Evgenii Lifshits and Lev Landau in 1957.

Source: Courtesy of Boris Gorobets, Moscow.

5
Lev Landau: GENIUS and
Evgenii Lifshits: MORE THAN LANDAU’S PEN

Lev D. Landau (1908–1968) initiated one of the great Soviet schools of theoretical physics. He began his studies at the University of Leningrad and completed them in Western Europe, where Niels Bohr was his mentor. In 1932, he established an outstanding theoretical physics department in Kharkov. In 1937, he moved to Moscow to Petr Kapitza’s Institute of Physical Problems and remained there for the rest of his life. There were two interruptions: in 1938–1939, when he was incarcerated, and in 1941–1943, when the Institute of Physical Problems was in evacuation in Kazan.

Landau created in broad areas of physics; his pupils extended his abilities in covering virtually the whole range of theoretical physics. His first outstanding achievement was the interpretation of superfluidity. He was a superb teacher of talented theoretical physicists, and guided Landau and Lifshits’s opus magnum, the series Course of Theoretical Physics.

Evgenii M. Lifshits (1915–1985) wrote much of the Landau-Lifshits Course. He liked to express himself in writing and was the perfect partner for the grapho-phobic Landau. He was an important theoretical physicist in his own right. His life was devoted to Landau, and to science. He was precise and demanding, did not have pupils, but he was mentor to the whole of the community of physicists. His legacy included the high professional level of the leading Soviet physics periodical, the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics.

Lev Davidovich Landau was born on January 22, 1908, in Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of Russia. His father, David L. Landau, was an oil engineer. His mother, Lyubov V. Landau (née Harkavi), was an obstetrician-gynecologist. Landau studied first at home; then he went to school and completed his secondary education at the age of fourteen. For higher education, first he went to Baku University where he started two majors, physics-mathematics and chemistry. After the first year he dropped chemistry, and in 1924, he transferred to Leningrad University. There were famous professors in Leningrad, such as A. F. Ioffe and D. S. Rozhdestvenskii in experimental physics and A. Friedman and Paul Ehrenfest in theoretical physics. Friedman was primarily interested in cosmology, and Ehrenfest had moved to Leiden, Holland, before Landau’s time. Landau became friendly with the students Artem Alikhanyan and Dmitrii Ivanenko. The latter coined the name “Dau” for him. Soon other future stars joined their circle, including George Gamow.

Landau was very much taken by the new physics of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, but he arrived on the scene a little too late to become one of the pioneers in the field. This also happened to Gamow, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Robert Oppenheimer, and others who were to be superb physicists but had to contend largely with the pieces left over after the great discoveries of the first decades of the twentieth century.

Landau graduated from university at the age of nineteen. He already started publishing papers before graduation, and embarked on his doctoral studies at the age of eighteen in Abram Ioffe’s section of the Leningrad Institute of Physical Technology (Leningradskii Fiziko-Tekhnicheskii Institut, [LFTI]). His friendships with Ivanenko and Gamow, as well as with Evgeniya Kanegiesser (the future Lady Rudolf Peierls) and Matvei Bronshtein, flourished. Kanegiesser characterized their circle of friends in a light verse in which the following referred directly to Landau:1

To tuneful songs, Landáu the clever
Who’ll gladly argue anywhere,
At any time, with whom whatsoever,
Holds a discussion with a chair.

They played tennis and went swimming and to the movies to watch Hollywood films, but were mostly doing theoretical physics. Landau’s unruly character had already manifested itself in his student days. Gamow, Landau, and their comrades made ruthless fun of Boris Gessen (see more about him in chapter 6), the author of a long entry about the (nonexistent) ether in the 1925 edition of the Encyclopedia Sovietica.² As a punishment, Landau was dismissed from his teaching job at LFTI, but he was allowed to continue his research in Ioffe’s laboratory.³ In 1928, Gamow, Ivanenko, and Landau published a joint paper about the universal constants—Planck’s constant, h; the speed of light in vacuum, c; and the constant of universal gravity, G.⁴

Somewhat later, Landau and Ivanenko stopped being friends, and soon afterward became dedicated enemies. Ivanenko took up a leading role in the fight of philosophers and “purist” physicists against modern physics, “Western imperialistic and bourgeois” science and its penetration into Soviet science, the subservience of Soviet scientists before the West, and “cosmopolitanism.” Simultaneously, Ivanenko fought for recognition of his discoveries that, according to him, others—foreign scientists—had expropriated. Ivanenko was a professor of physics during his entire career at Moscow State University and carried out excellent research.⁵

In 1929, the Soviet Ministry of Education sent Landau for a long study trip to Western Europe that included Germany, England, Switzerland, and Denmark. He was impressed by Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen School, and considered Bohr his mentor, his only mentor, ever. Landau attended some of the Berlin colloquia at which Einstein and other giants were regulars. Landau appeared to his European friends to be a dedicated communist, and he was eager to disseminate his views. Even in his dress he displayed his politics by donning a red jacket. This attitude was not especially conspicuous, because in those years, many in Western Europe viewed the experiment of Soviet Russia with sympathy. They felt that Communism might be the only effective force for fighting poverty and stopping the Nazis. Even physicists who never so much as flirted with Communism, among them Edward Teller, became Landau’s friends.

Teller’s experience with Landau is of interest on two counts. One is that discussions with Landau greatly stimulated Teller in developing the idea that eventually became known as the Jahn-Teller effect. Teller repeatedly declared that it would have been fairer to call it the Landau-Jahn-Teller effect.6 The other is that Teller recognized the extraordinary talent in Landau as a physicist. After World War II, when many scientists and politicians in the United States did not consider the Soviet Union capable of soon catching up with America in nuclear matters, Teller disagreed. In his opinion, the Soviet physicists were second to none. He warned that the free world should be prepared to witness great advances in the development of nuclear weaponry in the Soviet Union, which, as a totalitarian state, was capable of focusing its resources on solving selected problems even with a weak economy.⁷

Landau’s political views started changing after his trips to Western Europe. In 1935, he still demonstrated his support for the Soviet regime by publishing an article in one of the central Moscow newspapers, Izvestiya, with the telling title, “Bourgeoisie and modern physics.”⁸ He noted that becoming a physicist in bourgeois societies was a question of who could afford it, whereas in the Soviet Union physicists hailed from all strata of society, including the working classes. There was indeed a drive during the first period of Soviet power to recruit personnel for the many newly established research institutes from those layers of society that used to be excluded from higher education. Landau called for “building up the best in the world physics institutions of higher education for training the best in the world physicist-researchers and for creating the richest and healthiest popular literature.”⁹

