Secrets of astronomical life in the Caucasus mountains: An interview with Alexey Moiseyev.

— In psychology, there is a concept called "inner self," which is the image of how a person describes themselves. Who are you to yourself?

— I perceive myself primarily as an astronomer, more specifically as an observational astronomer. In popular perception, an astronomer is someone who looks through a telescope, but in reality, there are very few such individuals among astronomers. I consider myself an observer-experimenter. The professional community of astronomers worldwide comprises about 10,000 people, but only a few hundred are actively engaged in telescope observations.

Each of us observers has our own scientific interests, but they probably don’t take precedence. I often shift my interests based on what I find more engaging from an experimental and observational standpoint. Experimentation comes first.

— How did you end up in this profession?

— My case is somewhat cliché yet rare at the same time. I decided to become an astronomer after the third grade, at nine and a half years old, after reading Siegel's book "Treasures of the Starry Sky" (Siegel F. Yu. "Treasures of the Starry Sky: A Guide to Constellations and the Moon." M., 1980. — note by the editor.). My mother and I traveled to her homeland, the Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk. She bought me the book — "maybe you’ll find it interesting?" I became intrigued, and that was the start. I read, joined astronomy clubs, became an advanced astronomy enthusiast, built a telescope myself out of glasses from eyeglasses, and took photographs on film. At the same time, I was also interested in chemistry, but it faded into the background due to my passion for astronomy.

I had two classmates who were also interested in astronomy; we communicated and attended astronomy clubs together — we went to the Palace of Pioneers, and I visited the planetarium where they had just installed a large Zeiss telescope (Moscow City Palace of Pioneers and Schoolchildren; since 1992 — Moscow City Palace of Creativity for Children and Youth; until 2014 — Moscow City Palace of Children's (Youth) Creativity, now part of GBOU "Vorobyovy Gory." — note by the editor.).

I made my first telescope using attachment lenses for photographers and a plastic tube, but I almost immediately abandoned it: I found more pleasure in assembling it than in using it.

Then my grandfather bought me an "Alcor," which was part of a line of Soviet telescopes — "Alcor" and "Mizar." It cost 135 rubles, which was around 1990; back then, you could buy two bicycles for that money. After that, our group drifted apart based on our interests, and ultimately, I applied alone to the astronomy department of the physics faculty at Moscow State University.

— You came to your first year, and they immediately started training you to be an astronomer?

— Yes, and we had a much higher competition. It was 1993, the competition for the physics faculty was 1:1, and for the astronomy department, it was 1:5.

When I began interacting with foreign colleagues, I realized that the Russian system is an exception. In the world, astronomical specialization comes much later. A Belgian colleague once said: "I am a mathematician by training, and I learned about 'black holes' during my graduate studies." And this is said by a specialist who wrote very significant papers on supermassive black holes. Specialization mostly occurs at the graduate level.

However, we took pride in this elitism, contrasting ourselves with the physics faculty. We had more exams, and we underwent intense training from the very beginning. While most physicists only began to decide what they wanted to do in their third year, by that time we already had people with scientific publications.

I realized that the Russian system is an exception. In the world, astronomical specialization comes much later!

— This is 1993, a time not very conducive to scientific pursuits or anything beyond survival. Were you and your classmates thinking about how to make a living?

— I later looked back and was amazed: we had a large group of 25 people. More than half of them defended dissertations in their specialty. Surprisingly, many people remained in professional astronomy. Perhaps this is an anomaly. But it repeats itself — when you learn about astronomers of roughly the same age, you find out they all studied in the same cohort.

— Did your teachers say that "science is important"? That you shouldn't chase after a piece of bread, but should look towards eternity?

— This was not even up for discussion. We do what interests us. It was evident that they were genuinely interested too. We never felt that a teacher came just to clock in for a paycheck.

This is somewhat similar to the system at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT): we were taught by active scientists. For instance, our group curator was Konstantin Postnov, the current director of GAISh, a corresponding member of the academy.

If a person who is making revolutionary work on neutron stars gives us lectures on neutron stars, about the gravitational-wave background, it means a lot. There was a feeling that these were people who were engaged in their interest right here and now. They taught and then went off to study stars.

But we weren’t living on the Moon. We entered, and two months later, there was the shelling of the White House, and there were shootings on the streets of Moscow. This was all discussed among us. We were boys, and our department dealt with air defense systems, studying the S-300 system, while at the same time, bombings were happening in Yugoslavia. There were debates on these topics, and the group was divided: who was right here, who was wrong, what should be done? There was no consensus. I know of some guys who participated in the activities of left-wing parties, in the party of Anpilov (The "Labor Russia" movement led by Viktor Anpilov participated in the defense of the White House in October 1993. — note by the editor.). But this was just background noise.

From the second year, I stayed at the department, writing diplomas and course papers. We often spent the night at GAISh, in the astrophysics department because there were no computers at home, but there was a working computer there — and students could only access it at night.

— What was the atmosphere like within the astronomy community then? How did people relate to each other?

— I was surprised to find that there were researchers, and there were people who solved organizational issues, engaged in popularization activities, like the activist Shura from the movie "Office Romance" — and there were quite a few of such people. At that moment, I understood that the character types from the Strugatsky's "Monday Begins on Saturday" were indeed based on real individuals. It is believed that in this book, half of the characters were based on the then-Pulkovo observatory (Pulkovo Observatory, now the Main Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. — note by the editor.).

On one hand, everyone was engaged in a common cause; on the other hand, there were many contradictions. There was, for example, an active but ambiguous figure, Academician Alexey Friedman, a theorist who devised his own theory of spiral galaxy structure. And, as is often the case with bright individuals, this came with a temperament. Sparks flew, there were conflict situations that affected me as a student.

It wasn’t easy. My mentor during graduate school was Viktor Afanasyev, also an ambiguous yet vibrant individual. He amazed with his incredible work ethic; he was the author of a new method for measuring the mass of black holes at the centers of galaxies, based on unique methodologies from our six-meter telescope BTA.

He was a very tough person, but you could defend your position; this garnered respect from him, and he was willing to share interests: "Okay, you're doing the common work, and then you can pursue your own topic, even if I don’t like it and consider it wrong."

Many other leaders were seen as soft and kind, but it turned out their graduate students could only work "on a short leash," within the team, taking the longest to defend, because from the supervisor's perspective, if they defended, they would inevitably run away, and that was undesirable.

I went through this school: I entered graduate school on one topic that was proposed to me, while being ready to simultaneously work on what I liked more (and I had free time for that). Eventually, I wrote my dissertation on that "parallel" topic. Nowadays, this is almost impossible; graduate school has become a highly bureaucratized process, with constant and unending control and approvals for every step.

— We now understand