Science in the Soviet Union always occupied a privileged position, but at times it was a very risky position, too. In the 1920s, up to the early 1930s, there was a tremendous boost in science in the new Soviet Union, and gifted young people joined the profession in large numbers. Considerable segments of the population that under the czarist regime could not have dreamed of higher education were now encouraged to pursue it, and the most gifted members were lured into scientific research. The Soviet government realized the importance of interactions with the rest of the world and arranged study trips for scientists to Western Europe. International visitors were welcomed at Soviet meetings and laboratories. The goal was to re-establish old contacts and establish new ones in order to lift the level of science in the Soviet Union to an international standard.
This openness changed from the early 1930s as a result of several factors coming together. Among them was the demand of the Soviet state to involve scientists increasingly in solving problems related to the economy and especially for the military. It began innocuously enough; thus, for example, there was a debate at the Ukrainian Institute of Physical Technology about whether or not the profile of the Institute should be changed to address practical problems. Whereas the initial discussions appeared to be open and democratic, they soon led to a sharp division between the representatives of the two views. There were subsequent repercussions targeting those who opposed the changes. Applications of science, especially for the military, necessitated making much of it classified. This was compounded by Stalin’s growing paranoia about everything foreign, and he introduced an isolationist policy that characterized the Soviet Union during its later existence. After Stalin had eliminated those whom he considered rivals for power, he consolidated his monopoly and let his security organs loose to perform mass murders and deportations. Among the victims of this terror that included a considerable portion of the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the Red Army, there were a number of talented scientists: physicists, biologists, and others. Another period of terror flared up after World War II, in the period 1948–1953, during the last years of Stalin’s life.
We note two distinguishing features between the two periods of terror. One was that in the second half of the 1930s, there was no branch of science where scientists were immune to persecution. On the other hand, in the post–World War II period, at the last minute, physics was exempted. This was due to the recognition of the importance of the nuclear weapons program. The question was whether ideological purity was more important than the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Physics could not have provided the latter without the application of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics that were both considered the products of bourgeois ideologies.
The other distinguishing feature was that the prewar terror was not colored by anti-Semitism; whereas during the last years of Stalin’s life, the Terror coincided with increasing anti-Semitic tendencies. The attacks on Jews culminated in the arrest and indictment of a group of distinguished medical doctors and professors, mostly Jewish, who were falsely accused of planning the assassination of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The punishment and deportation of the entire Jewish population of the European areas of the Soviet Union had already been carefully choreographed under Stalin. Upon his death, these activities were abandoned, but covert anti-Semitism remained a characteristic feature of Soviet internal policy throughout the rest of the existence of the Soviet Union.
In the late 1930s, Stalin’s henchman, Nikolai Ezhov, indiscriminately murdered and exiled people. His successor, Lavrentii Beria, was no less brutal and ruthless, but he was more “rational.” Upon replacing Ezhov in 1939, he instituted an amnesty in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were freed, constituting about one-third of those incarcerated. Beria wanted to make the prison camps economically viable. From the mid-1940s, when he was made responsible for the nuclear weapons program, he gave precedence to performance over political and ideological considerations.
In both the American and the Soviet nuclear programs, at least in the top echelon, there were many Jewish scientists. For the American program, this could be explained by the influx of refugee physicists from Germany, Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere prior to World War II. By the time they had become eligible for defense work, the atomic bomb project was available for them. This project was initiated later than other defense-related projects that also involved scientists, such as the radar project. The refugee physicists were also the first to recognize the danger that Germany might acquire an atomic bomb; hence they had pushed for an American counterprogram before others recognized its necessity. By then, most of the leading nonrefugee American scientists had found assignments in other programs. On the Soviet side, the collapse of the czarist regime also meant the elimination of the severe anti-Jewish restrictions in higher education; young, ambitious Jews flocked to centers of learning and research, and the emerging field of nuclear science attracted many of their best minds.
Against this background of the privileged situation of physics, the disadvantaged circumstances of other sciences were conspicuous during the last years of Stalin’s reign. Among them, biology suffered the severest damage at the hands of the unscientific czar of biology and agricultural sciences, Trofim Lysenko. Stalin personally edited Lysenko’s presentation to the 1948 meeting of the agricultural academy in which Lysenko launched an all-out attack on modern biology. This was part of the dedicated effort by Stalin and his regime to prevent Western influence from penetrating Soviet society. The areas of computerization, automation, and other technology-driven disciplines, often referred to under the umbrella term “cybernetics” (today, the term “informatics” is more applicable), were also singled out for attack. Cybernetics was considered to symbolize everything evil that an imperialistic-bourgeois society could offer. The devastating conditions of biology and cybernetics in the Soviet Union impacted not only the well-being of Soviet society but Soviet military capabilities as well, especially in the long run. This would be conspicuous when it became clear that the Soviet Union would not be able to match the American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), regardless of whether or not the program was feasible and whether or not much less expensive and sophisticated countermeasures could have neutralized it.