Somewhat later, his disillusionment was manifested in his participation in the compilation of a leaflet that called for a mass movement for socialism, on the one hand, but condemned “Stalinist Fascism,” on the other.¹⁰ Landau’s arrest and his horrible experience in the NKVD prison (discussed more later) only added to his alienation from Stalin’s regime. For a long time, he ascribed all the ills of the Soviet system to Stalin and his associates but continued to adhere to Lenin and the ideals of the October 1917 Revolution. By the end of the 1950s, he had completely changed. He no longer had any illusions about the Soviet system and no longer restricted the application of the label “Fascist” to Stalin; now he called Lenin the very first Fascist.11

In 1957, the secret police (Committee of State Security—Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti [KGB]) prepared a summary of Landau’s anti-Soviet statements over the years, which had been detected by listening devices or by undercover agents.¹² Here, we present a sampling of Landau’s statements: From 1947: “The patriotic line brings harm to our science. This will only further delineate us from the scientists of the West and add to the gap dividing us from progressive scientists and technologists.”¹³ From 1952: “No effort must be spared to stay away from entering the thicket of the atomic business.”¹⁴ From January 1953: “If it were not for the fifth point I would not involve myself with special assignment [nuclear weaponry], would only be doing science in which I am being left behind. However, my special assignment gives me some leverage.”¹⁵ Here, Landau was referring to the Soviet questionnaires in which the fifth point was about nationality, and being Jewish was considered a nationality in the Soviet Union.

From an agent’s report dated April 9, 1955: “At the end of March 1953 Landau was summoned together with Ginzburg to a high official of nuclear matters, Avraami Zavenyagin, in connection with their special assignments. According to the agent’s report, Landau bitterly accused Zeldovich ‘who initiated all this sordid action.’”¹⁶ From January 12, 1956, “ [O]ur regime, as I have known it since 1937, is unambiguously a Fascist regime and it cannot simply change.”¹⁷ From November 30, 1956 (following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution): “Ours [our soldiers] are soaked in blood to their waist. The Hungarians achieved something greatest. For the first time they destroyed, dealt a superb blow onto the Jesuit idea of our time. A superb blow!”¹⁸ Here, Landau refers to the Hungarian Revolution of October 23, 1956. First, the Soviets withdrew from Budapest and let the Hungarians start building a multiparty democracy. But on November 4 and in the ensuing days, they ruthlessly suppressed the revolution. Landau equated the Jesuits and the Soviets.

After Landau had completed his visits to Western Europe, he continued his life in Leningrad, but was feeling increasingly frustrated. The father of Soviet physics, Abram Ioffe, and Landau somehow did not find the right synergy between them. It is true that Landau was not an easy personality. Later, after Landau was arrested, Kapitza characterized him in a letter to Stalin as follows: “He is provocative and cantankerous; likes to find errors in others, and when he does, especially in important senior people, such as our academicians, he irritates them with irreverence. This way he has acquired a lot of enemies.”¹⁹ Kapitza’s words were meant to excuse Landau in case his arrest had been a consequence of some foul language or behavior. Kapitza’s remarks sounded convincing, because they probably characterized Landau well.

In the mid-1930s, Ioffe facilitated the creation of a network of physics research institutes at a variety of places in the country, including Kharkov—until 1934 the capital of the Ukraine. Landau moved to Kharkov and was appointed to be in charge of the theoretical division at the Ukrainian Institute of Physical Technology (Ukrainskii Fiziko-Tekhnicheskii Institut [UFTI]). This institute soon became the third in importance among the Soviet physics research institutes after the Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow (Fizicheskii Institut Akademii Nauk [FIAN]) and LFTI. Many foreign scientists came to Kharkov; some merely to attend international meetings; others came for years to work. Laszlo Tisza, for example, arrived at Edward Teller’s recommendation. Tisza had become unemployable in Hungary after he was arrested and spent time in prison for having undertaken assignments for the Communist Party. He had already earned his doctorate, yet when he arrived in Kharkov he wanted to do doctoral studies under Landau. Tisza was one of the first to take Landau’s famous exams called teorminimum, or “theoretical minimum”—a series of high-level tests in theoretical physics and mathematics. Altogether, forty-three physicists took the tests over the years. Tisza completed his studies under Landau and defended his Candidate of Science (PhD equivalent) dissertation in Kharkov. He then left the Soviet Union, after having a premonition about the difficult times to come. Tisza later had a long, distinguished career as a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.20 Tisza’s dissertational work in Kharkov was the completion of a research project previously started by Leonid Pyatigorskii, whom Landau had excluded from continuing his project.

Lev Landau in the mid-1930s in the courtyard of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow.

Source: Photograph by and courtesy of the late David Shoenberg.

Pyatigorskii had suffered a tragic fate. As a ten-year-old child in 1919, he had witnessed the murder of his father and mother during an anti-Jewish pogrom in their village, not far from Kiev in the Ukraine. He himself was shot and his right arm had to be amputated. Pyatigorskii was gifted, became Landau’s doctoral student in Kharkov, and passed the teorminimum. Pyatigorskii and Landau had been on opposite sides of the fence from 1935 when there was a big debate at UFTI about whether the institute should enhance its activities in support of defense efforts or continue to do primarily pure physics research. Pyatigorskii was a dedicated communist and pushed for defense-related research, whereas Landau was for maintaining the emphasis on pure physics. The institute was divided along this line, and eventually those who thought like Pyatigorskii gained the upper hand. When a few years later Landau was arrested, he supposed that his misfortune was due to Pyatigorskii. After he had been freed, he blacklisted Pyatigorskii, which led to Pyatigorskii’s near-complete isolation. Pyatigorskii had to change his research topic, and until 1955 he could not defend his dissertation. It turned out that Landau’s accusations were unfounded.

Incidentally, when in 1939 Landau resumed his work after prison, for a short while he did not completely break with Pyatigorskii; they were producing a book jointly. It was the first volume, Mechanics, of what later became the world-renowned Course of Theoretical Physics. Given Landau’s grapho-phobia, the book had to be written by the one-armed Pyatigorskii. Later, Lifshits reworked the first volume, though it remained to a large extent unchanged. After that first book, Landau never had anything more to do with Pyatigorskii.

