Is There Intelligent Life in Russia? : FIVE BILLION VODKA BOTTLES TO THE MOON: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, <i> By Iosif Shklovsky translated from the Russian by Mary Fleming Zirin and Harold Zirin (W. W. Norton: $19.95; 228 pp.)</i>

Longtime Carl Sagan fans will recognize the name Iosif Shklovsky from the book that the two of them collaborated on in the 1960s, “Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Shklovsky, a Russian astronomer, was one of the first scientists to take the subject of extraterrestrial intelligent life seriously. His new book, “Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon,” is a posthumously published, Richard Feynman-style memoir of Shklovsky’s further adventures in Soviet science.

These adventures often are harrowing. Shklovsky, who shared with Feynman an inability to censor himself on any subject, frequently ran afoul not only of his colleagues but also of the Soviet authorities. Although he loved to travel and to meet with his scientific brethren and sistren in other countries, he was for 18 straight years prohibited from leaving the U.S.S.R., but he never knew why:

“During those years I had done more than a little internationally recognized work, and therefore I was always invited under the most advantageous conditions, but I was always refused. It was evident that somewhere in the secret chancelleries of the Ministry of Love (Shklovsky’s sarcastic term for the NKVD), there was a hitch in my dossier--I can’t for the life of me figure out what--that made my pitiful but persistent attempts to take part in international scientific life totally unavailing.”

Maybe it was his winning personality that’s to blame, for Shklovsky had a propensity for offending nearly everyone he came in contact with, whether friend or foe. He once told Edward Teller, for example, that in Russia, he, Teller, was regarded as a cannibal. (Teller, of course, was delighted to hear it!) And he had special contempt for “that goose Ambartsumyan,” this being Viktor Ambartsumyan, director of the Byurakan Observatory, a man whom Shklovsky once compared to the Big Dipper, saying that “there’s no logical reason why some constellations are more famous than others.”

And when Shklovsky, with this lovely, winning personality of his, finally was allowed out of the country, he sometimes wound up detesting the meetings he attended. “I sat through another day of torment,” he says of one academic conference. “I remember those professional windbags, for whom I had already developed a fierce hatred, avidly discussing the vital question of the need to set up a central book depository in Tanzania.”

Shklovsky was a serious scientist, however. He taught the world’s first course in radio astronomy, at the Shternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, in 1953, and in that same year also made his major contribution to science, suggesting that the radio emissions from the Crab nebula were caused by synchrotron radiation. His explanation has since been accepted and generalized to cover other cases of such emissions.

Still, he had a penchant for coming up with weird ideas. To account for the low density of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, Shklovsky once suggested that perhaps its interior had been hollowed out by an early Martian civilization, thereby making himself the Russian equivalent of Percival Lowell, the American exponent of the famous “canals.” “Fifty percent of Shklovsky’s ideas are brilliant,” a colleague once remarked, “but no one can tell which fifty percent they are.”

Luckily, Shklovsky’s book is not so much about science as it is about travel, personalities and Soviet politics. More than anything, it seems, Shklovsky simply liked to travel, and his description of a 10-day stay in Paris is one of the dramatic high points of the book. “Twelve days on my own in Paris!” he exclaims. “The rosy dream of many millions of people the world over!” In his case, however, he had to live on just seven francs a day; somehow, he survived the experience, existing on a diet of fresh apples and frankfurters.

The main value of Shklovsky’s memoir, though, is the picture it presents of what it’s like to be a scientist in the “evil empire”--for in this book, that’s exactly what the Soviet Union comes across as. There was the case of Nikolay Kozyrev, for example, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for mocking Friedrich Engels’ view that Isaac Newton was “an inductive ass.” The Supreme Court of the Russian Republic reviewed this decision, rescinded it as being too lenient, and instead sentenced Kozyrev to death by firing squad.

Shklovsky describes what it must have been like for the imprisoned scientist to be staring off into the snow, waiting for the hired guns to arrive: “Imagine Kozyrev’s situation: A distant point might at any point appear against the surrounding white wilderness and, as it came nearer, reveal itself as a sleigh hitched with draft animals (reindeer?) carrying his executioners.”

That happened in 1942, and conditions have improved since then, but not by all that much in Shklovsky’s view: Much of his book is a horrific tale of starvation in the face of Russian agricultural edicts, of purges and people denouncing people (Article 58 of the 1926 Russian Criminal Code made failure to denounce others a crime), and of various scientists being imprisoned for one political offense or another. Somewhat surprisingly, given his outspokenness, Shklovsky himself was never jailed. On the other hand, he was largely blackballed from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the best Richard Feynman tradition, Shklovsky gives us the human side of science, showing that scientists can be as perverse as anyone else. “Even after two heart attacks I’m still not interested in the workings of my poor heart,” he confesses. “From fourth grade I recall that it has auricles, ventricles and valves, but what it all adds up to--I swear to God I don’t know and don’t care.”

Alas, when it comes to telling stories, Shklovsky is no Feynman. His anecdotes lack the charm and pointedness of his American counterpart, and in fact many of his tales trail off without climax, resolution or punch line; they just end. In reading these pages, one does not get the impression of a brilliant intellectual at work but rather of someone who took inordinate delight in being cantankerous and in refusing to knuckle under to authority, characteristics that he regarded as positive virtues.

Shklovsky, it’s clear, had these virtues in extreme degree, and probably his single proudest accomplishment was his once having used the doorway to the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, “one of the greatest monsters in human history,” as a toilet. His account of this “unprecedented act of blasphemy” is the most gleefully recounted in the book.

“I slowly became conscious of a growing feeling of pride in my unique and audacious act,” he relates of the incident. “By the time we got to Borzhomi late that evening I was bursting with pride.”

Hard to resist a guy like that.