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USSR presence in the U.K.
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In 1970, while
attending an Electronics Industry meeting in Edinburgh, I was approached
by a Russian civil servant who invited me to travel to Moscow as a
Visiting Professor. He said Aeroflot would take myself and family
and that I should learn Russian.
Nearly 40 years later I would
still like to know how and why the invitation came about. At the time I
always voted Conservative, largely because of the emphasis of that Party on individual
freedom. Totalitarian ideologies, left-wing or right-wing, were
anathema to me. Moreover, I had resisted, at considerable personal
cost, totalitarian practices in the generally free and democratic United
Kingdom.
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Path to Edinburgh
Invitation by Russian
Action on Moscow
invite
Russian at Oxford College |
Possible reasons are given
below. Others may occur.
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I was targeted by the USSR as a possible recruit to
Communism and perhaps as its mole as I rose in rank or status in the UK.
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The USSR
valued my physics and engineering knowledge, for example in the Nuclear
and Electronics fields, or considered that the philosophical
content of my activities and publications, perhaps in Measurement and
Design, would help solve its industrial problems.
[1]-
False
rumours were spread about my political inclinations as part of a cover-up
of U.K. Industrial and/or Establishment malpractices.
[1] This possibility was
reinforced when, years later, I came across a diary entry about an IEE
Discussion meeting I had attended on 27th March 1968. The topic was The Engineer in Society and the Opener was Professor W.H.C. Armytage of the
University of Sheffield. The first of my letters on a similar topic
had been published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Physics some 6
months before - see Publications/Science & Society.
Professor Armytage's remarks had a pronounced political
content, especially in his references to USSR being helped by U.S.A.'s Arnold Hammer and the present-day need for such outside help by
the USSR. |
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