From the start of Stalin’s Terror in 1937, UFTI fared very badly. Brilliant scientists were arrested, tried, sentenced, and executed in short order. Landau felt that he might be the next at any moment, and he turned to Petr Kapitza for help. Kapitza needed a bright theoretician and invited Landau to his Institute of Physical Problems (Institut Fizicheskikh Problem, IFP) in Moscow. Landau became an associate of IFP in February 1937. A little later, Landau helped two outstanding former colleagues at Kharkov, I. Ya. Pomeranchuk and E. M. Lifshits, to move to Moscow.21

The period 1937–1938 is known as the Great Purge, or Stalin’s Terror. Landau was by then sufficiently disillusioned so as to allow himself to vent his discontent in his conversations with others. The Cambridge physicist, David Shoenberg, went to work in 1937 for a year in Moscow at Kapitza’s invitation. Shoenberg had been Kapitza’s student in Cambridge before Kapitza’s confinement in the Soviet Union. Shoenberg became friendly with Landau; both were new arrivals at Kapitza’s institute. Their friendship was becoming special because Shoenberg’s other colleagues were turning increasingly taciturn under the prevailing atmosphere of fear and terror. Shoenberg observed a great shift in Landau’s views. When they had met in the West, Landau sounded very “left-wing,” in Shoenberg’s words, and now “he became much more realistic.” I spoke with Shoenberg about their interactions in February 2000 in Cambridge. Landau told his friend about “konzlagers,” the German abbreviation for concentration camps. Shoenberg thought Landau was talking about Germany, not the Soviet Union, but Landau made the reference unambiguous when he said, “We invented them.”22 Shoenberg had comfortable living quarters at the IFP, where his meals were prepared for him, and he often invited Landau for lunch. Landau enjoyed gossiping in English, and Shoenberg found him rather indiscreet. One day Landau did not turn up for lunch, and Shoenberg learned that he had been arrested.

Shoenberg regretted his friend’s fate, and not only for humanistic considerations. Shoenberg was doing experimental work with Kapitza. He was involved in determining the changes of the bismuth crystal under the impact of strong magnetic fields. He found a lot of curious results, and he was looking for their interpretation. He had shown his data to Landau, who became interested in them, did some calculations, and produced a formula that showed the relationships among the experimental results. Shoenberg was very pleased by Landau’s assistance because all his measurements fitted Landau’s formula beautifully. Unfortunately, Landau had not had time to show Shoenberg the details of his calculations or the way he obtained the formula before he disappeared.

The NKVD arrested Landau on April 27, 1938. The story of his getting freed as a consequence of Kapitza’s guarantee is told in chapter 4 about Kapitza. Here, we limit our narrative to what happened to Landau. According to the information in NKVD archives, Landau was interrogated in June 1938; he signed the minutes on September 3, 1938, and the investigation was completed on November 21, 1938.²³ His case was transmitted to the public prosecutor on January 24, 1939, and it was transmitted from the prosecutor’s office to the Moscow court on March 25, 1939. The case was handled in the secret political section. Some fragmented description of the investigation also appeared in secret documents. Thus, on occasion, Landau was made to stand for seven hours and was threatened but not beaten; they applied other means of pressure to extract a confession from him. Landau, however, had stamina and stayed quiet in the interrogations for long hours.

His fellow prisoners gave him advice about how to behave with the interrogators in order to not make them angry. The prison diet was based on the grain millet, which Landau could not eat. By the time he was freed, he was no longer strong enough to walk; he lay in bed all the time, and the only thing he could do was to think about scientific problems. Subsequently, he told his wife that he could be oblivious to the prison conditions—whether he was in solitary confinement or put into an overcrowded cell—because he was thinking about physics. He was not given paper and pencil, but given his grapho-phobia, this may have not been important. He worked out his problems in his head, performed complicated calculations, and stored his “manuscripts” in his head.24 When he left prison, he had four research papers ready for publication. This is probably what saved his sanity.

During Landau’s disappearance, he became a nonperson in Soviet society, in accordance with to the usual practice. Shoenberg experienced this first hand. When Shoenberg finished his work, he wrote up his paper, which he intended for the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. At that time, it was possible to publish results obtained in the Soviet Union abroad if the scientist published the same paper simultaneously in Russian. Shoenberg’s manuscript was translated into Russian, and the next step was to secure official permission to publish the work. In his manuscript, he acknowledged Landau’s assistance, and Landau’s formula figured in the paper. In seeking permission to publish, Shoenberg was confronted by the assistant director of Kapitza’s Institute. She was astonished that Shoenberg had expressed thanks to an “enemy of the people.” She told Shoenberg that the acknowledgment had to go; Shoenberg refused and went to talk to Kapitza.

The director of the institute appeared quite sympathetic when Shoenberg told him the story. Shoenberg then narrated the rest of their meeting as follows: “[A]t that moment the Assistant Director marched into Kapitza’s office, and Kapitza immediately turned to me as if he were in mid-sentence and said something like, ‘So you understand, David, that you have to take that acknowledgment out.’ He obviously had to show support for his Assistant Director. Then he gave me a hint that, as I was going back to England shortly, there was no reason not to put back the acknowledgment into the English version of my paper.”²⁵

This is how it happened that the Russian version of Shoenberg’s paper did not mention Landau at all, and the mysterious formula appeared without Landau’s name. When Shoenberg submitted the English version to the Royal Society, the referee thought that Shoenberg might be plagiarizing since there was no mention of where the basic formula came from. In the meantime, Landau’s British friend, Rudolf Peierls, to whom Shoenberg showed the formula, understood that Landau must have worked it out. Peierls reconstructed the method and derived Landau’s formula. Eventually, the formula with its derivation appeared as a one-page appendix by Peierls to Shoenberg’s paper. The article became well known. Yet if Russian authors needed to refer to Landau’s theory, they had to quote Peierls’s appendix to Shoenberg’s paper.²⁶

As for Landau’s existence in prison, eventually the secret police broke his resistance and extracted confessions from him. When Kapitza’s efforts finally succeeded, Landau was released. The NKVD described their investigation and decision as follows:²⁷

LANDAU Lev Davidovich, born 1908 in Baku, until his arrest professor of physics, non-party, citizen of the USSR, was sufficiently proved to have participated in anti-Soviet group, harmful activities, and in an attempt to produce and disseminate an anti-Soviet leaflet.

However, taking into account

1) whereas LANDAU L. D. is an outstanding specialist in theoretical physics and may in the future be useful for Soviet science;

2) whereas Academician Kapitza P. L. expressed willingness to undertake guarantee for LANDAU L. D.

3) that the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, Commissar of State Security of the first rank, Comrade L. P. Beria ordered freeing LANDAU to be undertaken by academician Kapitza’s guarantee,

IT IS RESOLVED:

Arrested LANDAU L. D. is to be freed, action in his respect to terminate, and his case to be deposited in the archives.

