Tuesday, 25 May

At 10.15 a.m. I went to visit the Kuibyshev Industrial University accompanied by the Vice Chairman Voks Zolov. I went with Counsellor Chen, Daichu and Zengqi. First its principal told us the university’s history. He said it was established in 1931 to train technical personnel and engineers. The university taught subjects like thermo-engineering, factories with chemical techniques, the kinetics of assembling, electrical engineering and small machines. In the last ten years the number of graduates has reached several hundred. The standard of entry was high school graduation. Study duration was five years and they worked six hours a day. There was also an evening school, especially for factory workers who wanted to study.  Every night started from 7.00 until 11.00, study duration was also five years. After school, the students could help farmers. In the third year, students would work as interns in factories. During the intern period, they could replace workers and deputy officers. Before the war, the student ratio was probably 80% men and 20% women, now men were only 20% and female 80%. The government permitted third, fourth, and fifth year male students going to the Front line upon graduation, therefore there were many fourth and fifth year male students, while almost all first and second year students were female. On graduation, the government would allocate jobs to them. After the talk, we (the Australian embassy’s Counsellor and Secretary came too.) were led to a classroom to listen to a lecture. The professor was talking about mechanical theory. After ten minutes, we went to another classroom. It happened that there were two female students taking an exam. We sat and watched. One of the girls was   stressed, the Australian Cmbassy’s Counsellor felt sorry about this, and joked to us that the girl would never forget this day. Then we went to see the fuel laboratories and the students were testing the increase of heat content from bomb explosions. We went to see the chemistry laboratory, then back to the principal’s office. I asked him about the situation at the university and two other professors came as well. They did not dare to answer most of our questions, even the number of students, or number of students in each class. It was ridiculous. Some joked that if you asked people in the Soviet Union how many children they had, before answering perhaps they had to ask Moscow.