Igor Tamm’s grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Source: Photograph by and courtesy of the author.
Igor Tamm’s portrait.
Source: Courtesy of Valentina Berezovskaya, Moscow.
Igor E. Tamm (1895–1971) came from a part-German, part-Cossack family. He grew up in turbulent times in Russia and his parents sent him to Scotland to study and to be away from politics. When Tamm returned he became a theoretical physicist. He was disillusioned with politics though he remained a Marxist all of his life.
He achieved great success in theoretical physics, including his Nobel-Prize-winning theory of the Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation. During the war he was engaged in defense-related research, but his greatest contribution to Soviet might came after the war when he was a leading member of the secret project on nuclear weapons.
He placed his principles above his career and benefits. It was a miracle that he survived unscathed both the trappings of a corrupt society and Stalin’s terror. His life served as an example for his peers.
Igor Evgenevich Tamm was born July 8, 1895, in Vladivostok.* When he was three years old, his family moved to the town of their roots, Elizavetgrad in the Ukraine, in the center of the triangle of Kiev, Odessa, and Dnepropetrovsk. Today, the town is called Kirovograd. At the time of his birth, Tamm’s family was in the Far East, because his engineer father worked on building the Trans-Siberian railway. Upon the family’s return to Elizavetgrad, he was put in charge of the waterworks, electric power station, and the trolleys of the city. Elizavetgrad nurtured talent in both science and the arts. The world-renowned American chemist Moses Gomberg came from this city, and the Hungarian composer and performer Franz Liszt gave his last concert in Russia there.
Tamm was born into the Russian Empire of the ruthless Czar Nikolai II. He heard a lot about politics; he was ten years old at the time of the Russian-Japanese war. During his high school years he became a dedicated socialist. His parents were worried, and upon his graduation from high school they sent him away for one year to Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1914, just as World War I was breaking out, he returned and entered Moscow State University to major in physics and mathematics. When the war broke out, there was universal patriotic euphoria, but Tamm opposed the war, and joined those who felt similarly. They considered revolution to be the only way for Russia to progress. Still, Tamm wanted to help his slightly older colleagues who had been conscripted and were on the front. In 1915, he joined the Russian Red Cross organization and volunteered to serve as a medic in the Russian Army, a “med brother” analogous to “med sisters.”1 After one year he returned to Moscow to continue his studies. It was also in 1915 that he joined the Social Democratic Party. In 1917, he married Natalia Shuiskaya.
In 1917, two revolutions occurred in Russia. The first was the bourgeois revolution in February. It prompted Tamm to become an orator and a prolific author of newspaper articles and of leaflets. He consistently argued against the war. He ran for representative of Elizavetgrad for the First All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers, which convened in Petrograd, June 16–July 7 (June 3–24), 1917. At this time he was so dedicated to politics that during the election campaign he wrote: “I would give half of my life for this,” that is, to be a representative at this congress.2 Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution happened on November 7 (October 25); subsequently known as the Great October Socialist Revolution, it was celebrated every November 7 in the Soviet Union and throughout the communist world.
The socialists, called also social democrats, comprised many fractions and included Lenin and his followers. Lenin and his comrades won the majority in a crucial vote, and from then on, they called themselves the Bolsheviks—the majority—as distinct from the defeated minority, the Mensheviks. In subsequent years, after 1917, the two labels acquired important political meaning. The term “Bolshevik” became part of the official name of the Communist Party, in paretheses;** whereas Menshevik became equivalent to the “enemies of the people.”
It was still in 1917 that in another crucial vote, Tamm, who belonged to the Mensheviks, voted with the Bolsheviks. Lenin attributed much importance to Tamm’s support, thus, lending Tamm certain political prominence, and this is how Tamm’s political past became widely known in the Soviet Union. This could have helped Tamm in Soviet times, but it could just as well have hurt him, because the story was proof that he had been a Menshevik. Tamm was not a dedicated Menshevik, but arguing later that he was not would have sounded as if he were trying to whitewash his political past. He was deeply disturbed by Lenin’s Bolshevik dictatorship, and by 1922, he had withdrawn from politics and restricted his activities to theoretical physics.
Tamm spent another academic year, 1927–28, in Western Europe, this time as part of the Soviet efforts to re-establish scientific connections. He especially enjoyed his stay in Leiden, where Paul Ehrenfest was his host. The two men felt mutual respect and friendship, and Ehrenfest’s recommendation helped Tamm to visit some of the best research laboratories in Europe. He met famous physicists, including Albert Einstein, Walter Elsasser, Pieter Zeeman, Oskar Klein, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and, most importantly for Tamm, the taciturn Englishman Paul Dirac. Tamm was anxious to prove himself worthy of his colleagues. He classified them according to his estimates of whether or not he could measure up to them. He felt himself on equal footing with Ehrenfest, but found Dirac much above him.
In the period before Stalin’s terror in the second half of the 1920s, scientists like Tamm could find a lot to be enthusiastic about in the Soviet Union. Tamm tried to convince his Western colleagues about the merits of the Soviet system. Dirac was receptive to Tamm’s ideas. They had met when Dirac came to Leiden to visit Ehrenfest. Dirac was as tight-lipped as his reputation predicted he would be, but the extrovert Tamm managed to become friendly with him. For years, they enjoyed unique interactions.3 Dirac and Tamm met briefly again in 1929 in Moscow when Dirac was in transit from Japan to England.
Paul Dirac, O. N. Trapeznikova, and Igor Tamm in 1928 in Leiden. Photograph by Lev Shubnikov, founder of cryogenic physics in Kharkov and victim of Stalin’s terror. Olga Trapeznikova, a low-temperature physicist, was Shubnikov’s wife.
