I was listening today to a lecture (on youtube) on Covid by Russia’s famous pneumonia expert, Academician Alexander Chuchalin. He was for years one of the top Kremlin doctors: he treated personally Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Chernenko and others. Recently however he

resigned from Russia’s Health Ministry’s Ethics Council because of Putin’s premature registration of “Sputnik V” covid vaccine. Apparently Chuchalin opposed it on grounds of safety and when Putin overruled him, he resigned.
Anyway, Chuchalin begins his talk (while his students

are still entering the lecture room) with some history of viruses and from this I learned that the first scientist to discover them was Russian, Dmitry Ivansky ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Ivanovsky ). He was a professor of ...The University of Warsaw. However, unfortunately, we can’t take

credit for this because it was the Imperial University of Warsaw, whose history is not considered in Poland as part of the history of the University of Warsaw. The University of Warsaw was founded in 1816 by tsar Alexander I, when he became King of the Kingdom of Poland, created

by the Congress of Vienna (hence it is also called the Congress Kingdom) from a part of the Duchy of Warsaw (created by Napoleon). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before its partitions had 3 universities: the oldest was the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (founded 1364),

then Vilnius University (1579) and Lwów (Lviv) University (1661). But in 1816 Vilnius was in the Russian Empire, Lwów in Austria and Kraków an independent city, so Alexander founded a new university for his small kingdom (where he was a constitutional monarch which did not very

much agree with his constitution, and even less with that of his successor Nicholas I). Anyway, in 1830 the Poles rebelled (the November Uprising) and after its fall Nicholas decided to close down the university his brother had created. Then in 1862 Alexander II allow the opening

of The Warsaw Main School, which was a smaller smaller scale university (it had 4 departments: law & administration, math & physics, linguistics & history, and medicine) but in 1863 there was another Polish Uprising (The January Uprising) so in 1869 the School was abolished and

replaced by Imperial University of Warsaw, where everything was taught only in Russian and all professors came from Russian Universities. This university had many world class scholars but it was boycotted by most of the Polish population and was not regarded as a Polish

University. It was at this university that Dmitri Ivanovsky was a professor. In 1915 the German army occupied Warsaw. The Russians managed to evacuate the Imperial University (together with Ivanovsky) to Rostov. Fortunately they did not have time to take most of the magnificent

library with them. The Germans, trying to win over the Polish population, allowed the opening of The University of Warsaw with Polish professors and with Polish as the language of instruction so the history of the modern University of Warsaw dates from that time. Which is why

officially we can’t claim Ivanovsky or any of the other outstanding Russian professors who taught at the Imperial University as part of our legacy