The Russians Pay Up—in Rubles

A Dartmouth College astronomy professor is one American author who apparently benefited from Adlai Stevenson s trip to Moscow this summer. Mr. Stevenson journeyed to Russia to negotiate for the payment of royalties on books by American authors republished there.

The Dartmouth professor, George Z. Dimitroff, who was also in Moscow at the time, was approached by an agent of a Russian publisher, who paid him several thousand rubles in previously uncollected royalties for the Russian edition of Telescopes and Accessories, a textbook of which Professor Dimitroff was co-author. The publisher also wished to make arrangements for simultaneous publication of a revised edition he is writing.

Professor Dimitroff said the text had been translated into Russian in 1946 and sold about 15,000 copies in the first three months of publication. The book is still being printed and is required reading in the 10th grade (comparable to our freshman or sopohomore high school year) in schools all over the Soviet Union. It is used primarily in colleges and universities in America.

Professor Dimitroff was in Moscow for the triennial meeting of the International Astronomical Union, whose members were guests of the USSR National Academy of Science during their stay. He is a former superintendent of the Harvard Observatory and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain. He served as scientific liaison officer at the American Embassy in London in 1956.

Professor Dimitroff, who speaks Russian, knows many leading Soviet astronomers personally and visited the major observatories and most of the fifteen republics during his six-week stay in the Soviet Union. He came away with a feeling of "admiration and apprehension," he said, after viewing evidence of Soviet scientific progress. For example, the first entirely Russian-made telescope was constructed in 1937, an instrument with a six-inch lens of the type made by amateurs everywhere; today they have in operation miniscus-type telescopes, larger than the ones we have at Mount Palomar, which were completely designed and made in Russia. The Puklova Observatory in Leningrad, which was completely destroyed by the Germans in World War 11, now has the largest radio-telescope of its kind in the world.

"Even the general public is informed on a technical level we cannot match," said Professor Dimitroff. In the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibit Hall in Moscow, he saw an entire wall covered with wiring diagrams of the three Sputniks, front and inside panels. Instrumentation was illustrated in cut section. This was an exhibit prepared for the average citizen.

"They are motivated by an almost fanatical desire to surpass the United States, and have a national unity toward that goal," said Professor Dimitroff. "In twenty years," he predicted, "they will be so far ahead of us, it is doubtful that we can ever catch up."

Prof. George Z. Dimitroff