At a meeting of theoretical physicists in the early 1930s in the Soviet Union. From left to right, 1-Dmitrii Ivanenko, 6-Niels Bohr, 8-Lev Landa, 10-Yakov Frenkel, 14-Vladimir Fock, 15-Igor Tamm.
Source: Courtesy of G. A. Sardanashvily, Moscow.
In the summer of 1936, Tamm’s love for mountain climbing infected Dirac, and the two went off on a tour of the Caucasus. Kapitza was the only other physicist Dirac was interested in seeing in the Soviet Union. However, the war and the isolationism of Stalin’s Soviet Union did not help Tamm and Dirac’s friendship. When in 1956 they met again in Moscow, they did not return to their past closeness. That the meeting took place at all was surprising because of Tamm’s deep prior involvement in the secret nuclear weapons program, which made it difficult for him to meet with foreigners.
From the mid-1930s, the lives of Soviet physicists took a drastic turn for the worse. Lev Landau (see chapter 5) was arrested, and his life was only miraculously saved. Some of his colleagues were not only arrested and incarcerated but sentenced to death and executed. Among them were great talents and some of Tamm’s friends. His favorite pupil, Semyon Shubin, perished and so did another very gifted young physicist, Matvei Bronshtein, for whom Tamm had served as reviewer of his dissertation.
Tragedy struck his immediate family as well. His younger brother Leonid was arrested in 1936. In the factory where he worked, there was a terrible fire compounded by a horrific explosion due to the accumulated flammable gas. The authorities accused Leonid of starting the fire. He was well respected by his associates, a leader, and just as hard-working as he was brave. When the fire started, all others ran away, seeking cover, and Leonid alone tried to suppress the flames with his own hands. He did not succeed completely, but his actions prevented the fire from spreading and saved a large part of the factory. Nonetheless, he was tried and sentenced to ten years of incarceration without the right of having correspondence. His family did not know then that this formulation of the sentence was a euphemism for immediate execution. His wife was exiled.4
Igor Tamm was lucky. It happened that at the height of the terror, he and his family went for a summer vacation in a remote place. While they were there, a family member brought Tamm a summons from the secret police to appear at their infamous headquarters, the Lubyanka, in Moscow. Tamm arrived at Lubyanka in the evening of the day indicated in the summons. He was ordered to return the next morning. On that morning, a newspaper article by Stalin about some abuses of power by the authorities appeared. This may be why when Tamm returned to Lubyanka, they merely talked with him and then let him go.5
Tamm had graduated from Moscow State University in 1918, and for some time he taught there and at several other institutions of higher education. From 1934, and for the rest of his life, the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (Fizicheskii Institut Akademii Nauk [FIAN]) was his principal affiliation. He was closely associated with the internationally renowned physicist Leonid Mandelshtam from 1920 until Mandelshtam’s death in 1944. In 1933 Tamm had been elected a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he organized a section of theoretical physics at FIAN.
Tamm was engaged in conventional war-related research during the first period of the war. The situation changed in 1943 when the struggle against Germany took a turn, and the existence of the Soviet Union was no longer threatened. Tamm’s section of theoretical physics was re-established at the FIAN. He had not yet been invited to participate in the atomic bomb project, though. Distrust of Tamm stemmed not only from his political past but also from his family background.6 The Soviet security organs considered him a “volksdeutsch.”†
The paternal side of Tamm’s family was of German origin, and the maternal side was Cossack. His father showed heroism under the German occupation during World War II. Tamm’s parents and his sister were late in departing from Kirovograd before the German occupiers arrived. Tamm’s sister broke her leg just when the war started and lay in a hospital. She was released from the hospital before the fracture healed, and she had difficulty walking. When, after Kiev’s liberation, Tamm managed to visit the family, his mother had just been buried and his sister fell ill again. This time she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was Tamm’s task to find a surgeon to operate on her. The operation had to be performed without anesthetics since there were none available. After the operation Tamm took the amputated breast for laboratory analysis, and the malignancy of the tumor was confirmed. Tamm wanted the family to move to Moscow, but at this point his father was arrested for allegedly cooperating with the Nazi occupiers. He was saved by the testimony of his colleagues, who attested that he helped others and saved the lives of the persecuted. Finally, Tamm managed to bring his father and sister to Moscow.
In 1946, Tamm received his first assignment on the atomic bomb project, though he still did not have access to its most classified sections. He produced a paper on the width of very intense shock waves, which could not be declassified for the next twenty years. When the development of the hydrogen bomb started—not just feasibility studies, but real work—Tamm was directed to organize a special group at his section of FIAN to deal with its theoretical problems. Andrei Sakharov and Vitaly Ginzburg were among its first members. Within a short time, they came up with crucial ideas for the hydrogen bomb.
Tamm had already started working on the hydrogen bomb in 1948, that is, before the Soviet atomic bomb was tested at the end of August 1949. When in spring 1950, he moved to the secret installation Arzamas-16, he took with him two of his young associates, Sakharov and Yu. A. Romanov. Ginzburg had to be left behind because he lacked security clearance. Tamm stayed at Arzamas-16 only until the completion of the successful test of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953.
In the early days at Arzamas-16, office space was at premium. Even Tamm did not have a private office but shared one with Sakharov and Romanov. There were no set office hours, and the colleagues seldom talked with each other about anything but the problems that they had to solve. Sakharov patiently suffered the two others’ permanent smoking. Tamm lived alone; his wife came only for short visits. The work was compartmentalized to such an extent that the members of Tamm’s group and those of the other theory group led by Yakov Zeldovich were not allowed to know about each other’s work. Even those in charge of these groups could seldom travel beyond the classified areas of the installation and only then with good reason. Tamm was a good organizer and articulate in expressing his thoughts. He spoke fast, and his colleagues joked that if fast speaking had a unit, it should be called “one tamm.”7
In spite of the political disadvantages of his family background, which might have justified greater caution, Tamm behaved bravely when his conscience dictated such behavior. As described in greater detail elsewhere (see chapter 2), in January 1951, when the deeply religious mathematician M. M. Agrest was fired from Arzamas-16, Tamm openly expressed solidarity with him.
