"I am a student, I am glad I am a student.
Only two month ago I was a schoolboy,
Mathematics and Physics were always of interest to me.That's why I am here. "
From Phystech 1 year English textbook.
As a result of a natural process of clutter accumulation in my brain my stories are loosing colors and details and some of them disappeared all together. The only way to preserve some of those silly, yet dear memories is to put them in writing.
First few big words: Back in the old country, the proud name of Phystech had stood for the Excellency in physics and math. It shaped the minds of several generations of Russian scientists. In simple words, our school kicked ass. This Excellency, as all good things in life, did not come for free. It was not the difficult exams or the rats in our dorm showers or god-awful food in the campus cafeteria. We had very few women. They say that a sum of looks and smarts form a constant. In my year among 90 or so, borderline genius guys we had one very very smart girl.
Nonetheless, difficulties of everyday life went unnoticed, because at that moment in our life there was only one thing that mattered the most, to pass those excruciatingly difficult exams, everything else was rubbish. Lack of warmth and care from the better, tenderer half was substituted with abundance of booze and practical jokes. Two things combined have been making an explosive combination. Much later I realized that Phystech was one big, huge, fraternity house. Not by coincidence, most popular holiday at Phystech was April fool's day, celebrated with overdose on vodka and a barrage of hoaxes. The time is then, and the story goes like this:
No train tracks
1. Probably the most destructive joke orchestrated annually on 1st of April was painting of the railroad tracks not far from campus with an ordinary paint of dark color. This seemingly innocent act had rather devastating consequences on the local train service on that date. Painted tracks no longer could reflect the light from a beam of a front car. In the evening, from the train operator point of view, it looked like tracks would suddenly disappear into a thin air. To heighten the effect, a long metal crowbar has been used to short the rail tracks safety system. It would switch the semaphore signal from green to red. As a result, the night of April the 1st local trains spent a hefty half hour waiting for the resolution.P.S. I thought of this ‘legend’ as of an amusing anecdote, until, unintentionally,I witnessed this operation live. (It also involved setting up tracks on fire and police coming to investigate). My sympathies go to all passengers on the train that unwillingly fell victims of this joke.2. Pool painting was more innocent and more popular joke on April fools day.Every year on April 1st pools around the campus were painted in bright radioactive colors. It brightened the grim atmosphere of midterms and kept rumors alive about some weird and dangerous experiments with radiation and acid rain (or something like that) conducted in the campus labs. It was also the last resort for the Aprils fool-day joke for someone who could not come up with something more imaginative, like ripping off letters off the railroad station signs and making them really obscene. (For instance, the name of the commute train station right next to our school translated from Russian sounded like “Long-lake” station. Changing one letter in the name turned it into a “Long-breasted” station.) Or painting your neighbors windows and changing their clocks by 3 hours back so that they would not tell the night and the morning apart.
Loosing virginity
3. There were many fake ads and flyers appearing here and there around the campus just before the fool's day. Yet lots of people read them seriously, and some swallowed the most outrages baits.Most typical joke of that sort was in the form of the note from dean. The ads tated: "Students who did not go through deflowering must urgently appear in a dean's office and promptly do so ASAP. "Students, who did not know the meaning of the word defloration, obediently and promptly indeed would show up at the dean's office. In the end, it all depended on the dean’s sense of humor (or its absence). You can only imagine the eyes of the secretary when she heard the reason for their appointment with the dean. I guess they were as wide the eyes of two girls picked for the occasion by our seniors, who were in charge of annual summer-labor camp that we called ‘kartoshka’ (potatoes in translation from russian) It’s worth to mention that back in the old country all students were required, in the spirit of Maos cultural revolution, to help our comrades in the farmland to collect annual harvest of potatoes and beets), when your humble servant barged in with the mentioned above note-request for defloration. But this is completely different story.4. Once with my own eyes I have seen a local train named after one of our most vicious professors. Those times, the trains used to have the name of WWII war hero written across the train cars. But during this time of year different kind of heroes were painted in bright colors on the side of the commute train. Those were the kind of names that you could have seen engraved on the tops of sturdy lecture hall desks and toilet walls. Inscriptions were too graphical to quote here. To pull this trick off a group of volunteers had to wake up real early and make a trip to the train depot with spray paint cans. All in all the train is much better place for commemoration than the wall of the toilet.