Landau was freed from prison exactly one year after his arrest. During the rest of his life, he barely talked about his one year in the hands of the NKVD. Landau’s tragic experience in 1938–1939 was expunged from public awareness in the Soviet Union until its collapse. For example, in 1965, one of Landau’s former pupils and longtime associate Alexei Abrikosov published a booklet about the life and oeuvre of his mentor; there is no mention of this “episode.”28 Another former Landau pupil, academician Isaak Khalatnikov edited a substantial volume of reminiscences about Landau; the book appeared in 1988.²⁹ It starts with a review by the late Evgenii Lifshits, again, without even a hint of the tragic turn of events in Landau’s life in 1938–1939.³⁰ The N. E. Alekseevskii chapter—Alekseevskii worked at Kapitza’s institute, just as Landau did—is specifically about Landau in the 1930s. Alekseevskii mentions that their meetings with Landau stopped at some point in 1938 but hints that Landau’s changing family situation is the reason for this.³¹

After his liberation from NKVD captivity, Landau became more careful about what to say and when to stay quiet. He always remained deferential toward Kapitza.³² According to one of the leading Soviet physicists, E. L. Feinberg, there were two Landaus. In his youth he was shy, and this made him unhappy. Later, he learned to be tough, and this made him happy.³³ According to Feinberg, the original shy Landau created a mask for himself that was harsh, and after long use the mask became his natural self. But even in this harsh behavior there appeared windows when his original self came to the surface. This was the more private Landau, in contrast with the less sympathetic public Landau. Being in the presence of one or two close friends or listening to some poetry that moved him would make Landau’s softer self come out. According to Kapitza, “Those who closely knew Landau were aware that behind this briskness in statements there hid, in essence, a very kind and responsive person always ready to come to help to somebody who was unjustly offended.”³⁴

Landau’s incarceration and his cruel treatment in the NKVD prison left indelible scars in his mind. He lived the rest of his life under the shadow of this experience., He was never legally rehabilitated during his lifetime, and Kapitza’s role as guarantor never officially ended, not after Landau’s death in 1968, and not even after Kapitza’s death in 1984. It was only in 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that his case was reviewed. On June 23, 1990, the office of the State Prosecutor General decided to discard the NKVD resolution of April 28, 1939 (when Landau was freed, conditionally), and to stop any further procedure in the absence of crime.35

As for Landau’s work after his return from captivity, Kapitza was not disappointed. Kapitza discovered superfluidity of helium at the end of 1937, and he knew that it would take a theoretical physicist of Landau’s caliber to provide an interpretation of the phenomenon. Without interpretation, the discovery could not be considered complete. In 1962, Landau was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this theoretical contribution.

Stalin and Beria were not disappointed either in Landau’s contribution to the work they considered crucial, namely, the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons. During the war years, 1941–1945, Landau investigated traditional explosives. He studied the trajectories of the explosion products and the nature of shock waves. This work later proved to be instrumental for the development of the nuclear bombs. Landau’s engagement in nuclear weaponry was first with the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb. Today, not only it is well known that the Soviet Union built its first atomic bombs as a result of information it gained through espionage, but the Russian authorities also admit it. However, the Soviet scientists and technologists labored on the atomic bomb as if they had not been provided the blueprints for their production. The Soviet leadership was extremely careful to restrict the circle of people who knew about the sources. and except for the two top physicists in the leadership of the project—Igor Kurchatov and Yulii Khariton—the others basically worked without such knowledge. At most, some may have wondered how it could happen that of the often great variety of possible solutions, Kurchatov always hit on the right ones.³⁶

It appears that Kurchatov and the Soviet leadership did not become complacent due to the inflow of first-rate intelligence. The Soviet scientists had to work hard on solving every one of the problems in developing the atomic bomb despite the availability of intelligence. This served to camouflage the inflow of American information, and was also an excellent preparation for the continuation of the nuclear weapons program beyond the first atomic bomb. The next atomic bombs already utilized original Soviet solutions.

From the start of the Soviet atomic bomb program, Kurchatov understood Landau’s potential value to the project. He kept urging the leading governmental organs to get Landau involved. His first attempts failed, but he did not give up. He and Khariton realized that “Landau combines the art of deep theoretical analysis of physical phenomena and the ability of finding the efficient approaches for quantitative calculations of extraordinarily complex problems. As a result, relatively simple relationships are obtained whose application solves practical problems.”37

In the period 1943–1945, Kapitza’s IFP was not yet included in the nuclear program; hence Landau, working there, could not be involved. But because Landau was one of the leading scientists in nuclear physics, and because of his expertise in related areas, for example, shock waves, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would become part of it. First, he and his group, consisting of Lifshits and a few others, examined the theoretical aspects of detonations of ordinary explosives. By summer 1946, Landau had become a member of a commission of theoreticians charged with checking the previous calculations by Yakov Zeldovich’s group at the Institute of Chemical Physics. Furthermore, they were branching out in new directions to describe the details of the events immediately following the nuclear explosions. In 1946, Kapitza left the nuclear program and was soon after removed from the directorship of the IFP. There was no longer any obstacle to involving the IFP and Landau in the atomic bomb program.

Landau’s and Lifshits’s contributions to weapons development have not been widely known, and they did not want them to become known either. Even when they spoke about these activities, they underlined that they were not building bombs, only carrying out calculations on the consequences of exploding them.³⁸ This was not quite so, because they investigated the processes within the bombs as well. They also dealt with the quantitative theory of nuclear chain reactions. The next step was the investigation of reactions that might play a role in thermonuclear detonations.

Landau and his group stayed at IFP in Moscow, although at one point his possible move to Arzamas-16 was considered. Ultimately, both he and his superiors thought that he would be better able to serve the project by staying at IFP. Landau had his own style of working, which was obviously most efficient for a theoretician, but was unacceptable to some bureaucrats. The NKVD general charged with supervision of the unit to which Landau belonged, observed Landau’s absences for hours and days from the lab and contrasted this with Landau’s high salary. At one point, he wanted to have Landau fired from the project. When the scientific director of this unit, academician A. I. Alikhanov, learned about the general’s intention, he contacted the supreme leader of the atomic project, Lavrentii Beria. Alikhanov explained to Beria that Landau was working according to the needs of the project rather than following a strictly regulated but inefficient regime. Landau was left in peace.³⁹

In the year 1946, another crucial event was the elections to the Academy of Sciences. The previous elections were held in wartime, in 1943, and their most conspicuous story was Kurchatov’s election to full membership, skipping the corresponding member stage, as a result of Stalin’s direct interference. Kurchatov considered Landau so important for the atomic bomb project that in 1946 he wanted to have Landau elected to full membership, and this is what happened. In the next elections, in 1953, Andrei Sakharov would also be elected, skipping the corresponding member stage. Based on these three examples, the jump in the elections to full membership might seem a rather frequent occurrence. This would, however, be a false impression because these three events were almost without precedent and obviously occurred due to the extreme importance of the nuclear weapons program. In Landau’s case, his election was based more on expectations of his future contributions than rewarding services already rendered.