Tamm and most of the other leading theoretical physicists on the hydrogen bomb project maintained their interest in fundamental research during their years at Arzamas-16. They had the ability to choose the right research problems and to convey them to their young associates. In the early 1950s, the acumen of theoretical physicists working at Arzamas-16 may have exceeded that of those working in various research institutes in Moscow. Hence the comparison in which it was said that Sarov (in whose vicinity Arzamas-16 was located) might be called the New Moscow; and Moscow, the Old Sarov. Interest in challenging physics was among the driving forces for the scientists at Arzamas-16; another was Soviet patriotism.
Tamm served in a most dedicated way in the development of the Soviet nuclear bombs. The question arises, how could Tamm and others with similar negative experiences serve Stalin and the Soviet Union and with such dedication and produce these terrible means of mass destruction. Just as the possibility of nuclear weapons emerged, theoretical physics was no longer merely a l’art pour l’art science for the satisfaction of scientists’ curiosity or the advancement of their careers. It had become a decisive force in defense, and not just for Stalin and the communist regime. It was indeed national defense.
Stalin was a shrewd enough politician to recognize the value of the scientists’ patriotism—and everybody else’s—and to play on it. During World War II, it helped him that the war of Hitler’s Germany against the Soviet Union threatened the existence of the Russian people and the other peoples of the Soviet Union. When the struggle against Nazi Germany was labeled the Great Patriotic War, it was not a mere slogan forced onto the Soviet people—it was reality.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, the fledgling Soviet efforts in nuclear research were stopped, and even those few scientists who had been engaged in it were redirected to work on traditional weaponry. Although Stalin distrusted the intellectuals—while counting himself to be one—he recognized their value. On September 15, 1941, shortly following the German attack, the State Committee of Defense under Stalin’s leadership forbade sending scientific researchers and instructors in higher education to the front and, generally, forbade employing them outside of their areas of expertise. This decision further enhanced the dedication of these specialists to the cause, and strengthened their feeling of responsibility before their fatherland. Stalin’s approach to the scientists conspicuously differed from Hitler’s. When Max Planck warned Hitler about the consequences of forcing the Jewish scientists out of Germany, Hitler made his famous statement: “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.”8
After World War II, the Soviet citizens were indoctrinated in the dangers of American imperialism. The Soviet physicists took pride in showing that they were capable of performing as well as the Americans. Nonetheless, at the time of the Soviet quest for the first Soviet atomic bomb, the Soviet physicists were not allowed to seek their own solutions. They had to limit themselves to doing exactly what they were instructed to do, which amounted to copying the American approach (without knowing that it was the American approach). However, in the development of subsequent atomic bombs and the hydrogen bomb, they had the opportunity to seek their own original solutions.
The first Soviet hydrogen bomb was successfully tested in August 1953. It was not yet a bona fide hydrogen bomb, only a boosted atomic bomb, only about twenty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. But it is also true that fusion reactions took place in it (see chapter 3). Upon the success of the test, Tamm and the other scientists were showered with awards, bonuses, and goods generally unavailable to ordinary Soviet citizens, including new apartments, dachas, and cars. The scientists knew that had the test failed, they would have been severely punished. Tamm confided in his daughter that the squadron to execute them had already been formed, and had the scientists not succeeded, its action would have been swift. Of course, with Stalin’s death in March 1953 things might have changed, and the test took place a few months after Stalin’s death. Still, before the test, Lavrentii Beria had also disappeared—he had been the powerful supervisor of the Soviet nuclear project who in the past erected a protective umbrella for its participants.
Tamm’s scientific production was not huge by volume, some seventy papers and two monographs, including nonresearch contributions, such as reviews of the works of other physicists. His research contributions covered four principal areas: (1) macroscopic theory, (2) theory of the atomic nucleus, (3) theory of fundamental particles and their interactions, and (4) applications. The contribution for which he and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize belonged to the first area. The work was done in the period 1937–1944, in part jointly with Ilya Frank. It was the theoretical interpretation of the Vavilov-Cherenkov Effect, as it was known in the Soviet Union, or the Cherenkov Effect, as it was known in the rest of the world.
The Cherenkov Effect was an experimentally discovered phenomenon in whose foundation there was a beautiful mechanism of emitting light by fast-moving particles. The effect was then used to establish techniques for the detection of charged particles, fast moving in air, water, ice, and other media. For the particle itself that radiates, the effect leads to a new mechanism of resistance as a consequence of collisions with many other particles in the same medium.
Another of Tamm’s achievements was the discovery of phonons in 1929 and over subsequent years. The word “phonon” comes from the Greek word for sound. It pertains to the electric and thermal conductivity of crystalline solids and ordered liquids. The building units of such condensed phases—atoms, ions, or molecules—may be excited by external interference. The response is collective excitation (and may even be manifested as sound), and this is described as “phonons.” When early in the twenty-first century a Russian stamp series depicted the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century in Russia, a drawing representing Tamm’s phonon discovery was shown next to his portrait. He would have been pleased to see this stamp because he valued this discovery more than the one for which he received the Nobel Prize.
