It was a fascinating experience going to Moscow in 1956. It was like visiting another planet. Some of the people in our group, like Viki, had been there twenty years before and they could compare, they had lots of friends. The rest of us made friends quickly though with the same people, these Russian physicists who had been around in 1936–and of course with the younger ones as well. In a few days we got to know them very well and we talked about all sorts of matters, and it was even possible to discuss some political questions because of the thaw, or whatever you want to call it – the… the change in the political climate. Khrushchev had just given his anti-Stalin speech. It hadn't been published but it was circulated, by word of mouth. The Party official in each work group throughout the country was supposed to tell his or her fellow workers about the speech. Millions of people had been released from confinement in prisons and labor camps. The guards who were fired because they weren't needed any more constituted a huge population of unemployed in addition to the prisoners that had been released. And probably some of the people we saw cleaning the spittoons in the physics labs were, had recently been, guards in labor camps. And we heard all sorts of stories of scientists who had been confined and… and terrible things done to them but were now free. The whole situation was amazing.