By Teresa Levonian Cole
TENERIFE, Spain (Financial Times) — “I don’t know why people have this idea that we were oppressed under the Soviet Union,” says Garik Israelian. “I remember a time of parties, a lot of fun. There was no unemployment, everyone had free apartments, people were very happy. It was different under Stalin, of course, but things changed with Khrushchev. Armenia was an exception in the Soviet Union — our language, culture and church were preserved and respected.”
Dr. Garik Israelian, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists, was born in Yerevan in 1963 and is a grateful beneficiary of the Soviet education system. “I was a disaster at school,” he recalls. “I never studied — I just liked music.” To his family’s despair, he left school at 16, went to work in a theatre and indulged his passion for rock guitar, forming a band and playing in bars. “But then I saw [the film] Solaris and it changed me 180 degrees. I was so inspired. I started reading science fiction and decided to go to university. It meant I had to study math and physics from the beginning, at home. But the great thing about the system then was that it didn’t matter how badly you did at school, so long as you passed the exams for university. Otherwise I would have had no chance.”
Studying astrophysics at Yerevan University, his supervisor was the renowned Viktor Hambartsumian, who established the USSR’s first department of theoretical astrophysics. “He came from Leningrad University to Armenia, where he founded the Byurakan observatory and directed the Armenian Academy of Sciences for 50 years,” says Israelian. “He was very famous, a genius.”
So it was with great reluctance that, on gaining his PhD in 1992, Israelian approached Hambartsumian for a letter of recommendation, to work abroad. “1988 [the year of the earthquake] to 1996 was the worst time in Armenia,” he says. “The Soviet Union collapsed. There was no money, no products in the shops, no electricity for six to eight months. I was writing my thesis by candlelight at night and working on a farm [by day]. It was very clear that if I stayed in Armenia, I would have to abandon science.”
He had already had a taste of the west, spending three months in 1990 at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. “My first goal was to buy records,” he laughs. “It seemed incredible to me you could buy records in a store. I [had] heard the Beatles when I was five or six, and collected vinyl. So thanks to rock music, I had some English.”