There were other scientific activities by Tamm, not directly related to his theoretical physics, but also significant. One such issue was his concern about how to distinguish between underground nuclear explosions and natural earthquakes—this was related to his participation in the Pugwash movement. The name “Pugwash” came from the first Canadian location of a series of conferences known as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Although Tamm enjoyed the Pugwash meetings, he had no illusions about the nature of the Pugwash movement. The participants from the West were individual intellectuals dedicated to peaceful coexistence between the two camps, the American-led West and the Soviet-led East. On the Soviet side, the participants were government-controlled scientists who were supposed to voice officially sanctioned opinions. Tamm despised the Western intellectuals who accepted such an imbalanced approach to the discussions. Many years later, in 1988, Tamm’s former pupil Andrei Sakharov attended a Pugwash meeting, which he also did not hold in high opinion. He surmised that “Pugwash is worthwhile so long as its efficiency is greater than zero—even if it is not much greater … so let Pugwash do its work. But without me!”9
Another of Tamm’s concerns was about molecular biology. It pained him to see the growing gap between the progress in the West and the situation in the Soviet Union. Trofim Lysenko had destroyed the science of genetics, and made it impossible to cultivate molecular biology, acting with full support of the Soviet leaders, first Iosif Stalin and later Nikita Khrushchev. Tamm realized that under the circumstances it would be impossible for the Soviet biologists to reverse the trend, but that the nuclear physicists might be able to do it. Tamm convinced Igor Kurchatov, the leader of Soviet nuclear research, about the necessity of taking action. Instead of directly challenging Lysenko, they took measures that could be done within their jurisdiction. In the late 1950s, they organized a special seminar, with Tamm as its chair, for a limited circle of people. Initially, the seminars were held in private rooms of members of the Science Academy, almost like an underground movement. In 1958, they organized a section of radiobiology within the framework of Kurchatov’s Institute of Atomic Energy.
Even though Tamm was a theoretical physicist, he gave talks on recent achievements in biology, based on his readings. In 1957, in one of his lectures on the molecular mechanism of heredity, he discussed the genetic code, which at the time was not yet solved. The genetic code describes the mechanism of transfer of heredity information from nucleic acids to proteins. Right after the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, the Russian-American physicist George Gamow raised this question of information transfer from nucleic acids to proteins (called eventually the genetic code). In his 1957 lecture at Leningrad University, Tamm mentioned the models suggested up to that point for the genetic code; among them, Edward Teller’s unsuccessful attempt at creating a code.10
The involvement of nuclear physicists in saving Soviet biology was not merely a matter of altruism. They felt the need to know the consequences of nuclear tests on heredity. Tamm wanted a broad circle of scientists, especially young scientists, to become informed about progress in science. As early as fall 1945 he gave popular-science lectures about atomic energy and wrote popular articles on this topic. Apparently, he felt it incumbent upon himself to inform the broader community about this development.
In 1958, he used the forum afforded by the Nobel Banquet to bring up recent progress in biology as if claiming the right to get involved in it as the quote below shows. At the Nobel Banquet each category is represented by a two-minute speech by the Nobel laureate or by one of them if there is more than one. In 1958, the three physicist laureates decided that Tamm should be the one to speak. In his short speech, he said, “The dividing line between physics and biology is at present a rather sharp one. But a number of impressive recent achievements in biology make one believe that we are perhaps on the eve of an epoch of great discoveries in biology. I venture to express the opinion, that to achieve fundamental success in biology a very close working cooperation of all three sciences, representatives of which are honored by Nobel Prizes, will be indispensable.”11
After Stalin died, and especially after Khrushchev’s originally secret, but soon famous, speech in February 1956 at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in which he exposed Stalin’s crimes, many felt freer and behaved differently than before. Tamm did not change his behavior or the way he reflected on various developments and political issues. He did not need to do either, as he always projected a certain degree of internal freedom.12 He had high moral principles and was already taking risks in expressing them. However, he preferred taking action when he could expect results to taking action just for the sake of taking actions.
Tamm learned a folk wisdom from his physicist colleague at FIAN, E. L. Feinberg, and liked to repeat it whenever it could be justified: “My God, let me have peace with what I can’t change; bravery to fight for what I can change; and wisdom to be able to distinguish between the two.”13 Tamm was already severely ill when in August 1968, following the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia was invaded by the other Warsaw Pact countries. A group of Soviet scientists, including Andrei Sakharov, prepared a letter of protest against the invasion. It was brought to Tamm for signature and he signed it. Soon afterwards, one of his favorite pupils told him that he should withdraw his signature lest his division of theoretical physics at FIAN suffer from his action, and Tamm withdrew his signature.14
Up to 1948, that is, up to his involvement in the nuclear project, the Communist Party did not consider Tamm as a trusted member of Soviet society This was compounded by the leading Soviet ideologue Andrei Zhdanov’s personal antipathy toward him. Before the war, Tamm was chairman of the theoretical physics department at Moscow State University. When the University returned from evacuation, Tamm was not given back his chairmanship.
In 1946, Zhdanov eliminated the corresponding member Tamm’s name from the roster of the new potential full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. On this occasion, an unprecedented episode happened. The outstanding physicist corresponding member M. A. Leontovich, who had been nominated for full membership for the place allocated for a theoretical physicist, turned to the president of the Academy and let it be known that he did not want to become full member if it would mean taking Tamm’s deserved place at the Academy.15 This was a testimonial how much his peers revered Tamm. Leontovich’s gesture though did not change Tamm’s situation.
Tamm was elected to full membership in 1953, that is, twenty years after his election to corresponding member. His election to full member followed by a few months the successful test of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb. Years later, Sakharov remembered the question Zeldovich had posed about Tamm’s exceptionally high value to the project. Zeldovich ascribed Tamm’s advantage to Tamm’s “high moral level.”16 Even after Tamm had finally been elected full member of the Academy, however, the Soviet leadership continued viewing him with suspicion and did so throughout Tamm’s life.