As mentioned above, the development of bombs saved physics from the ideological attacks. Ironically, practical considerations contributed—alas, with the opposite outcome—to Lysenko’s support by Stalin and later by Khrushchev. He promised to lift the productivity of Soviet agriculture if Soviet agriculture would follow his teachings. The results were disastrous, both for biology in the Soviet Union and for Soviet agriculture. It was the physicists who would come to the rescue of biology, hesitantly at first but gradually with enhanced determination. Igor Tamm, Andrei Sakharov, Petr Kapitza, Igor Kurchatov, and others appeared increasingly determined to fight for modern biology. Sakharov’s determination stemmed from his study of the possible biological consequences of nuclear testing. For Tamm, it was his general concern for science that mattered. On December 10, 1958, the day of the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm, Tamm, in his two-minute banquet speech, managed to highlight the importance of modern biology (see chapter 1).
Tamm had been Sakharov’s mentor, and had strongly influenced the formation of his pupil’s philosophy and outlook on the world. Both men condemned the way the Soviet leadership evoked anti-Semitism when the leadership found it convenient and relied on such occasions on the worst instincts of parts of the population. In his Memoirs, Sakharov quoted Tamm saying that there is “one foolproof way of telling if someone belongs to the Russian intelligentsia. A true Russian intelligent is never an anti-Semite. If he is infected with that virus, then he’s something else, something terrible and dangerous.”1 The anti-Semitic character of the Soviet system remained in effect throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. There were limitations on the number of Jewish students that could be accepted at certain institutions of higher education, and some institutions did not accept any Jews at all.2 It thus happened that Jewish professors taught a student body that Jewish students could not have joined. It also happened that when scientists were recruited for important, urgent projects, it was unofficially declared that there would be no limitation on the hiring of Jewish employees—this was another proof that under “normal” circumstances, there were severe limitations on Jews. It was also an open secret that a considerable portion (estimated at 25% to 30%) of the members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences would never vote to accept a Jewish nominee. It was a testimony to the professional strength of Jewish academicians that they were nonetheless elected.
The membership of the Soviet Academy of Sciences consisted of various strata. Some members were truly great scientists. Others were obvious representatives of the Communist Party. Yet others were elected as a result of complicated compromises between various groups of the members. Still, to a certain degree, the Academy of Sciences represented a hope for democratic action amid the hopelessness of a totalitarian regime. In rare, isolated cases, the majority of the membership defeated party nominees, and in a few cases it elected new members in spite of contrary party directives. By and large, however, the Communist Party kept the Academy under tight control, along with everything else in Soviet society, to the end of the existence of the Soviet Union. Most of the “heroes” of this book became members of the Science Academy, and they did so based on their scientific achievements. Their elections in some cases were facilitated and accelerated by their stellar participation in the development of Soviet nuclear power.
All scientists selected for inclusion in this book were top scientists, but there were many more that could have been selected just as well; beyond their excellence, my choice was subjective. There were a few whom I would have liked to add but decided not to lest the project grow too large. I hesitated over whether or not to add Igor Kurchatov, and here I would like to share my dilemma with my readers. He was an outstanding physicist, and it was to a great extent due to his activities that the Soviet Union caught up quite fast with the United States in nuclear matters. He was forty years old when he was made head of the Soviet nuclear program. I decided against his inclusion after I had read the information that was readily available about him, and found it an impossible task to realistically evaluate his personality and performance in the framework of the present project.
Kurchatov was the primary recipient of the intelligence pouring into Moscow about the American and other nuclear bomb developments. Some other leaders of the Soviet atomic bomb project were also receiving intelligence data, but nobody had the direct access to these classified reports that Kurchatov did. It is understandable that the Soviets guarded most rigorously the sources of such information and even the fact that they were the results of espionage activity. This is why Kurchatov could not reveal the sources of the information that he was obliged to share with his colleagues in order to utilize the information. His colleagues were amazed by the trustworthiness of this information, the solutions that proved almost invariably correct, and must have supposed that the data came either from Kurchatov’s own research or from secret Soviet laboratories. If he was a conscientious scientist—and indications are that he was; to this day he is much revered among the Russian scientific community—his role of presenting scientific information without its sources must have tormented him. Some day—and it may never come—it might be possible to delineate his personal achievements from what he learned from espionage. Sorting out this problem was beyond the scope of the present project.
Yulii Khariton, to whom a chapter in this book is devoted, was also on the receiving end of intelligence, but in his case it was easy to delineate his scientific achievements before he joined the weapons program from his later activities as scientific chief of the secret Soviet nuclear laboratory, Arzamas-16.
My choices of the scientists for this book were directed by my interest and background in the physical sciences, although biology would have been another fascinating area of inquiry about great personalities. There, my first choices would have been the martyr Nikolai Vavilov and the scientist who figured prominently among those who brought modern biology back to the Soviet Union, Vladimir Engelhardt. As it is, they both appear only briefly in the book.
In this book, a dozen or so Soviet scientists are presented through impressionistic portraits. I happened to know personally nearly half of the scientists introduced here, and I have met family members of some whom I did not know. Some of these family members represented more than one of the heroes in this book. Most of the great scientists belonged to a privileged circle of Soviet society, and it was not unusual that their children married the children of other members of this circle.
