, and of her determination to win the superpower race into space? The genius of Russia is as inexhaustible, and perhaps even more so, than her celebrated energy resources, and her other national treasures. This is a point worth keeping in mind at all times, especially for those who may still be doubting whether, after the tumble of the mighty Soviet Empire, Russia could have retained her great power status.