Up to the political changes under Mikhail Gorbachev, it was the general practice that the leadership of the Communist Party exercised veto power over elections to the Academy of Sciences. There were rare exceptions when the academy members did not submissively follow the party instructions; the importance of these rare exceptions appeared magnified in the light of the background of unquestioned dictatorship of the Communist Party.
In 1955, the party leadership wanted to prevent Tamm and Abram Ioffe, the doyen of Soviet physics, from becoming members of the leading body of the mathematics-physics division of the Academy. The party accused Tamm of several negative acts17: (1) he did not consider the activities of others with desired objectivity; (2) he made mistakes in compiling the program of the all-union conference on quantum electrodynamics and the theory of elementary particles; and (3) he criticized the ideologically sound activities of the editorial office of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. To the disappointment of the party organs, however, the elections did not go according to their intentions.
On top of this, the president of the Academy, Aleksandr Nesmeyanov (see chapter 12) supported Tamm’s and Ioffe’s election to the divisional leadership.
All this happened at the meeting of the physics-mathematics division of the Academy, January 31–February 1, 1955. This meeting went down in the history of the relationship between the Science Academy and the Communist Party as conspicuously atypical for Soviet times. The internal party documents blamed Landau and his circle and Tamm and his circle, and named them the culprits in the opposition to the recommendations of the party. Nesmeyanov’s attitude was also noted with very negative remarks.18 However, from this story it would be a mistake to conclude that the Soviet Academy of Sciences was rebelling against the communist regime or the party leadership in general. It was a rather isolated case, and it was only the physicists who could afford such budding independence due to their privileged position in national defense. But at least it was an early crack in the supposedly monolithic Soviet establishment.
It may seem puzzling that the Communist Party would guard so uncompromisingly its grip over questions that by no means threatened the Soviet regime. The Party and the secret police demonstrated again and again a pathological fear that Western ideas of democracy might penetrate any segment of Soviet society. They were probably right, because any compromise might have become the starting point of a broader demand for democratization in society.
Another telling example occurred later in the same year. A two-day commemorative meeting of the fiftieth anniversary of Einstein’s theory of relativity was scheduled for November 30–December 1, 1955. The meeting took place within the framework of the physics-mathematics division of the Science Academy. There was a preparatory commission consisting of Tamm, Landau, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Evgenii Lifshits. Already suspicious, the Communist Party was carefully monitoring the activities of the commission. Party officials criticized the choice of three of the presenters, Landau, Ginzburg, and Lifshits, claiming that they were not sufficiently versed in the theory of relativity, while some whom they considered to be the real experts were not in the program. This is already extraordinary that the Communist Party would be meddling in the details of the scientific program of such a meeting.
The party representatives accused Lifshits in particular of spreading teachings about the expanding universe. The Communist Party considered this notion to be contrary to Marxism-Leninism and a product of imperialistic ideology. Another presenter, Zeldovich, was also accused of idealism (as opposed to materialism); he could not be criticized for not being in the field, but the party did not like his scientific views. Zeldovich indeed was of the opinion that the chemical elements were of billions of years of age, and that did not fit the party line. Again, the party organs criticized the Academy leadership, that is, the Presidium, for its permissiveness. The entire ideological struggle had an ironic character because the Soviet Union at this time was making great strides in the fields of cosmology and relativistic astrophysics, which were demonstrated by the presentations of the very scientists the Party did not want participating in the event.19
Grave of Pavel Cherenkov in the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Source: Photograph by and courtesy of the author.
Pavel Cherenkov on Russian postage stamp, 1994.
Igor Tamm, Pavel Cherenkov, and Ilya Frank—the three Nobel laureates in Physics, 1958.
Source: Courtesy of Valentina Berezovskaya, Moscow.
It should be noted, though, that even at the January–February 1955 divisional meeting it was not all defeat by the Communist Party for the candidates for the divisional leadership. Mikhail Lavrentiev was elected academician-secretary—the person in charge—and he was the man the Communist Party wanted for this position. Lavrentiev was a noted mathematician who later rose to the position of vice president of the Academy. His most memorable achievement outside mathematics was the initiation of the gigantic scientific center in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Soon after Lavrentiev took over the physics-mathematics division, he had to deal with the issue of Nobel Prizes for Soviet scientists. This is of interest to look into not only for general considerations, but also because it greatly concerned Tamm’s Nobel Prize in 1958. In the archives of the Academy, there is a Resolution No. 19 from about November 1, 1955, in which it is stated that “the divisional leadership does not find it advisable to nominate Soviet scientists for the Nobel Prize since this prize cannot be considered international as demonstrated by the lack of Nobel awards to outstanding individuals of science and culture of our country (D. I. Mendeleev, L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov, M. Gorky).”20
In order to understand the origin of this odd resolution, its circumstances need to be recalled. In late 1955, there was disappointment in Moscow that the expected Nobel Prize for Nikolai Semenov did not materialize (it would, though, the next year, in 1956) and the physicists thought they would have nothing to lose by their protest. Unbeknownst to them, by then, the Cherenkov Effect was being considered by the Physics Nobel Committee; the prize for it would be awarded in 1958. The possibility of a Semenov Nobel Prize was still not dismissed, and the chemistry division did not issue a statement similar to the one by the physics-mathematics division. The mathematicians did not need to bother, because there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. It is noteworthy that the physics-mathematics division discussed the matter as a question of divisional nominations, whereas the Nobel Prize institution excludes collective nominations. Here, however, there is evidence that the Nobel Prize institution was willing to tolerate, even encourage, the involvement of collectives for getting nominations for Soviet scientists—they appeared eager to have Soviet participation in—as they termed it—the “Nobel movement.”21
The Soviet organizations—the Science Academy and the Communist Party—took it upon themselves to interfere in the nominations originating from the Soviet Union. They opposed nominations for Landau and Tamm. In both cases the reason was the role these two scientists had played in demanding greater freedom for academicians in Science Academy matters.22 It is well documented that in 1958, Sheldon Glashow, a future Nobel laureate physicist, having been awarded the necessary financial support, wanted to spend some time in Tamm’s group. Glashow wrote to Tamm asking to be accepted as a visitor. In turn, Tamm asked the Academy for permission, but he never received a response, neither permission nor a denial. It is impossible to know exactly where his request ran aground, at the Academy, the Interior Ministry, the Communist Party, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, because all these institutions could be involved in deciding such questions.
