While the KGB Watched

...Under the watchful eyes of the KGB, he defied Soviet authority by participating in, and often hosting, unofficial seminars in Moscow, attended by fellow refusenik scientists and visiting confreres from abroad...

...The exotic Russians caused a sensation and found themselves "as popular as film stars...

...Just as we believed, before our journey to Brazil, that we might contract every disease known to man there " On the voyage home, the Soviet cargo ship carrying the scientists made several stops...

...But despite his privileged position as a member of the scientific elite, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned by such negative aspects of Soviet life as the influence of the KGB, the reluctance of the regime to allow the free exchange of information with the West, and the duplicity of some of his colleagues who thirsted for advancement...

...Many were tried and sentenced to the Gulag...

...Some of the refuseniks' stories have already appeared in books and articles published in the West over the past two decades...

...Between 1975 and 1987 he kept applying for and being refused a visa...

...In 1987, at the age of 76, he and his wife Svetlana, a specialist in medical and biological problems, settled in the United States, where he continues to do research, primarily at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...

...Amid the chaos in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, before the Soviets took firm control, he witnessed the terror of a pogrom in Zhitomir carried out by Simon Petliura's Ukrainian Army...

...This was risky for a Jewish pariah, but Alpert could not remain silent...

...in religious school young Yakov studied Hebrew and learned about the "destructive experiences endured by the Jewish people" throughout their history...

...Most were fired from their jobs and treated by the regime as disloyal...

...For him the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks in August 1968 became a defining moment: "It sickened me to know that Soviet troops held the Czechoslovakian people at gunpoint—'protecting' them from their own desire for a more open society...

...Even the more fortunate among them were harassed and kept under KGB surveillance...

...At the end of the month he heard a BBC broadcast of Andrei Sakharov's seminal essay on "Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," and listened to the words "as to my own inner voice...

...The book includes graphs to illustrate his experiments that are a bit too technical for the layman, as are many of his scientific explanations...

...I understood that the state was rotting and that it would collapse just as the Roman Empire once did " STILL, it was not until 1975 that Alpert reached his third turning point—filling out an official application to emigrate...

...There he quickly designed a meter to test the clarity of radio waves on different frequencies in Moscow and other parts of Russia...

...He and Svetlana thus entered the world of the Russian dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, "two distinct but related, and sometimes overlapping, groups...

...At 15 he followed the polemics between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, and concluded that "the Soviet system was a good one for all humankind...

...In the mid1980s, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a leading Russian dissident, wrote: "Refuseniks are by definition people who have psychologically broken with Soviet society, and who have a critical attitude toward it...

...During his teens he became interested in electricity, then he "caught the radio bug" from an older ham operator friend and built his first receiver...

...They became close friends and defenders of Sakharov and Yuri Orlov, also a distinguished Russian dissident physicist...

...Along with his growing passion for science, Yakov began to develop an interest in political and social issues...

...After the launching of Sputnik I in 1957, Alpert contributed to space research...

...Interestingly, Alpert does not mention the 1967 Six-Day War and its impact on Soviet Jews...

...For two weeks he did not go to his library and stayed alone in a dacha "listening constantly to the 'Voices,' as we called the radio broadcasts from the West...

...While traveling among the people in the provinces, Alpert not only measured natural phenomena but started to make sharp judgments about the political situation: "Thus in 1932 Iunderstoodthatthe Soviet brand of Communism, which was totalitarianism, produced a generation of thoroughly dependent and depressed people...

...Yakov displayed his nonconformist character in a secondary school physics class when he rebelled against his teacher, who was making mistakes, and organized a student strike...

...In such an environment, with the lack of opportunity to separate themselves from the Soviet system, it is inevitable that fearless opposition to the system will appear...

...For half a century Alpert has enjoyed an international reputation in several fields of radio and space plasma physics...

...Next March Yakov Alpert plans to celebrate his 90th birthday in New York with his colleagues...

...My wife Gloria and I visited the Alperts in 1986 and found a bravely optimistic couple, actively engaged in intellectual life, and grateful for the lifeline they were receiving from Americans and Europeans, including Nobel prize winners, members of Congress, and in particular the Committee of Concerned Scientists and the New York Academy of Sciences...

...Rather, my rebellion flowed from my scientific reading and my impulsive temperament...

...Looking back today, he thinks his desire to devote himself to science as well as his need for personal freedom kept him from acceding to the "restrictive demands of the Communist organizations that everyone should be alike and march in step...

...Many people in my country did not even know what it meant to have free choice...

...Especially intriguing is Alpert's detailed, dramatic story of how he coped with his status as an outcast...

...Yakov excelled in his studies at the Soviet primary school he entered at age eight...

...Within two years that led to his second turning point: He was hired as a laboratory assistant at the Ministry of Communication's Radio Experimental Station—the place he calls "my university...

...It was "highly unusual to see a group of Soviet citizens traveling anywhere in the West," Alpert points out...

...But he never joined the Pioneers, the Communist Party's youth group, or the teenage Komsomol...

...The people from our embassy told us that the Brazilians thought all Russians had long beards and walked around the Kremlin with poleaxes...

...Determined to quit the "inescapably to tahtarian and anti-Semitic' regime, Alpert gradually withdrew from all confidential work...

...I would not say that I led the uprising because of my political reading," he writes...

...When he graduated six years later his Russian language teacher said prophetically, "Here you have a professor...

...Initially thrown out of the school, he was reinstated after an investigation proved him correct...

...With Making Waves, Yakov Alpert adds impressively to that literature...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, "Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty" The Russian word otkaznik, translated into English as "refusenik," was coined in the USSR in the 1970s to describe Soviet Jews whose application for an exit visa had been rejected...

...Soon after Alpert was born in the Tevye-like shtetl of Ivnitsy in 1911, his parents moved to Zhitomir, a town about 85 miles west of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev...

...One of the most fascinating segments of Making Waves tells how he organized a 1947 Soviet Academy of Sciences expedition to Brazil to observe a unique solar eclipse...

...He has written an absorbing memoir of his rise to the pinnacle of his profession, his fall from Kremlin grace once he decided he could no longer live in a "fascist state," his courageous struggle in refusal for 12 years, and his ultimate triumph, with the help of foreign colleagues...

...The first major turning point in his life, Alpert believes, came at age 18 when he left Zhitomir for Moscow...

...Meanwhile, he has given us a present in this revealing inside story of the Soviet scientific establishment and how he made waves...

...He found ajob as a construction worker and spent his free time in the Lenin Library devouring science books and world classics...

...It was obvious that my homeland was in deep decay...

...At home the family spoke Yiddish...

...In the intervening 40-odd years he earned the degree of doctor of physical and mathematical science, and became a world famous expert on the propagation of radio waves and the structure of the ionosphere...

...He hoped, in vain, that the authorities would recognize he was no longer involved in matters of state secrecy and approve his exit application...

...This enabled them to tour Holland and Berlin, among other places, prompting the author to declare the trip both a "scientific success and a rewarding personal experience...