A portrait of Brook drawn from the official materials alone cannot provide an accurate picture of this complex and controversial person. Vladimir Danilovich Belkin, a doctor of economics and a professor at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had worked alongside Brook for many years. Towards the end of his career, Brook became interested in economic problems connected with emerging economic reforms. Belkin recalled:
Brook was one of the few people who responded to the need for radical economic reform. He wanted to build socialism if not with a human, then with at least a proper economic face. But all of this was horribly sabotaged from 'above.' There was hardly anything left of the old monolith, yet it was expected to continue supporting the entire system. The leaders saw assassination attempts on the old system in every proposal from our economists. Brook clearly predicted that our national economy was headed towards a collapse, claiming that it was due to insufficient communication between our dual systems of government – the Soviet Ministries, GOSPLAN, etc. – and the Communist party. 'Our overall government system, which the party created, could react rapidly to the party, but the party lacked the ability to react to the government,' Brook declared. Only a person with Brook's sagacity could say such things in public.
The big battle occurred in GOSPLAN regarding pricing politics; its director, Pyetr Fedayevich Lomako – the last bureaucrat of the Stalinist era – told Brook, 'You have attacked the authority of GOSPLAN and this mutiny will cost you dearly.' Brook was forced to retire.[11]
Veterans of Brook's laboratory, Alexandridi, Zalkind, Rogachev, and others, helped me describe Brook's character. Alexandridi recalled:
To me, Isaak Semyonovich seemed to be both distinguished and formidable back then. Judging by today's standards, he was a relatively young scientist, only in his late forties. But at the time, I saw him as an old man with advanced scientific degrees and accolades.
He wanted to do everything faster. He literally flew through the laboratory, running from one worker to another, asking about the progress of various projects, giving advice, listening carefully to requests, and making notes about incomplete work.
Intellectually gifted, highly educated, and quite demanding of himself, Brook drew great admiration from others who wished to imitate him. He treated his colleagues like a stern but caring father. For example, when he discovered that Matyuhin had no coat, he brought him his own leather jacket. He tried to help others in similar ways.
Brook inspired us with his enthusiasm and obsession with work, teaching us that we could overcome any obstacles. We were young and seldom realized what kind of person was working next to us. Now, after considerable experience in my field, I have come to understand that I have never met a person of Brook's caliber, even though I have worked with many other academicians.
His extraordinary talent, energy, ability to attract people to his work, encyclopedic knowledge -- he seemed to know everything -- outstanding mathematical education, and a never-ending stream of ideas, demonstrated what an exceptional person Brook really was.
Brook's Laboratory technicians N. N. Lenov and N. V. Pautin recalled:
He was never superficial or hypocritical, which is the reason why he appeared to the outside world – at the scientific councils, meetings, and conferences – as an ill-tempered, quarrelsome opponent, a hair-splitting critic, in brief – an enfant terrible. Only someone like him could say, for example: 'This technology is from the Stone Age!' when describing the 'Strela,' the first mass-produced Soviet computer.
Alexandridi further commented:
Brook was a very secretive person and made everyone adhere to the strict rule of keeping all of the information about the laboratory stay inside its walls. He avoided participating in government projects, which tended to attract other groups of people. The work on the M-1, M-2, and M-3 computers was carried out as internal projects, ordered by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. We worked under difficult conditions. There was always a feeling that we were making the computers illegally, and since they were not a part of any State plan and hence, there were no guarantees that would be able to obtain modern equipment or parts for them. Sometimes, we were forced to use tools and components from a German property reparations warehouse.
Brook was always brimming with new ideas and so preoccupied with innovation that sometimes, in the middle of the development, he abandoned not only the project, but the people involved as well.
Pautin agreed:
Those character traits could only hinder the advancement of his career. Barely a third of the M-3 computers that were developed in his laboratory went into a modest mass-production, but later experienced a rebirth in the industry. It was not until 1958 that Brook was able to organize the INEUM that he had conceived of long before.
