During the Cold War in the period 1945–1991, the balance of power between the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union, including their allies—maintained a tenuous peace. Each of the two superpowers possessed enough destructive weaponry to annihilate the other many times over. In many other aspects the two superpowers were vastly different. The United States was more technologically advanced, whereas the Soviet Union had a troubled economy and a backward infrastructure. The sophisticated weaponry of the Soviet Union was to a large extent due to the outstanding achievements of its scientists and the communist regime’s ability to concentrate its limited resources on selected tasks. The Soviet Union could not have become a superpower without a strong scientific background that relied on some traditions in science dating back to czarist Russia, but whose foundations were created from the beginning of Soviet power and developed in the 1920s and 1930s.
To be a scientist was one of the most privileged professions in the Soviet Union. It was a magnet for talent in view of the very restricted possibilities where gifted young people could aspire for a career. In contrast, the current Russia pays diminishing attention to science. One of the vice presidents of the Russian Academy of Sciences recently noted, “The demise of the Soviet Union hurt Russian science very much.”1
Although communist ideology advocated a classless society, there was strong stratification in Soviet society. This is conspicuously demonstrated by the differentiation of its burial places. They had a hierarchy, with the Lenin Mausoleum on the Red Square in Moscow at its top—between 1953 and 1961 it was Lenin’s and Stalin’s mausoleum. Behind the mausoleum are buried the next echelon of Soviet leaders, each represented by a bust. Stalin is one of them; his bust was erected as late as 1970, indicating how hesitant post-Stalin Soviet leaderships were in condemning one of the bloodiest dictators in world history. When I last saw these graves (in June 2011), of the twelve, only Stalin’s was covered with fresh flowers. Many of the most distinguished Soviet (and some international) politicians, military leaders, and communist revolutionaries are interred in the Kremlin wall, among them Sergei Korolev, the chief Soviet rocket constructor, and Igor Kurchatov, the nuclear czar.
The Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow is Russia’s most distinguished cemetery.2 It is located close to the Moscow River and the center of the city. In addition to political and military leaders, buried here are many of the topmost representatives of Soviet (as well as pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian) intelligentsia: writers, artists, scientists. A walk in the cemetery reveals such a plethora of great scientists of the Soviet decades that in itself is a manifestation of the importance that science played in the Soviet regime.
When I was a master’s degree student in Moscow in the first half of the 1960s, I heard a lot about the Novodevichy Cemetery, but could not visit it. For years, it was closed “temporarily” for reconstruction. When I visited Moscow in the early 1980s, it was possible to visit the Novodevichy, but at the entrance the police took away all cameras, which they returned when the visitor left the cemetery. I was very much taken by the modern tombstone recently erected over the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s grave—the work of sculptor Ernst Neizvestny.3 To me, its alternating black and white stones were an expression of antisymmetry. It fit Khrushchev’s image eminently: he was one of Stalin’s close associates and party to his crimes, yet he unmasked his master after his death. I lamented the ban on taking photographs in the Novodevichy, and soon I received color slides of the tombstone from unknown donors. I included the image in a forthcoming publication on symmetry.4
Nowadays, it is possible to visit Novodevichy freely, and on the occasion of my rare visits to Moscow, I never miss the opportunity to return there. Quite a few scientists whom I knew personally are buried there, some in their own right, others because they inherited the right from their families. Walking along the alleys of this beautiful memorial place, the thought is always with me that during the Soviet era there was an extraordinary accumulation of talent in science. They were the very men (there were hardly any women among them) who made it possible for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.
The expression “Buried Glory” in the title indicates that the scientist heroes in this book and their achievements belong to the past. Most have been unknown in the West, and while their activities have become a little better known lately, their personalities have remained mostly in obscurity. It is an interesting question why the Soviet scientists—with the notable exception of Andrei Sakharov—are so little known? This is in spite of their decisive contributions to the Soviet might. Western historiography tends to ignore them, even those that helped create the Soviet hydrogen bombs. The Soviet space program fared a little better due to the spectacular and easy-to-perceive successes, such as the first Sputnik in 1957 and the first manned flight by Yurii Gagarin in 1961.
Only one of the heroes of the twelve chapters in this book is still alive. Nine of them are buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Seven of them received the Nobel Prize, and the rest were also at that level of scientific achievement. The coverage in this book is far from comprehensive, and it is not a history of Soviet science either. The primary goal of the book is to bring the personalities and the lives of a select set of Soviet scientists into human proximity. I hope that my selection of the sample of scientists introduced in this book will be adequate to create a good impression of what it meant to be creating in science under Soviet conditions and will also lead to an appreciation of the achievements of scientists who lived and labored in Soviet times.