The Beginning: The Uninvited Dean: How a Phone Call Changed Everything
It really was the beginning, and it almost happened like this.
I came home from a business trip exhausted, the kind of tiredness that settles into the bones before the coat is even off. At the time, I held a demanding post at the Kharkiv Research Institute of Microbiology and Immunology — deputy director for scientific work and head of the clinic. My wife met me at the door with the quiet certainty of someone delivering news that cannot wait: a Professor V. Lemeshko from the University had been looking for me and would call.
Lemeshko. I turned the name over in my mind like a coin of uncertain denomination. Then it came back — a reception at the Kharkiv Research Institute of Therapy, where I had served as deputy director. The academician L. Malaya had introduced him with ceremony: a scientist of world renown. I remembered thinking, not without irony, that many scientists in our country carry that title while science quietly recedes into the wallpaper. Our paths had never crossed professionally, and so he had faded from memory.
Then the telephone rang.
Lemeshko's voice was measured, deliberate. He bore a proposal from Rector I. Tarapov: the University had opened a department of specialists in fundamental medicine with the right to medical practice, housed within the Faculty of Biology. The rector wished to discuss whether I might take on this function.
I told him I needed time to think. A week, he offered. A week, I accepted.
I consulted the people whose judgment I trusted — the luminaries of Kharkiv medicine: L. Malaya, V. Hryshchenko, A. Korzh, M. Khvysiuk. I spoke with colleagues. I spoke with my family. Every voice said the same thing: this was rare, this was important, this was worth trying. The chorus was unanimous, almost unnervingly so.
Seven days later, Lemeshko called. Was I ready? I was. Then tomorrow — four o'clock. Four o'clock it was.
There was something quietly flattering about returning to Karazin University. Years earlier, I had studied here at the evening department of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics — a young man navigating equations under artificial light, never once setting eyes on the rector. To be invited back by that very office, to one's own alma mater, felt like a story completing a circle it hadn't known it was drawing.
The meeting with Rector Tarapov and Lemeshko was brisk and full of possibility. We spoke of revival — of restoring the classical tradition of university medical education that had been displaced and diluted over decades. We agreed I would begin part-time, a trial arrangement, cautious and sensible. All three of us left the table satisfied.
Then Tarapov produced a bottle of "Napoleon." The cognac moved through my empty stomach with swift authority; a pleasant warmth bloomed outward, and the room tilted gently. It was in this agreeable haze that Lemeshko slid a sheet of paper across the table and began to dictate — an application for a full-time transfer. Not half a position. Not a trial. Full-time, immediate, irrevocable. I signed.
The next morning I arrived as a university employee, wearing the role like a coat cut for someone else. The Biology Faculty received me. The academic year was nearly spent — late March already — and the students who would become doctors were still absorbed in the fundamentals of biology. A significant portion of the year had evaporated before medicine had even been introduced.
The first obstacle was textbooks. The Kharkiv Medical Institute refused our request without ceremony. I wrote to Donetsk, to my other alma mater, and Rector V. Kazakov answered generously — a donation of volumes spanning every major medical specialty. The city's medical library opened its doors as well. We were assembling a faculty from almost nothing, brick by improvised brick.
It became clear quickly that a department nested within Biology would never suffice. Medical subjects would always lose ground to biological ones. I proposed to Rector Tarapov the creation of a standalone Faculty of Fundamental Medicine. The decision came swiftly. I was elected dean.
We selected our first students by a simple, elegant logic: the top twenty-five performers from the Biology Faculty's winter examinations. No separate admissions, no ceremony — just merit, measured and applied. These young men and women, the very best of their cohort, became the founding generation. They wrote, without knowing it, the first lines of a revival.
Everything ahead seemed luminous. Ukraine was newly independent, the air electric with possibility, plans multiplying like cells in a healthy body. We believed we were building something lasting.
No sign warned us of what was coming. No premonition stirred when, barely two months into the new academic year, a commission arrived — dispatched by the Ministry of Health, by Minister and academician A. Serdyuk himself. Its purpose was singular and unambiguous: to extinguish the experiment before it could prove itself. Serdyuk understood the stakes. If university medical education succeeded here, the entire system might shift toward the Ministry of Education — and that, to him, was an existential threat.
What followed was not a disagreement. It was a war.
I did not understand that yet. Standing in those early autumn corridors, I could not have known that this confrontation would stretch across years, that it would demand everything — endurance, sacrifice, ingenuity — and that those who dared to stand beside this idea would be treated as though marked by contagion. I did not yet know that this bright beginning carried within it the seed of a long and unrelenting struggle.
But it had begun. Quietly, over cognac and a sheet of paper slid across a table. It had already begun.
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