Cold War: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology or MIPT is a Russian university that was originally established in the Soviet Union. It was created after a government decree on March 10th 1946 mandating the creation of a "College of Physics and Technology". This mandate was created after a letter was sent to Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union at the time, by Pyotr Kapitsa. The letter argued for the need of a school to maintain and develop the science & defense potential of the USSR. The degree was briefly halted before the school was officially established on November 25th of 1946 as a new school within Moscow State University. In the letter, Kapitsa argued the found principles should be:

• Rigorous selection of gifted and creative young individuals.

• Involving leading scientists in student education, in close contact with them in their creative environment.

• An individualized approach to encourage the cultivation of students' creative drive and to avoid overloading them with unnecessary subjects and rote learning common in other schools and necessitated by mass education.

• Conducting their education in an atmosphere of research and creative engineering, using the best existing laboratories in the country.

Kapitsa was a prominent Soviet physicist who would eventually get a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics". The man graduated in 1918 from the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University after serving as an ambulance driver for two years during World War I. During that time, he lost his father, wife, and 2 children during the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. He invented new machines for the liquefaction of gases and discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium in 1937. He was a man dedicated to science and developed an entire explanation of the phenomenon of superfluidity in 1941 and during the Second World War, Kapitsa became responsible for the entire Soviet production of liquid oxygen.

On September 1951, a government decree established the institute as its own independent higher education institution. Many great scientists and thinkers would be alumni of MIPT, including Nikolay Semyonov, Lev Landau, Alexandr Prokhorov, Vitaly Ginzburg, Sergey Khristianovich, Mikhail Lavrentiev, Mstislav Keldysh, Sergey Korolyov and Boris Rauschenbach.

MIPT is still around today and still free to most students in accordance to the Soviet and Marxist socialist principles the university was founded on. Students also receive small scholarships that depend on student performance and cheap housing (about $13 to $20 US Dollars per month in 2020).