Tamm’s possible interaction with foreign scientists was frowned upon. It did not help this particular case that Glashow’s parents had immigrated to America from Russia (even if they were escaping the anti-Semitic czarist regime at the beginning of the twentieth century).23 Tamm was never informed about the reason he could not receive the foreign visitor. For quite some time, Soviet diplomats encouraged Glashow, telling him that he would receive his Soviet visa, though not for a visit to Tamm but to another group in Moscow.24 However, his Soviet visa never materialized, and Tamm received no explanation either. It was a humiliating situation for Tamm, and it puzzled his colleagues in the West.25
There was, though, pressure on the Academy of Sciences to advance the Nobel recognition of the discovery of the Cherenkov radiation. The political considerations favored Cherenkov’s sole candidacy, whereas correct scientific reasoning favored also including the two theoreticians, Tamm and his associate Frank. The Nobel Committee for Physics invited Igor Kurchatov to submit nominations of worthy candidates for the 1958 physics prize. Kurchatov asked Vitaly Ginzburg and E. K. Zavoiskii to prepare the scientific justification for the nomination of Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm. Kurchatov then sent the nomination to the Science Academy. The Academy was supposed to forward the nomination to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to arrange for the documentation leave the country and get to Sweden. It seems bizarre that Kurchatov had to follow such a complicated procedure rather than simply mail his nomination to Stockholm. To understand how things worked at that time and what it entailed finally for Tamm (and Frank) to become laureates, I narrate further details about the events leading to the 1958 physics prize.
At my request, the long-time former secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, Anders Bárány, looked up the 1950s in the archives at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.26 His findings are summarized as follows. Cherenkov was nominated regularly in the 1950s, but it was not until after the discovery of the antiproton in 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, that the Nobel Committee for Physics started to seriously consider him for the prize.27 This was due to the important role the Cherenkov counters played in the antiproton discovery. This was also the starting point for the more widespread use of the technique. Lamek Hulthén, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, wrote a nomination for Cherenkov in 1956. It was repeated in 1957, when a nomination for Cherenkov came also from the Soviet Union; it was by V.N. Kondratev. The same year Wolfgang Pauli nominated Cherenkov together with Tamm. Erik Ingelstam, Professor of Optical Physics, also at the Royal Institute of Technology, nominated Cherenkov, “possibly together with Frank or with both Frank and Tamm.” Finally, Vladimir Fock in Leningrad nominated Cherenkov together with Sergei Vavilov. Fock must have known that Vavilov had died in 1951, but he apparently did not know that the rules of the Nobel Prize excluded posthumous awards (in the Soviet Union, posthumous awards were common). In 1958, Hulthén again nominated Cherenkov, but this time together with Vavilov—in his case we must suppose that he did not know that Vavilov had passed away. At the end of his nomination, Hulthén even excuses himself for previously not having understood the important part played by Vavilov! Ingelstam repeated the same nomination he made in 1957, that is, Cherenkov, “possibly with Frank or both Frank and Tamm.”
Cherenkov’s candidacy was reviewed as early as 1952 by Axel Lindh, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics. He expanded his review in 1955, and in 1957, he wrote a detailed final report. In this he argued that Vavilov had given Cherenkov important impulses to continue his investigations, although Vavilov’s explanation of the effect was wrong. Frank and Tamm, he said, had made the correct interpretation, and it was through their work that the Cherenkov Effect became known as a usable detector. Lindh suggested that the Committee seriously discuss a prize in this area.
The Nobel Committee for Physics writes in its reports to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1956 and 1957 that they realize the importance of the Cherenkov Effect for detector work. In 1958, they have a discussion about a possible Nobel Prize for the discovery of the antiproton and stress the fact that Cherenkov counters played an important role in it. Following the suggestion in Lindh’s 1957 report, they discuss a prize for the discovery and explanation of the Cherenkov Effect. They also mention that Vavilov had died in 1951. The Nobel Committee then proposes a shared Nobel Prize in Physics to Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm, and the Academy follows this proposal. It is noteworthy that there is a reference in the archival documents to a letter signed by Landau, Nikolai Andreiev, and Abraham Alikhanov stating that Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm should share the prize (see also chapter 6). The Nobel Committee received this letter some time in 1958, and it was not handled as a formal nomination.