Landau was more than sanguine about skipping the corresponding membership and becoming full member directly; he even declared that should he be elected corresponding member, he would decline it. Stalin was the arbiter of such questions, and apparently the Soviet dictator supported Landau’s candidacy for full membership. This is the more surprising in view of Landau’s past incarceration, which was as much a consequence of the anti-Stalin leaflet as it was of unfounded accusations. Kurchatov’s need for Landau’s active involvement in the nuclear program must have played a role, and Stalin could act mysteriously.

Landau proved most valuable not only for the atomic bomb, but also for the hydrogen bomb project. He played a decisive role in reaching the conclusion that the so-called tube approach—the Americans called it the “classical Super”—would not lead to success. This gave green light to Sakharov’s and Ginzburg’s approaches to the successful Soviet thermonuclear bomb.

In 1953, as soon as Stalin disappeared from the scene Landau quit the nuclear weapons program. He told his friends: “This is all; I’m not afraid of him [Stalin] anymore, and I no longer work on this project.”40 As it was alluded to earlier, later, in spring 1955, some special problems necessitated that he be recalled. It was in connection with the hydrogen bomb of unprecedented strength that Khrushchev was enamored with. However, Landau refused to rejoin the project even for a temporary assignment.⁴¹

Landau could be very direct toward the authorities as well as toward his peers, and had a tendency for autocratic behavior. He could be cruel and unforgiving, even publicly, when he did not like a reported finding, regardless of the authority of the presenter. In some way, it was an expression of his democratic attitude that he did not distinguish between the targets of his criticism and that he considered those on the receiving end of his critiques as his equals. But even this democracy did not justify the occasional coarseness of his reactions. Clever people learned that it was better to approach Landau with finished, completed work that one could defend with assurance than with work in progress. It was also possible to convince Landau that his interlocutor was right, but he never uttered words admitting directly that he was wrong.

He was generous with his advice and did not expect acknowledgement for it, but he was not very careful to acknowledge what he may have learned from other people’s unpublished communications either. He stated: “Some think that a teacher steals from his students, some, that students steal from their teachers. I think that both are right and participation in this mutual stealing is remarkable.”42 However, he never let his name be added to any authors’ list in a publication unless his ideas had played a decisive role in the study and/or taken a substantial part in the calculations. The negative aspects in his interactions with junior colleagues were manifested when they turned to him with their ideas and he went ahead and solved the problem, and published the results on his own.⁴³

There have been claims (see chapter 7) that Landau’s criticism prevented the publication of important results that later were proven to be correct by foreign scientists. This meant loss of priority and recognition. This is a complex question. Landau did not forbid anybody to publish anything even if he disagreed—but it would have taken a very strong character to publish something that had earned opposition from Landau. He had such immense authority that he did not have to “forbid” publication; even his criticism sufficed to prevent it. The atmosphere in Landau’s environment was authoritarian. Besides, Soviet scientists could not easily send their manuscripts abroad for publication, let alone for discussion with foreign colleagues. Exchanges were rare; most Soviet scientists hardly ever traveled; great authorities seldom came for visits, and when they did, there were carefully choreographed programs for them. These circumstances tremendously enhanced the importance of the opinion of such an authority as Landau. Igor Tamm taught his disciples how to handle Landau’s criticism. He taught them to ignore general comments, such as “all this is nonsense,” but to pay close attention to his specific remarks.⁴⁴

Landau was a great physicist, and his acumen manifested itself not only in weapons design, but even more so in pure science. He was a theoretical physicist. One might tend to think that is already a restrictive delineation within physics, but in fact it is a vast area. Few physicists in modern times have been capable of contributing creatively to both experimental and theoretical physics—Enrico Fermi comes to mind as one. Landau was one of the last theoretical physicists who could navigate any area of theory with ease. It was unfortunate for him that most of his career was spent in isolation from much of world physics. This sometimes favored responding to what had been discovered elsewhere to continuously producing pioneering work in the forefront. This was yet more characteristic of many of his peers in Soviet physics. The high level of sophistication, including its higher mathematical character, makes it very difficult to describe Landau’s achievements. He certainly earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues at home and internationally. On his fiftieth birthday, in 1958, he was presented with a symbolic two-stone tablet listing Landau’s “Ten Commandments,” his ten most important achievements in theoretical physics.⁴⁵ Then, the question arose, why not add yet another tablet with more “commandments?”⁴⁶

Landau was not given to philosophizing. He liked to deal with concrete issues and sought order in everything, whether it was physics or everyday life. His mind was utterly analytical, and he liked to introduce classifications ubiquitously. In this, his rational approach to everything and his characteristic sarcasm blended inseparably.47 He classified theoretical physicists, placing them on a steeply diminishing scale. His principal consideration was discoveries rather than knowledge, impact, or books. At the top of his list of twentieth century theoretical physicists was Einstein. Taking previous centuries into account, he put Newton in the same category with Einstein. The next category represented a fivefold reduction in the level of quality. Here, he put thirteen physicists, including Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Max Planck, and Louis de Broglie; there is no unambiguous evidence of who the other five might have been. Landau placed his own name into the next category, but later he changed his mind and elevated his position closer to the category of Bohr, Fermi, and the others. There are lists of Soviet physicists as well, but only fragments of them have been made public; here Landau may have been reacting to subjective considerations.⁴⁸

Lev Landau in 1958.

Source: Courtesy of Boris Gorobets, Moscow.

His classification of women was anything but politically correct, but Landau was far from political correctness even for his time. For women, he created six classes. In Class I he placed the German movie star Annie Ondra, a grey-eyed, Marilyn Monroe–type blond. “When looking at her; it is impossible to turn away. Class II is for pretty, slightly pug-nosed blonds. Class III, they are nothing particular, not quite terrible, but maybe not for looking at. Class IV, better not to look at; they are not dangerous for people, but scary for horses. Class V, interesting; they are not to look at; their parents need be reprimanded; Class VI, if repeated, they have to be shot.”49