Professors
5. Talking about vicious professors, there was this one particularly bad, whose name had been honored with paint in the previous story. His name was Goga Barachinsky. He was ancient to survive Stalin, holocaust, war, and teaching at Phystech. This tough life made him sour as a lemon, especially towards us, the students. Not all of his grades were the worst some of them were just bad and he never gave excellent grades. I witnessed in our first year at the school, how my classmate after preparing his question for oral exam well before the time approached the teachers desk. The system in Phystech was such that if you prepare for your exam questions before everybody else did you have a privilege of picking the professor (to give you the final grade) instead of being assigned to one. My friend was unfortunate to pick Goga because of his innocuous appearance, even after another professor whispered in disbelief “Are you sure?” In the end he got B-. As Goga explained in the end of exam: “You, of course understand, that I gave you an extra grade for your audaciousness”.Axes
6. One of the most shocking stories repeated over and over again in lecture halls and dormitories involved a rather unusual for academia artifact, an axe. I have to warn you that this story, unlike above anecdotes, is more shocking and gruesome than humorous. I heard about it on my first Physics lecture, and, even before then, once I found out that students at the prestigious General and Applied Theory Department are called 'axes'. The story goes about this very bright guy from this 'Axe' department. Axes required a lot from its students in terms of grades and studying. The strain and pressure of staying perfect was too big for many kids and a lot of them literally flipped out, some end up in a mental care, some committed suicide. Right across railroad tracks (see story #1) there were bunch of birch trees favored by unfortunate students as the place to say goodbye to a cruel world. Eventually the faculty had to cut those damn woods down. Getting back to the story, this guy, and renown for his scholar achievement and member of elite intellectual fraternity went nuts. It's not clear why he decided to kill another kid. Perhaps he thought that he was falling in love with the girl from the parallel group and he could not stand any competition. Or he was just very ill in the head. Judging by the way he prepared his execution it was the latter. He waited until his victim would go to a toilet and would be in the most uncomfortable position, then he hacked the poor lad's head 5 times, dropped the axe and went back to his room and into the history of Phystech. He was arrested and put in the asylum and he did, despite the degree of creepiness of that incident, start the nickname of axes for the whole department of FOPF. It was pretty offending nickname, not as much as the department of Aero-Space whose name was FAKI (FUKI phonetically). To get back to 1st of April theme, on this day those two departments would have screaming matches from the top of the dormitory roof, Axes versus Fukis. Conveniently enough their dorms were next to each other. Heavy artillery had been used in the form of megawatt speakers with amplifiers brought, but as far as I remember it was a tie.7. The eminence and dark influence of the “axe” affected numerous generations of phystechs and created many copycat nut cases (psychtechs). I myself had once a duel with my fellow neighbor, axe in my hands, bedpost in his, which was our weapon of choice in gang wars against local hooligans. The duel came to an abrupt stop only after the axe flew out of my hand almost hitting my friend and got stuck in the wall. The tale however is about this Lithuanian guy, my countryman, with a nickname Gitis. I’ve heard this story many times while I was in Phystech and later in US, from the friends of both sides involved in this incident. In the end I have averaged the varying, sometimes very different accounts of the story to create more or less accurate description. He was not exactly a crazy psycho, well, not when he was sober. More frequently than not though he was drunk off his ass, just like that time when this happened. There were frequent discotheques in those days, phystechs dancing with each other and around couple of local girls. Obviously tension was high and in the dispute over who’s right is it to dance next things got hot and Gitis went crazy. A fight broke but several guys, apparently all roommates, quickly subdued him. They tied him up, left him under the stairs to cool off and sober up, and then they went back to their room to prepare the homework for English. A friend of Gitis that happened to find him tied up released him. Gitis was at this junction completely out of his mind with rage. English studies were in full swing when they got interrupted with the loud thuds on the door. It was Gitis armed with an axe, Steven King style, trying to hack his way through the door and into the room of his violators. Here is why this story should be a demo of problem solving techniques under extreme pressure. In a few seconds they had organized rescue plan. One guy pulled a heavy table toward the door. Behind that door there was another guy waiting for the signal to pull it open. Third was preparing to grab the axe from Gitis as soon as he appears inside, who made a significant progress with the axe through the door. In the end, their plan worked perfectly, hail Phystech problem solving skills. Those guys should definitely put this in their resume. Gitis was disarmed, beaten mercilessly and subdued yet again. It was a true happy end, since the next morning Gitis could not remember a thing about what happened.
Profilak
8. In the middle of the campus there was a temporary respite from harsh schooling, called Profilak. For some reason Profilak was the most popular target for nailing entrance doors from the outside on Aprils fools day even though it was not a bad place. Every student had a chance to spend one month of a year away from his roommates and an old dorm room, to change surroundings. All you had to do is to complain to campus resident doctor about your physical or mental health and a month later you were there, eating a better food, cooked in a separate kitchen, watching free cable TV, which by the was yours truly helped to install all over the campus, yet I have never stayed over in profilak. Now the cable is the base for the broadband network on campus, but yet again it’s a different story. This shuffle was confusing at times as one had to adjust to leaving in a new location. To no surprise some mistakes happened once in a while. Once upon a time a girl walked through the wrong door leading into a room filled with guys. Everybody was already lying in his bed ready to fall asleep. They became wide-awake as soon as a girl started taking her clothes off while talking to them as if she talked to her girlfriends. Guys tried their best to keep quiet and not to scare her away. Everyone thought of one question, whose bed she is going to choose. They could hold their concentration up until the moment she said, "Girls, I would give anything for a good lay" at which moment the room broke into roaring laughter sending semi-naked girl out and away. I heard this story so many times and read it on Internet that I cannot be sure that this really happened at Phystech. However I’ve decided to leave it and tell it the same way it had been told me at Phystech.Phystech parable
9. “A beekeeper Valabuev before he engaged in beekeeping has planted a tree of life, has written the gospel and has given birth to the god-son. Then, he abandoned it all and got engaged in beekeeping. All is vanity except for bees, used to say the beekeeper Valabuev, Bees are also vanity, it’s just there are lots of them!”
P.S. Some of the stories might sound like the legends and anecdotes. Most probably they are. Nonetheless those are the tales that I did actually heard, and some of them I have seen with my own eyes. In either case, this is not by any means the pinnacle of journalism. It’s my recollection of those tales. So if you see anything that you heard differently please let me know and I would gladly correct it.
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