Bashir Iskandarovich Rameev was born on May 1, 1918. When passports were established many years later, his father registered his son's birthday incorrectly, listing it as May 15. Rameev's life and work mirror the events of the post-October Revolution era, which began in 1917.
His well-educated grandfather, Zakir Rameev (1859–1921), was a poet of classic Tatar literature. He signed his poems with the pseudonym Dardmend, which means "sad" or "suffering" in Persian. He was a member and chairman of many charitable societies, published a newspaper and did much for the establishment of Tatar national culture. During his lifetime, only one of his published poetry books was translated into Russian: only two thousand copies were released and he remained largely unknown. Unfortunately, most of his poetry was lost after his death. In 1921, when many people were cold and starving, saving poetry was not important.
Only now, when justice and humanitarian principles are being reestablished in the Soviet Union, these events are finally coming to light. The truth is that Zakir Rameev was also a rich businessman, a gold mine owner, a member of the Russian State Duma, and a staunch liberal. He spent a considerable part of his profits on charity, support for orphans and foreign education of talented youth, with the aim of creating a Tatar intelligentsia. But after the October Revolution, such qualities were no longer admirable and instead were considered criminal: his son Iskandar and grandson Bashir would end up paying for them later.
Zakir Rameev sent his son, Iskandar, to study at the Freiberg Mining Academy in Germany. Iskandar returned to Russia the day before the First World War started, and worked in one of his father's gold mines. After the revolution, he became the chief engineer at a copper smelting plant in the town of Baimak. He was arrested for the first time in 1929 and released a year later without any charges. Bashir was only eleven years old and could not imagine the trouble yet to come, but he instinctively prepared for it, finding work as a photographer for a geological expedition and later as a bookbinder. He finished school in 1935 in Ufa, where his family had moved; his father had become the director of the Bashkiria gold trust. Iskandar Rameev was a talented engineer; he developed and implemented automatic milling units that could be operated by just one man, sharply increasing the level of gold extraction.
In April 1938 when Stalin's purges began, Iskandar Rameev was arrested again. His blueprints for the gold extraction unit disappeared into the bowels of the NKVD archives.[2] After two years under investigation he was convicted and sentenced to five years in a prison camp in the Kemerovo region. In 1943, ten days before his scheduled release, he died.
Iskandar Rameev was posthumously exonerated over twenty years later. Unfortunately for his son, Bashir Rameev became the "son of an enemy of the people" in April 1938. By that time, he had successfully graduated from high school and was in his second year at the Moscow Energy Institute. He enjoyed tinkering with gadgets since childhood and once entered an amateur radio contest in Moscow. In 1935, at the age of 17, he became a member of the all-Union society of inventors.
After his father's arrest, he was forced to leave the Institute and return to Ufa. He remained unemployable for a long time because of his blacklisted status. When Rameev was drafted into the Army in 1939, one of the military physicians detected an inflammation in his lungs and rejected him. He decided to move to the Crimea where nobody knew him, planning to find work at a sanatorium or Young Pioneer camp and improve his health. Penniless, he ended up walking along the entire Crimean coast, but there was no work for him there either. He returned to Moscow, where he finally found a job as a technician at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Communication; it was early 1940, just before the Second World War.
Rameev was lucky: he was allowed to do what he enjoyed and his work had practical applications. During the first weeks of the war, he proposed a method for detecting dark objects from flying planes – by means of infrared radiation passing through cloaked windows. He also invented a relay device that would turn on the warning system during air-raids. He was not allowed to join the Army, but instead enlisted as a volunteer in a battalion of the Soviet Communication Ministry. The battalion served the Senior Command Headquarters of the Soviet Army. At first, Rameev fell in with a group that designed encryption equipment, probably because there was no time for proper assignments. The device that the group designed was accepted by the army and used for a period of time. Rameev took trips to Arzamas and Nizhniy-Novgorod, where Stalin intended to move the Headquarters, to install some of the technical equipment.
During the preparations for the liberation of Kiev, a special group of twenty men was formed. They were equipped with portable radio transmitters in order to provide communication service for the troops. As part of this operation, Rameev ended up at the Ukrainian front in September 1943. After their mission of providing communication for the troops during a forced crossing of the Dnepr and the liberation of Kiev ended, the group was disbanded and Rameev returned to Moscow.
In 1944 he was demobilized in accordance with a government decree that directed specialists to rebuild the economy, and applied for work at the Central Scientific Research Institute No. 108. In the application form, he stated that his father had died, but did not indicate where. Earlier, he sent a letter to Stalin asking for help; he was seeking the leader's official support in his claim that a son is not responsible for his father's actions. Instead of an answer, he received a paper summons for a telephone conversation, where a stern voice warned him: "Live quietly and don't contact us ever again!"
At that moment, Rameev understood that he had to do something unusual, outstanding, and very important for his people and nation in order to give his life meaning.
Academician Axel Berg, a remarkable scientist, was working at the Institute No. 108 at that time. Berg introduced Rameev to computing, applications in radar devices and the field of electronic circuitry. During the same period Rameev became interested in nuclear physics and invented a charged particle acceleration device, for which he received an invention certificate. When physicist and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, Alexander I. Leipunsky, learned of Rameev's invention, he was intrigued by the young talented scientist and invited him to Obninsk, where they were just beginning to experiment with atomic power engineering. But unfortunately, the political system failed the scientist again, and six months later Rameev was informed that there was no place for him at Obninsk.
[2]Narodnii Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the predecessor to the KGB).