Naturally, Tamm was pleased to be awarded the Nobel Prize, but he maintained that he received it for less significant work than what he considered to be his principal discovery, the phonons. He was keenly aware of some missing names on the roster of Nobel laureates. He considered three omissions especially hurting: two were Leonid Mandelshtam and G. L. Landsberg for the discovery of what the Russian literature calls “spectroscopy of combination scattering” and is known as “Raman spectroscopy” in the rest of the world. The third omission was Zavoiskii for the discovery of electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR). Tamm did not find his own award fully justified and declared: “To some others the prize was given for something accidental, including me.”28 He repeatedly nominated Zavoiskii for the Nobel Prize. Mandelshtam occupied a special place in Tamm’s thinking; he revered him as his teacher and said frequently, “I owe him everything; everything.”29
Let us, however, return to the story of political interference in connection with the 1958 Nobel Prize for the Soviet physicists. After the Nobel award had been announced, the three awardees for a while could not respond to the Swedish queries about whether or not they would be able to accept it, let alone attend the ceremonies. That same year the Swedish Academy had awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the great Soviet writer Boris Pasternak.†† Soviet officialdom found it difficult to fathom seeing the Soviet physicists together with the “heretic” Pasternak at the same ceremony. The physicists could give their affirmative response to the Swedes only after Pasternak had been blackmailed into declining to accept his Nobel Prize (it was hinted that if he accepted the award and went to Stockholm to receive it, he might not be let back into the country).30 It seems that nothing was left to chance in the Soviet regime. When the three Soviet physicists returned home after the Nobel festivities, there was a meeting with the representatives of Moscow society at the auditorium of the Moscow Museum of Technology. Tamm was the principal speaker. After he finished, someone shouted, obviously by prearrangement: “Long live Soviet science, which under the direction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is leading the way for the whole humankind to world peace.” The audience duly greeted the slogan with applause.31
After the Nobel episode, Tamm’s brave attempts to democratize the Soviet Academy of Sciences continued. One might have thought that he gained encouragement from his Nobel award, but it is impossible to discern any difference between the way he acted before and after his great distinction. At the end of 1956, for example, all the divisions of the Academy were holding their own meetings in preparation for the next election of the president of the Academy. Following the separate divisional meetings, the General Assembly of the Academy was supposed to elect the president, and no opposition was anticipated, not only to re-electing the current president, but to the procedure either. Based on past experience, it was expected to be a perfunctory exercise. Aleksandr Nesmeyanov was the current president; he was reasonably popular; and the Communist Party did not want to replace him, either. He was the only candidate for the post.
However, at the physical-mathematical divisional meeting, Tamm criticized the way the general assemblies of the Academy were conducted. There was hardly any discussion, and the elections of the Academy leadership were always predetermined by higher party authority. There was no dissent ever in the voting. Tamm wanted the members of the Academy to have the right to a free debate. Of course, it did not escape anybody’s attention that what Tamm said about the Academy of Sciences was applicable to the whole Soviet system, so Tamm’s views could be taken as criticism of its foundations. Tamm mentioned in particular the re-election of Nesmeyanov whose first five-year term was ending. Since it was the intention of the higher party organs to re-elect him, it was taken for granted that this is what would happen; and, in fact, it did. But Tamm managed to make his point and suggested that the president first make a report to the membership before his re-election was decided. Tamm spoke at the divisional meeting, and the physicists and mathematicians agreed with him, but all the other divisions were for re-electing Nesmeyanov without further discussion.
When the voting then came, Nesmeyanov won, but this time it was not unanimous, making this election an unprecedented event. The general assembly decided that the re-elected president should make a report at their next meeting outlining his plans for the future. This was also a first. Incidentally, Tamm and Nesmeyanov were on friendly terms, and Tamm made it clear that his criticism was not directed against Nesmeyanov as a person, but was instead in connection with the presidency. Nesmeyanov did not take Tamm’s move personally; in fact, he found it justified, and the two remained on friendly terms for the rest of their lives.32
Up until the late 1950s, elections of new corresponding members and full members at the Soviet Academy of Sciences were rare occasions; later they took place once every two years. In the 1958 elections, party interference was still substantial. As before, the intention was that the party organs rather than the Academy membership should decide the outcomes. The Central Committee of the Communist Party had a section dealing with science and higher education to exercise party control over the Science Academy and the institutions of higher learning. Most of the associates of this section had been trained as scientists. There was, then, the so-called communist fraction of the Academy, that is, the group of party members among the academicians who got together before every election and decided whom they would support, following the intentions and recommendations of the party leadership. From this point, it was a clear path to the elections.
This was, however, 1958, and things could no longer be taken for granted as far as the wishes of the party were concerned. The party organs saw the writing on the wall and were taking precautions to prevent election results that from their point of view could be disastrous. The documents revealing the behind-the-scenes machinations of the party remained classified for a long time. It was only in 1994 that the original list of names was published, along with the party’s evaluation of the situation in the division of the physicist and mathematician academicians. A document stated, in part: “In the Division of Physico-mathematical Sciences of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an incorrect situation has formed according to which a group of non-party-member scientists, in particular academicians L. A. Artsimovich, A. I. Alikhanov, L. D. Landau, M. A. Leontovich, and I. E. Tamm, tend to ignore the intentions of party organizations and try to impose their own high scientific authority over party influence, especially in the questions of personnel that have always been the non-alienable concern of the party (italics added).”33
The document listed the names of those physicists-communists who had been defeated in previous elections as a result of the insufficient vigilance of the Presidium of the Academy. The defeated candidates had been recommended by the party’s Central Committee; in their stead, pupils of Landau and a pupil of Tamm had been elected along with other non-party-member physicists. The lamentation goes as far as hinting at that party membership could disadvantage physicists from being elected to membership of the Academy. This party document could be considered to be a testimonial that, at least on this occasion, the Science Academy, and in particular its division of the physical-mathematical sciences, was an island of democracy in an utterly undemocratic environment; and the scientists whom the party document described as “perpetrators” were the unsung heroes of democracy.
The next illustration of Tamm’s demeanor comes a few years later; the story also shows the limits of how far the regime let him voice his opinion.34 On February 6, 1962, Petr Kapitza gave a speech at the general assembly of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as part of the discussion of the account by E. K. Fedorov, Secretary General of the Academy. Kapitza lamented the damages from the denial of cybernetiscs in Soviet science and the nonunderstanding of Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2 (E energy, m mass, c the speed of light in vacuum). He criticized the Soviet “philosophers” for their errors, though he carefully avoided any criticism of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. He mentioned in passing the philosophers’ erroneous actions in the case of the uncertainty principle in quantum theory and the theory of resonance in the investigation of chemical reactions. Due to the private initiative of a section editor, the periodical Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economics Journal) published Kapitza’s speech. This was followed by an uproar in party press.