Lenov:
'It is impossible to make a scientist,' he would say, insisting that the conventional scientific postgraduate path was ineffective. 'Get involved in the work and everything will pan out!' he would say. He did not hurry even his best students – Matyuhin and Kartsev. Moreover, he contributed to the delay of their thesis defenses, believing that in the beginning they should obtain extensive engineering experience. Maybe that was why he could not keep them on staff. Both of them left the Institute and later became great scientists and founders of their own scientific schools.
I met Brook in March of 1956 during a conference on the "Development of Soviet Machinery and Instrument Building" in Moscow, a meeting that drew specialists in computer technology from all over the Soviet Union. The plenary session in the great hall at Moscow State University was overcrowded. The conference was opened by its organizer, academician Lebedev. Professor D. Y. Panov made the first report, "The History and Development of Electronic Computers," in which he remarked:
At the present time, everybody knows about the universal electronic computer BESM, built in 1952 under the academician Lebedev's supervision. The performance of this computer surpasses all European models and most American computers.
During the International Conference in Darmstadt in autumn 1955, academician Lebedev gave an overview of this machine, which was highly rated by the foreign scientists and engineers who visited the conference.
At this Conference you will hear the reports of many Soviet scientists and engineers, including academician Lebedev's report "High Speed Universal Computers," about the Soviet digital electronic computer M-2, designed under the management of the Corresponding Member of the AS USSR Brook, and about the Strela, developed by Bazilevsky and others. You will also hear reports by Ushakov, Gutenmacher, Korolkov, and others, about our work on simulation devices.
I have to say that I paid close attention to the reports, and closely scrutinized the faces of the conference participants during the breaks in the hope to become better acquainted with the people I haven't met before. I presented my paper on "Devices Based on the Combination of Crystal and Magnetic Elements," at the section on universal digital computers. Tamara Alexandridi also appeared at this section. Her paper, "The Electrostatic Memory Device of the M-2," and she personally – young, graceful, and vivacious – attracted my attention. I approached her with some questions, and later managed to visit the Electro-Systems Laboratory where she worked.
Back then, Isaak Brook was 54 years old and at the height of his career. After the conference I saw him a few more times. Brook passed away on October 6, 1974, only three months and three days after Lebedev died.
I had also become better acquainted with Matyuhin and Kartsev. Nevertheless, my knowledge of them at that time, and later, did not extend beyond the information about the machines that were built under their supervision, or the books and articles they had written. When I decided to write this book, they were already gone.
George Lopato (I will talk about him in Chapter 4) and Tamara Alexandridi helped me tremendously in preparing this book. Almost forty years after the 1956 conference, Alexandridi shared with me a great deal of insight and information about the "Brook Brigade," herself, and her husband Matyuhin, whom she married in the 1950s.
As a rule, Brook invited only men to work in his laboratory. Alexandridi was the sole woman to work with the group responsible for the development of M-1. Brook was intrigued by Alexandridi's atypical surname, which she got from her father, a "russified" Greek from Krasnodar.
Alexandridi was born on September 26, 1924. When she was two years old, the family moved to Moscow, where she was raised by her mother. She studied in the Moscow Radio Club and received a special degree as a radio operator. At the beginning of the Second World War she volunteered for the Army, witnessed the siege of Sevastopol, and lived through the great battle at the Volga, all the time working as a radio operator. She returned to Moscow in June 1945 with Second Order Award of the Great Patriotic War, and five medals. Later that year she enrolled at the Moscow Energy Institute and in 1950 was sent to Brook's laboratory. At the time we met again, 40 years later, she had become a professor at the department of automated systems at the Moscow Automobile Roads Institute, where she still teaches.
[11] Author's note: In the late 1950s INEUM was pulled out of the Academy of Sciences and transferred to aid in the creation of the State Economic Committee under GOSPLAN.