The scientists presented are grouped in three sections; nuclear physics, low-temperature physics, and chemistry. Even in the chemistry group, most of the scientists were physicists or received training in physics. Twentieth-century physics and chemistry, especially in the first half of the century, overlapped a great deal. The labels physical chemistry and chemical physics demonstrate this blending of previously more-distinct disciplines. The principal discoveries of Nikolai Semenov, Yulii Khariton, Boris Belousov and Anatol Zhabotinsky, and Aleksandr Nesmeyanov were chemical in character even if only Belousov and Nesmeyanov could be labeled as bona fide chemists. The classifications “nuclear physics” and “low-temperature physics” here may also seem arbitrary since there was remarkable overlap in the activities of the physicists appearing in these pages. They did not recognize any of the artificial boundaries that the usual classification systems our educational and research establishments force onto science for practical considerations. The overlap among the activities of these scientists and their related backgrounds made some overlap among the chapters in this book inevitable. I tried to keep it within limits, but found that some overlap was useful to facilitate smooth reading. In discussing, for example, Lev Landau’s incarceration and the actions taken by Petr Kapitza to secure his liberation, I look at the story from Landau’s and Kapitza’s perspectives in their respective chapters.
I believe that the portraits in the following pages provide a realistic and instructive picture of some of the best minds in twentieth-century science. In their sum, their stories bring us also closer to understanding not only these exceptional contributors to twentieth-century science, but also to understanding what to a great extent continues to be an enigma, the Soviet Union.
To facilitate geographical orientation, three maps are presented here.
The Soviet Union, 1945–1991.
Western Soviet Union with the borders of the member republics and the locations figuring in the text marked (the names of the respective republics are in parentheses, except for Russia), 1—Ashkhabad (Turkmenistan), 2—Baku (Azerbaijan), 3—Chelyabinsk, 4—Elizavetgrad (today, Kirovograd, Ukraine), 5—Nizhnii Novgorod, in Soviet times, Gorky, 6—Kazan, 7—Kharkov (Ukraine), 8—Kiev (Ukraine), 9—Minsk (Belarus), 10—Moscow, 11—Riga (Latvia), 12—St. Petersburg, 13—Samara, 14—Saratov, 15—Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan), 16—Ulyanovsk, 17—Vilnius (Lithuania).
Moscow, Gorky—Nizhnii Novgorod and a few additional locations figuring in the text with distances (in miles) from Moscow as the crow flies, 1—Arzamas (244 miles), 2—Chernogolovka (35), 3—Nizhnii Novgorod (250), 4—Moscow, 5—Pushchino (65), 6—Sarov (231), 7—Troitsk (22)
Note on the scientific degrees in the Soviet/Russian system. University graduates who become teachers, engineers, and researchers receive a Diploma that can be considered equivalent to a master’s degree, or somewhere between a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree. Diplomas issued by Moscow State University and other leading institutions, for example, can certainly be considered equivalent to a master’s. The Candidate of Science (C.Sc.) degree can be considered equivalent to a PhD degree. Just as the levels of American PhDs greatly vary depending on the granting institution, this is so in the Soviet and Russian system as well, although the ultimate granting agency is the State Commission of Accreditation, whose existence is supposed to guarantee a nationwide uniform level. The Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree follows the C.Sc. degree. The work for the C.Sc. degree is usually conducted under the supervision of a mentor; the work for the D.Sc. degree is usually independent research assisted by graduate students working for their lower degree. There is no equivalent to the D.Sc. degree in the US system, whereas in Russia this degree is usually a prerequisite for a professorial appointment. In this respect it is similar to the Habilitation in the German system. Membership in the Soviet, now Russian, Academy of Sciences can be considered to be part of the system of scientific degrees. It is a two-tier system. The first is the “corresponding membership” and the higher one is the “full membership.” The titles are Corresponding Member of the Soviet (Russian) Academy of Sciences and Academician, respectively. The full membership does not necessarily follow the corresponding membership, and there are no rules stipulating how long one may be a corresponding member. Becoming an academician was and continues to be in the pinnacle of science—this was not a Soviet category, but a continuation of practice used in czarist Russia. In Soviet society, there was no aristocracy, and the communist higher echelon could be admired or despised. The scientific elite was revered.
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Note on the transliteration of Russian names. The general rules of transliteration have been followed, but precedence was given to spellings that were already well known in the English-language literature. If the name had appeared in different versions, the most frequently used version was used. Variations may be, for example, Alexander, Aleksander, and Aleksandr or Alexey, Alexei, Aleksey, and Aleksei. Surnames have usually fewer variations in the literature, for example, Kitaigorodskii and Kitaigorodsky. I tried to be consistent throughout the text; exceptions include when original literature is being quoted, and when in the reference the name is given as in the original even if the spelling is different from the one used in the main text. Similar considerations applied to geographical names, leading to some inconsistency but retaining self-consistency. Thus, Gorky is used throughout rather than Gorkii, and Nizhnii Novgorod rather than Nizhny Novgorod.