Dmitrii Ivanenko and Igor Tamm (lower right corner) in discussion at a meeting. In between the two, on the left, Rudolf Peierls; Victor Weisskopf is on Tamm’s right.
Source: Courtesy of G. A. Sardanashvily, Moscow.
Tamm felt that Kapitza needed support and wrote a strong letter to Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta. He went one step further than Kapitza. He ascribed the errors not just to the selected individual philosophers; rather, he accused the whole erroneous philosophy of science in the Soviet Union. He claimed that the Soviet philosophical literature broadly distributed negations of such important scientific achievements as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He noted though that only an insignificant fraction of physicists followed the erroneous positions of the philosophers—those who were afraid of getting accused of idealism. Had it not been so, Tamm stressed, it would have been impossible to apply atomic energy for practical purposes, since nuclear technology is based on quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.35
Just as Tamm had felt the need to give additional support to Kapitza, now the Gazeta felt the same was needed for Tamm. They turned to another internationally renowned authority, the physicist Vladimir Fock, who produced a strong supportive statement in which he unambiguously joined Tamm’s and Kapitsa’s positions. It turned out, however, that Tamm and Fock as well as the Gazeta went a little too far, and the party authorities prevented the Tamm and Fock letters from being published. They were duly filed in the archives. Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta was also a party publication, and the section editor, I. D. Sobko, who initially published Kapitza’s statement, was moved to another job and was never heard from again.
During the late 1960s, as Tamm grew increasingly frail, Andrei Sakharov came to visit him from time to time. The two discussed poems in which at the time Sakharov was deeply interested and talked about politics. One of their topics was the role of individuals in shaping history. They tried to answer questions of “what if …” They tried, for example, to chart the fate of their country if instead of Stalin, Lev Trotsky had become the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. Tamm estimated that there would have been ten times fewer victims, while Sakharov opined that the number of victims would have been a hundred times smaller. Tamm compared Trotsky with Beria as both could be rational and perceptive. Tamm met Trotsky when Trotsky was responsible for national defense in the Soviet government. Trotsky visited the plant where Tamm worked at the time and he easily grasped ideas that must have been rather foreign to him. Concerning Beria, Tamm noted that Beria could completely ignore whatever disadvantage someone had as long as he could be useful for Beria’s goals, such as nuclear weapons. For example, when Tamm wanted to involve the excellent physicist Leontovich in the work on the hydrogen bomb, Beria was informed about Leontovich’s background, which made him unsuitable in the eyes of the security organs. However, Beria was not shaken and decided on the spot to involve Leontovich.36
Another celebrity who came to visit Tamm was the renowned author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They talked about a great variety of topics. Solzhenitsyn was working on his book First Circle and wanted to learn about how Stalin looked in the Mausoleum. The writer had never visited the Mausoleum, and by this time Stalin had been removed from it. When the anti-Solzhenitsyn campaign started in the Soviet Union, Tamm felt solidarity with him and called him “poor Solzhik.”37 When in 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize, he came to Tamm asking for his advice on what to do.
Tamm considered himself to be a poor organizer, but his section at FIAN, his Teorotdel (Theoretical Section) appeared very well organized, as if it had organized itself—which may have been the attribute of a good organizer. Tamm respected good organizers, among them Igor Kurchatov and Abram Ioffe. He respected the ability to build experiments and construct apparatuses. He counted Mandelshtam, Landsberg, and Zavoiskii among those virtuoso scientists who had such traits. Further, he especially appreciated the ability to provide criticism. He considered Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Ehrenfest, and Lev Landau to be excellent critics. He found scientific criticism to be a very fruitful necessity for healthy scientific progress. He stated, “Without them [the critics], our progress would tremendously slow down! It’s a pity that not everybody understands this.”38
Tamm considered sectarian zealotry, pseudoscience, and unprincipled complicity to be the most dangerous enemies of science, and called them the three-headed dragon. He hated Lysenko and his associates, including a man called Nikolai Nuzhdin whom Khrushchev badly wanted to be elected an academician. One can imagine how the world-renowned Soviet nuclear physicists regarded Lysenko when the agronomist told Khrushchev that underground nuclear tests frightened the Earth and as a consequence would stop food production. Further, he declared that sparrows could move around so quickly on their tiny feet, even on snow in wintertime, because their feet were fueled by atomic energy. Khrushchev warned the scientists that if Nuzhdin were not elected, he, Khrushchev, would disperse the Academy. During the next election campaign, Tamm, Sakharov, and the biologist Vladimir Engelhardt all argued against electing Nuzhdin, and the Academy did not elect him. Khrushchev was no longer in the position to do away with the Academy because in October 1964 he had been retired by his Politburo colleagues. It was indicative of the changes when in 1964, in preparation for the national holiday of November 7, among the series of portraits of Soviet heroes along the spacious Lenin Avenue in Moscow, Lysenko’s portrait was quietly replaced by that of Tamm.
The unusual modern tombstone over Tamm’s grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery is the work of sculptor V. Sidur. Years before Tamm’s death, Vitaly Ginzburg took Tamm to visit Sidur’s workshop. Tamm had mixed feelings about the sculptor’s works; some he liked; others he did not understand. Following Tamm’s death, the family asked Sidur to produce a tombstone. The authorities wanted to erect a bust in traditional style, but the family felt this was too static to represent Tamm’s mobility. They preferred Sidur’s modern statue, which may or may not correspond to Tamm’s taste in art, but well expresses his maverick nature, contrasting with the many tombstones around in classical style.39