Landau and his future wife Konkordia (“Kora”) Drobantseva met in Kharkov when he was twenty-seven years old. She was an engineer in a chocolate factory at the time. He had been shy with women and had never had any relationship before. When they married, they gave each other full freedom. Landau utilized his; he had several relationships with beautiful women; sometimes a relationship lasted for years, and it appears that it did not cause problems in his marriage. He and his wife had one son, born in 1946, Igor Landau, who studied at Moscow State University and became an experimental physicist in Kapitza’s institute; later, he worked in Switzerland. He died in 2011 and was buried in Landau’s gravesite at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Landau classified sciences as “natural,” “nonnatural,” and “antinatural.” He assigned some of the humanities to pseudoscience and thought that they cheated working people by yielding products of no value. Scientific communism, that is, the teachings of the philosophy and political economy of Marxism and Leninism, and similar disciplines gave Landau a fit. He considered them especially harmful and looked with contempt at the people who chose such disciplines for their profession. He classified intellectual workers in four categories. They could be imaginative and diligent, imaginative and lazy, lazy and dimwitted, or diligent and dimwitted.⁵⁰ His classification of research work showed both his elitism and his highly developed critical approach to his profession. The highest category was “gold fund.” The next was “quiet pathology,” to which he assigned 90 percent of publications. The authors of such works do not expropriate results of other authors, but they do not have their own results either. They are not engaged in pseudoscience, only quietly and unnecessarily rummage their own subject. “Philology” and “Exhibitionism” refer to pseudoscientific works, with aggressive claims for scientific results, whereas it is all merely self-advertising. The last class covered what could be described as “noise.”⁵¹

Landau’s grapho-phobia has been an interesting puzzle. Some felt it was congenital; others thought it was an acquired trait. Most probably, it was a mixture of both. According to one of his biographers, Boris Gorobets, Landau’s grapho-phobia could be explained by his rationalism and egocentrism.⁵² It was rational in that he was not very good at writing, whereas Lifshits excelled at it, so each should do what he did best. It was also egotism in that he did not want to waste his time and energy on writing down his thoughts; it sufficed that he had thought of them. Landau was a good lecturer; he did not have to think much in lecturing; his thoughts flowed seamlessly. But it has also been noted that they were often quite close to the text of the corresponding volume of the Landau-Lifshits Course. The first volumes of the Course had started with his pupils transcribing his lectures. Probably his grapho-phobia was much less pronounced in his youth and strengthened with age, not least because by then he could engage others to write down his thoughts. This was his practice not only for coauthored papers but also for papers produced by him as a solo author, which were written up by someone else, most often by Lifshits.

Landau’s creative life was telescoped into three relatively short periods. His first paper appeared in 1926 when he was eighteen years old. From 1926 until the time of his incarceration in 1938 was a period of twelve years. Then there were two years before World War II began for the Soviet Union, lasting until the summer of 1945; but this period cannot be considered normal. From 1946, Landau was heavily involved with the nuclear weapons program. He quit in 1953, after Stalin’s death. Another creative period of nine years followed, which lasted until his tragic automobile accident on January 7, 1962. Thus, his creative life lasted twelve + two + nine, a total of twenty-three years, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four.

The tragic accident happened on a slippery winter road; the car in which Landau was traveling collided with a truck coming from the opposite direction. Neither the driver of the car nor the other passenger was hurt. Landau suffered such heavy injuries that the doctors who treated him did not expect him to survive. Most of all, he suffered head injuries. News of the accident filled the airwaves and all forms of the media. The country was traumatized. I was a student at Moscow State University at the time and experienced this myself. We first learned about what happened in our physics lecture; the effect was almost indescribable. People did not understand Landau’s physics, but they understood his tragedy, and they could identify with him. He was not a politician; his portrait was not carried in May 1 demonstrations, but in contrast with the faceless politicians—in spite of their portraits everywhere—this was a real person. In addition, there was the great respect of the Russians for science.

Landau’s colleagues, whether they knew him personally or not, sat vigil; everybody was trying to do something for him. Even the authorities overstepped their own limitations and lifted their rigorous rules to let medications and the chemicals for preparing medications be flown in from foreign lands without the usual red tape. Foreign doctors arrived for consultation. These extraordinary medical efforts kept Landau alive, but his next six years were ones of continuous suffering. He suffered physically from pain and he suffered spiritually from understanding that his mental capacities had shrunk. For a man of his sarcastic and critical nature, this must have been unbearable. It is a question whether he was lucky that due to his fame he was saved or whether he would have been better off if he had been allowed to die. When he asked his doctor whether there was any hope of ending his excruciating and constant pain, he added that he had never been afraid of death and that the condition he was in was no life for him. Yet this is how he lived for six long years until one day in 1968 he died.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences found it prudent to announce Landau’s Nobel Prize in Physics in October 1962, the year of the accident. The distinction was awarded for his theories of liquid helium. In 1954, Landau’s possible Nobel Prize was reviewed for the first time in the Nobel Committee for Physics. During the 1950s, he had been nominated regularly, sometimes together with Kapitza, sometimes alone. In 1958, Wolfgang Pauli nominated Landau alone for the Prize, and Artsimovich and Leontovich nominated him and Kapitza together. In 1959 and again in 1960, Heisenberg nominated Landau, but there was no nomination for him in 1961. When they were nominated together, Kapitza was nominated for the discovery of the superfluidity of helium and Landau for the theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon. Bohr had been submitting such nominations for years. However, the Nobel Committee for Physics hesitated, because superfluidity had also been discovered by two Cambridge physicists, essentially at the same time as by Kapitza.

In January 1962, as soon as Bohr learned about Landau’s accident, he changed his mind about the usual joint nomination and decided to submit one solely for Landau. There was no ambiguity of priority for Landau’s work; hence, he had a better chance of receiving the award alone than coupled with Kapitza.53 Bohr was highly experienced in Nobel Prize matters, and his nomination carried weight. Besides, the members of the Nobel Committee could not have been insensitive to Landau’s tragedy. He was awarded an unshared Nobel Prize.

There was no question about Landau’s traveling to Stockholm to receive the award. The Swedish ambassador in Moscow handed it to Landau in the morning of the same day when the festive award ceremony was taking place in Stockholm for the rest of the awards and in Oslo for the peace prize. Protocol did not call for his saying anything during the ceremony when he was given the medal, the diploma, and the check in the conference room of the Central Hospital of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Yet Landau said a few sentences in English in response to the Swedish ambassador’s speech. Only a limited number of people were allowed to be present during this ceremony. Landau’s doctors did not want a crowd. Kapitza was there; the Soviet Nobel laureates had also been designated to be present though two of them were deleted from the list to make room for some officials of the Science Academy.⁵⁴ There was a reception in the evening of the same day at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow at which Landau was represented by his wife and Kapitza; this time all the Soviet Nobel laureates attended.

At the same time, the traditional Nobel banquet was taking place in the famous Blue Room of the Stockholm City Hall. Landau would have been in stellar company. The chemistry prize was awarded to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the structure of globular proteins. Yet more exciting was that the physiology or medicine prize went to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Each category of the Nobel Prizes is designated one two-minute speech at the Nobel banquet. In lieu of Landau, the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm delivered the two-minute address that had been carefully prepared in Moscow by apparatchiks rather than by scientists, and it was exactly what could have been expected from officials sitting in Moscow offices. It read as if Landau had asked the ambassador to ascribe his success to the labors of all Soviet scientists and to the achievements of Soviet science. Further, Landau—ostensibly—thought that the award would facilitate the cooperation between Soviet and Swedish scientists and scientists of the whole planet.55 Luckily, the Soviet authorities did not charge any of their office people with giving Landau’s scientific lecture in his stead; he never gave his Nobel lecture.

