A Refusenik Finds His Academic Refuge : USC Provides Mathematician a Sanctuary to Renew Research That Was Denied by Soviets

When word came last August that Victor Kipnis and his family were finally being given permission to leave the Soviet Union, the distinguished Jewish mathematician had a nightmare.

It was that the rest of the world did not exist. All that he had read in contraband books about democratic societies, all that he had heard in snatches about other peoples and other lands on the BBC and Voice of America “was a fiction.” In the dream, he said, there was “no other world. There was only the the Soviet Union.”

But it was only a dream. After nearly seven years of what he describes as systematic persecution and months of nervous waiting after permission had finally been granted, Kipnis was allowed to pack his bags and leave the only country that he had ever known, but one that he had grown to hate.

Now settling into a tiny one-bedroom, virtually bare apartment on the fringes of Beverly Hills (so that his 16-year-old son can attend what his father has been told is the best high school in the Los Angeles area), Kipnis, 37, is about to begin his new life as an American university professor.

For the Soviet expert in theoretical statistics who was considered an enemy of the Soviet government, it is the end of a nightmare. But for USC, it is a dream come true.

Three and a half years ago, in what was generally considered a bold but futile gesture, USC quietly sent a two-man delegation to the Soviet Union to hand-deliver invitations for one-year “visiting scholar” appointments to seven eminent Soviet scientists.

The scholars, whose temporary appointments were approved through normal academic channels at USC, were part of a much longer list of names drawn up by the New York-based Committee of Concerned Scientists, which for years has been trying to offer support to political dissidents and refuseniks, Soviet Jews who have been denied permission to emigrate.

Fired From Research Posts

All the scholars to whom USC made offers were men and women who, despite their stellar research careers, had been fired from their high-ranking research posts, stripped of their academic degrees, banned from scientific meetings and even denied access to libraries in the Soviet Union. One, Alexander Paritsky, a physicist who had been an organizer of a “Refusenik University” in the Soviet Ukraine, had been sentenced for “anti-Soviet agitation” to three years in a Siberian labor camp.

Although some scholars believe that there are as many as 20,000 refuseniks in Moscow alone, no university had ever made so many blanket offers and no one at USC ever “really believed” that they would come, said USC Rabbi Laura Geller. Geller is helping organize a major reception for Kipnis on Sept. 4, at which the Jewish community in Los Angeles is planning to present USC with a new humanitarian award for its efforts on behalf of human rights.

Geller’s own active work on the issue began, she said, when she and a handful of other Jewish employees at USC heard vivid details of the persecution of Jewish scholars and other political dissidents in the Soviet Union from Yuri Shtern, an economist who had been permitted to leave the Soviet Union for Israel in the early 1980s.

Because of the fear that communications from abroad would never reach any of the Soviet scientists, Irwin C. Lieb, then USC vice president and provost, and Michael Melnick, an associate professor of basic sciences, decided to travel to the Soviet Union and hand-deliver the invitations with copies sent to appropriate Soviet officials and word of their trip released to the press after their departure.

In a 40-page letter to his sons after his return, Lieb described the fear that he and Melnick felt, the elaborate system of coded names and addresses that they had devised, the furtive meetings in subway stations and in dismal apartments with the ostracized scholars.

“No one thought our offers would get them out of the Soviet Union, but many believed that the attention that would be drawn to them in the West would at least keep them out of jail because of the Soviet government’s sensitivity about such matters outside their own borders,” Lieb said.

In a recent interview, Lieb recalled that Kipnis was one of the refuseniks whom he and Melnick were most concerned about. “He was bitter and harsh.” In a country where most people are constantly glancing over their shoulders to see who is watching and who is listening, “he spoke carelessly.”

Kipnis, too, remembers the meeting with his American visitors. It was not the first time that foreigners had come to see him to offer their support and consolation. But when they offered him a job, he said, “It was a shock. . . . It was wonderful.”

