Yakov Alpert (b.1911) has been making waves all his life - in scientific laboratories, where his pioneering work as a radio physicist earned him world renown, and in the Soviet Union, where he defied the repressive Soviet regime, became a refusnik and a dissident, and at the age of 76 finally won permission to emigrate to the United States. Alpert tells in this personal memoir what it was like to be a scientist during the entire life cycle of the Soviet Union.