The tombstone over Landau’s grave is an exquisite bust of the physicist resting on a tall metallic stand. The bust is the creation of Ernst Neizvestny, who was Kapitza’s choice. Kapitza was the director of the institute where Landau worked, and a considerable share of the expenses of the tombstone was paid by the Academy of Sciences.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Commemorating Lev Landau on postage stamps of (a) Azerbaijan (2008), (b) the Ukraine (2010), (c) Russia (2008), and (d) Israel (1998).

Upon hearing about Landau’s death, Nobel laureate Hans Bethe referred to him as “one of the greatest theoretical physicist of our time.”56 Two-time Nobel laureate John Bardeen sent a telegram to the Soviet Academy of Sciences stressing Landau’s “profound contribution to elementary particle physics, to low temperature phenomena, to the theory of solid state, and to other branches of physics.”⁵⁷ At Landau’s burial ceremonies, there were quite a few speeches. Evgenii Lifshits spoke on behalf of Landau’s pupils. He ended his speech with the following sentence: “As we are bidding goodbye to him, we are bidding goodbye to the best part of our lives.”⁵⁸ Lifshits was Landau’s right hand—literally, Landau’s writing hand—and during the subsequent years, Lifshits often recited the poet David Samoilov’s lines, obviously meaning Landau without explicitly referencing him:59

It’s all over. The eyes of genius have closed.
And when the skies have darkened,
As if in a now deserted building
Our voices have become audible.
Let us drawl, drawl the hackneyed word,
Let us speak languidly and vaguely.
How they feast us and treat us graciously!
They do not exist. Anything is permitted.

Lifshits was delicate enough not to offend anyone personally who might have considered themselves Landau’s direct followers.

***

Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshits was born in 1915 in Kharkov. He had a younger brother, Ilya; both boys became physicists, both excelled as theoreticians, and both became full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Their father was a renowned medical doctor, a gastroenterologist. He had a broad education and outlook on the world and traveled often, taking his family with him. It was most unusual, but in the Lifshits family, they spoke English with the children and had an English teacher for them until 1937. They also had a music teacher, and both boys at some point considered becoming musicians. Their mother, Berta Lifshits (née Mazel’, meaning “happiness,” as in Mazel’ tov) was very proud of her sons’ achievements. According to an anecdote, Berta’s friend called her a liar when she said that both her two sons were members of the Science Academy because it was so unbelievable.⁶⁰ She survived her husband, who died in 1934; she died in 1976.

Evgenii was first taught at home and entered school starting with the sixth grade. He was not very sociable as a child, but he did not make enemies. From 1929, he attended a chemical college for two years. He started his university studies in 1932 at the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics and graduated a year later in 1933. He immediately began his graduate studies as Landau’s student at the UFTI and completed his project and examinations in 1934. His project was related to the existence and properties of electrons and positrons. Landau, who had not believed in the existence of positrons, may have hastened the completion of Lifshits’s graduate studies. Some physicists remembered Landau repeating the saying, “Dirac-durak,” meaning in Russian “Dirac-nitwit.”⁶¹

Lifshits then charged ahead after becoming a Candidate of Science (PhD equivalent), and in five years he acquired the higher degree; he became a Doctor of Science. There was one short period in Lifshits’s life, which looks like derailment, in spring 1938 when for a few months he worked in the Institute of Leather in Moscow, followed by about a one-year stint at the Kharkov Institute of Chemical Technology. By September 1939, however, he was back on the right track at Kapitza’s Institute of Physical Problems (IFP). The timing of the detour coincided with Landau’s imprisonment by the NKDV. It was not just that Lifshits was without a mentor and had to seek alternative employment. His main worry was that he might get entangled in the case. Under normal circumstances he need have not feared such a development, but those were abnormal times.

From the second half of the 1930s, Landau and Lifshits were engaged in creating their famous Course of Theoretical Physics. Apart from the first version of Mechanics, on which Landau cooperated with Pyatigorskii, it was always Landau and Lifshits. Landau highly valued Lifshits’s writing ability. On occasion, he called him “a great writer, the Leo Tolstoy of physics,” in which one might even spot a bit of patronizing. There have been comments that Landau “may have exploited” Lifshits.62 However, they found the ideal partners in each other. Lifshits was Landau’s pupil, and remained his professional pupil to the end. Lifshits has been called the “Apostle of Landauism with no compromise.”⁶³

There has been a popular joke that “there is not a line written by Landau and not a thought by Lifshits” in the Course, but this is a very unfair characterization of what the series represents.⁶⁴ The two discussed every chapter and every paragraph, and afterward Lifshits wrote it up and then returned it to Landau, who read everything. Another discussion followed, of the minutest details, and Lifshits prepared what was usually the final version. There have been translations into twenty languages of the set or its individual volumes. The complete set is 5300 pages long. The Course is Lifshits’s principal legacy, but not the only one.

Although Lifshits did not have his own pupils, he was still a great pedagogue; his courses were coveted, and he had plenty of opportunity to teach. He taught courses at several institutions of higher education. He loved lecturing. In the immediate postwar period, new institutions mushroomed, and there was a need for good lecturers. Lifshits had a clear mind and a precise style of lecturing. He lectured as only scientists who have a full understanding of the subject matter can.

His biographers described a characteristic episode. When Dirac gave a lecture to a huge audience in Moscow, most of those present could not have followed Dirac’s lecture in English (maybe some native English speakers could not have either). Lifshits volunteered to translate, but Dirac did not want the interruption of preparing a near-simultaneous translation. So he gave his lecture, and it was followed by Lifshits’s “translation.” He gave a brilliant presentation of what Dirac had said, he used Dirac’s formulas preserved on the board, and he faithfully followed the sequence and contents of Dirac’s lecture. It was much more difficult than giving one’s own lecture, but Lifshits’s presentation proved impeccable.65 In contrast, he was not very good in live scientific discussions. It was a standard outcome that when people turned to Lifshits with questions or for clarification, instead of entering an exchange, he readily gave them the exact place in the Course, the volume, section, and often even page number, where the answer could be found. Incidentally, Dirac was known to lecture as if reading from his own book—he was not reading, he remembered everything verbatim. When his students then asked for clarification of a problem, his response was to repeat exactly what he had already said.

Evgenii Lifshits lecturing in the early 1980s.

Source: Courtesy of Boris Gorobets, Moscow.