“By that time, I had lost my job (as had his wife, Marina, who had been a chemist in a Moscow research institute). I was angry. I didn’t care if they were KGB agents.” But, in fact, he said, he knew that his visitors were not KGB men posing as USC administrators simply by the way that they were dressed.

“It was February, 1983,” he recalled in heavily accented but fluent English. “It was rather cold in Moscow. But you should have seen what he (Lieb) was wearing. This very, very thin coat. And this unproper hat for Russian winter. And his shoes--the soles were very, very thin. He was green with cold. . . . But then when I heard they were from Los Angeles, I understood.”

What Kipnis long before had come to understand was that, for him, living in the Soviet Union was “living a lie.”

All of his life, he said, he had carried an identification card. Unlike those of most fellow citizens, his did not say “Russian” or “Ukrainian.” It said “Jew.” And, yet, as a Jew he was taught to ignore his heritage. He could not practice its rituals. He could not study its teachings.

“And, as a Soviet citizen, of course, I could not criticize my own government. . . . The conditions of life were terrible. My parents were afraid to tell me the truth because they knew nothing could be done. They just wanted me to have a happy childhood. I think they were wrong. When I had a chance to know the truth, to read some books and to know there were other ways of thinking, I could no longer live that lie. And I could not let my son see me living that lie. I had to teach him that there was another way to live. But we could not do it in the Soviet Union.”

Upon leaving their homeland last November--Kipnis is so far the only one of the seven scholars invited by USC who has been allowed to emigrate--the Kipnises flew to Vienna. With only their belongings, they did not have enough money to see even one opera. “But the museums and the buildings, they were beautiful,” his wife said recently with obvious contentment.

From Vienna, they went to a relocation center outside Rome, where they studied English and prepared for a new life. But where that new life was to be, they were not sure.

Kipnis remembered the USC offer but was, he said, “embarrassed” to contact the university to see if it was still open after so much time had passed. Although word of their emigration had reached the United States, it did not come in time for USC to reissue its invitation. So the family departed once again, this time for Toronto, where Marina Kipnis’ sister and her family were living.

But the connections were eventually made, and the offer was indeed still good.

Now, less than a week before classes are to begin for the fall semester, the Kipnises are trying to settle into their new American life. “So far, the worse thing I have found in the West is that every American must have two things. And without these two things, he is nothing. I mean a driver’s license and a credit card. I cannot drive, so I am at a loss in this regard. . . . And having been here only a short time, I don’t seem to qualify for credit.”

There have been other inconveniences as well. Having been told they could take no written materials outside the Soviet Union, Kirill, Kipnis’s son, has no record of his vaccinations, which are required before he can enroll in high school. He spent last weekend recovering from a series of new shots. But now that that is behind him, he is spending long hours every day, not at the beach or touring Hollywood, but in the library among books of Russian literature by such writers as Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, which he has never before been able to read.

Catching Up on Reading

That is where the elder Kipnis is spending his time, too, but not for pleasure. He is at work trying to catch up on seven years of back reading in his field of theoretical statistics. What he has found has come as something of a shock. “I find the questions that were of interest (to mathematical statisticians and econometricians) when I was still allowed to do serious research are no longer, how do you say, in fashion now.”

What seems to have happened, he said, is that many of the experts in the field have concluded that the questions that were once of so much interest are now thought to be far too complex and difficult to solve. “I hope I will persuade my American colleagues that they are wrong.”

He wonders if he will be successful. He worries about what will happen after his yearlong visit at USC and whether he will find a permanent position here or at some other U.S. or Canadian university.

Some of his earlier research on what makes statistical models work has already been smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published on his behalf. Another study on that subject is to be published soon.

“Maybe I am wrong. But what I am most looking forward to,” he said with obvious enthusiasm, “is the criticism of my views, the exchanges with others in my field. . . . Seven years has been a very, very long time.”