Whatever Lifshits did, he did with perfection. For his college courses, the preparation he needed to do was obvious. It was less so when he was invited to give guest presentations because he did not always know the level and background of his audience. He therefore prepared three versions of his talks, at three different levels, and at a moment’s notice he could change from one to another. He never missed an opportunity to deliver a talk about Landau. His attachment to Landau went beyond science; it was a great friendship, and it endured the trying times of the period between 1962 and 1968, from the moment of Landau’s accident to Landau’s death. And it did not end with Landau’s passing, either. It is curious to think that Lifshits lived a fully active twenty-three years after Landau’s incapacitating accident; yet most people think of them as a unit to the end. This image has formed due to Lifshits’s faithfulness to Landau and his legacy.

One of the few areas of Lifshits’s independent activities was his work as editor of the Zhurnal eksperimentalnoi i teoreticheskoi fiziki (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics [JETP]). In 1931 this periodical was a spin-off of the Zhurnal Russkogo fiziko-khimicheskogo obshchestva (Journal of the Russian Physical-Chemical Society), which had been appearing since 1878. In 1955, Petr Kapitza was appointed editor-in-chief of JETP, and he invited Lifshits to be his first deputy, delegating to him the running of the journal’s day-to-day operations. It was an excellent choice and an excellent partnership. Kapitza was not interested in the details, but he was a big name. Lifshits immersed himself in all the operational details; he had a vast knowledge of topics and authors as well as potential reviewers; and he loved spending his time and efforts on the journal. Even physically, it was a most convenient arrangement. Lifshits’s home, his work place at the IFP, and the editorial office of JETP were situated around the same courtyard. He could go from one place to another without a winter coat even in cold weather.

He was in charge of the journal for forty-six years, and it was estimated that during this period some one hundred thousand manuscripts went through his hands. He was direct. candid, and dedicated to bringing up the level of the journal, and he succeeded. It became a sign of prestige to appear in the pages of this journal, and it became the leading physics publication in the Soviet Union.66 He often made corrections and suggested changes to authors. It even happened that he rewrote parts of the manuscript and some considered his contributions so substantial that he could have been a co-author of their papers. Yet he respected the intentions and the desires of the authors. He liked to say, “The editor suggests, but the author decides.”⁶⁷ Another of his favorite aphorisms about editorial work was, “The principal editorial instrument is deletion.”⁶⁸ JETP was the first Soviet physics journal to appear in the West in a full English translation. This provided an added incentive to its authors. With the appearance of the English translation they were entitled to a small honorarium in Western currency. It was given to the authors of JETP in form of so-called certificates to be used in special shops, Berezka (“birch tree” in diminutive),⁶⁹ where products that were mostly unavailable elsewhere could be purchased.

Lifshits received recognition for his work, but it came rather late. In 1962 he was awarded jointly with Landau the Lenin Prize for the Course, which was high on the list of Soviet awards. Lifshits had participated in the work on thermonuclear bombs under Landau’s direction and in 1954 was awarded the Stalin Prize for his contribution (Landau received Hero of Socialist Labor). Lifshits’s election to the Soviet Academy of Sciences did not come too early either. Although he had been nominated in 1953 and 1958, he was not elected corresponding member until 1966, and full member in 1979. Thus, he was an academician only during the last six years of his life. Looking at the dates, he joined the first tier years after Landau’s accident; and the second tier, many years after Landau’s death. It seemed that while Landau was alive, he did not consider it a high priority to get Lifshits into the Academy. He did not hinder his election, but he did not go out of his way to facilitate it either, and his silence was interpreted as lack of support. It seems that for Landau, it was a convenient arrangement to have Lifshits in the position he was in, a respected professor, but not a member of the Academy.

For his election as corresponding member in 1966, Lifshits received strong support from Vitaly Ginzburg. Ginzburg was not yet a full member—he was elected in 1966—but he had been a corresponding member since 1953. For Lifshits, the situation was becoming critical because at fifty-one years of age, he was getting close to the age limit: at the time the directive was not to elect new corresponding members aged fifty-five-years or older. Ginzburg looked around and noticed that among the candidates for corresponding member was L. V. Keldysh, thirty-five years old and having a good chance of being elected. Ginzburg asked Keldysh to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Lifshits, which he agreed to do. Lifshits was elected in 1966 and Keldysh was elected the next time, in 1968.70

For scientific output, Lifshits altogether had close to fifty research papers, including about twenty as sole author.⁷¹ He published very solid articles, on average much more substantial than is customary nowadays. He worked out the theories of various phenomena, such as ferromagnetism, the molecular interactions between bodies in condensed phase, symmetry changes in crystals, and various problems of low-temperature physics, among others. During the last period of his life, cosmology became his favorite subject both for research and lecturing.

Politically, Lifshits was very reserved. He read a lot, including literature that was frowned upon in the Soviet Union, but his interest in clandestine literature did not translate into action. He never initiated or joined any kind of protest. He never signed any letter or statement against those who actively involved themselves in dissent, and he never signed anything critical of Andrei Sakharov.

When he got involved in an action that the reigning regime disliked, it was not because he wanted to stage a political protest; rather, because he was absolutely honest in all scientific matters. In 1955, there was a commemorative session at the Academy of Sciences honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Einstein’s theory of relativity of 1905. Lifshits gave one of the talks and spoke about the age of the universe and its expanding character. This was heresy in the eyes of the watchdogs of ideological purity in the Communist Party. In hindsight, it is tragicomic that the communist ideologists elected to fight the latest achievements of science whereas these achievements had nothing to do with politics. Of course, there was reason the Communist Party meddled in the affairs of the Science Academy. It could not tolerate any sphere of Soviet life that stayed outside of their jurisdiction, and they were afraid of any Western influence. In the long run, they were fighting a losing war, but they were winning the battles in the short run, causing all kinds of difficulties for many people, including the best scientists. The drastic measures of the early 1950s taken against scientific views that were contrary to the perceived Communist ideology were gone. But unruly scientists could still lose such “privileges” as teaching in the universities of Moscow and foreign travel, to mention just two among many. Lifshits never gave a second thought to such possible consequences of his taking a stand in science, and luckily for him, his peers, including Ginzburg, Zeldovich, Tamm, Landau, and others, stood by him.

Lifshits died in 1985, and the era of Landau and Lifshits ended. Isaak Khalatnikov, the director of the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics, said: “Physicists were afraid of Dau [Landau] and they were shy before Evgenii Mikhailovich [Lifshits]; while they were around, all made an effort to behave with propriety. Now they are no more.”72 E. M. Lifshits is buried at Kuntsevskoe Cemetery, a branch of the Novedevichy Cemetery.