Soviet postage stamp with Aleksandr Nesmeyanov’s portrait, 1980.

Aleksandr Nesmeyanov’s annual production of scientific publications.

12
Aleksandr Nesmeyanov
BRILLIANT ADMINISTRATOR AND SOVIET COURTIER

Aleksandr N. Nesmeyanov (1899–1980) was exceptionally prolific both as a chemist and as an administrator of Soviet science. He created new organic compounds and a new field in chemistry—he called it element-organic chemistry—known in the rest of the world as hetero-organic chemistry. He tried to improve Soviet life by his own means. When agricultural production proved inadequate to feed the country, he initiated a new branch of chemistry to produce artificial food.

As Rector of Moscow State University, his achievements included the establishment of a new campus. As the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for a decade, he created a plethora of research institutes, including one for his own field and another for scientific information. He served the Soviet regime as courtier, first under Stalin, then under Khrushchev. He did not like independence in people, but he tried to guard the independence of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He held an unprecedented number of public positions. His actions were limited by the restrictive nature of the Soviet regime whose boundaries he did not attempt to overstep.

In fall 1961, I attended Aleksandr Nesmeyanov’s course in organic chemistry at Moscow State University. Although organic chemistry was not my favorite area of chemistry, I sat close to the front in the huge auditorium because once I was there I wanted to follow his lecture. I did not find Nesmeyanov to be a great orator, but my experience differed from others who described his lecturing style as colorful and exciting. Maybe that characterized his younger years. To me, he seemed to monotonously recite the subject. However, his tremendous knowledge shone through his dull style, and he did not use any notes to help him remember what he wanted to say. I was a master’s degree student; later, it turned out that I did not have to pass his examination: My course credit from Budapest sufficed. Nonetheless, attending his lectures turned to be a useful exercise in getting to know this notable contributor to Soviet scientific life.

When I attended his course, Nesmeyanov had just left the most important science administrator’s position in the country, the presidency of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. However, he retained positions that each would have sufficed to keep anybody busy full-time. He was director of a large research institute, chair of a large university department, and held many other appointments. He gave the impression of being rather aloof. He did not interact with his students in the lecture theater; he came, lectured, and left. Even during the breaks, he did not mix with us. This was, again, different from how others described their experience with him as a professor. In 1961, he was in his early sixties, seemed more sleepy than alert, and dressed shabbily. He appeared assiduous, talking to the last second of the lecture time, though at that point he quit, and he never missed a lecture.

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Nesmeyanov was born on September 9, 1899, in Moscow, thus his life began under the czarist regime. His father held a law degree from Moscow State University and served as the principal of an orphanage. His mother had artistic ability, and Nesmeyanov inherited her flair for the arts. Even while in his highest positions, he painted. Between 1908 and 1917 he attended secondary school at a private gymnasium. A book turned his interest toward chemistry: when he was thirteen years old, he came across an inorganic chemistry textbook and found it more exciting than the books of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. A year later, he acquired an organic chemistry text, which fascinated him even more, and he started a home laboratory. He fell in love with materials, their smells, colors, and shapes.

His home laboratory became the young Nesmeyanov’s sanctuary. In youth, he was not strongly built, was shy and introverted, and found it difficult to enter a room if there were other people there. He was afraid of public speaking and refrained from it throughout his university years. He was religious but gave it up by the time he started reading books about science. He decided early on that he would be a professor and achieve something big in science.

He became a vegetarian very early. When he was about nine or ten years old, he decided not to eat meat, and a few years later he decided not to eat fish either. This was not due to the influence of his immediate surroundings: he was alone in this in his family, and his mother tried to talk him out of it. She told him that the animal world was organized in such a way as to provide the foodstuff of others, adding that this was the law of nature. Nesmeyanov responded that if that were true, then people should not attempt to fly because it would contradict another law of nature. He went through an especially trying period during the famine of 1919–1920, but it did not shake his resolve. He stressed that his vegetarianism was not a protest against anything; rather, he was appalled by the hopeless situation of animals selected for slaughter.

In 1917, he started to study at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University, which included chemistry. In one or another capacity he remained affiliated with this school for the rest of his life. He completed his studies in 1922 and continued as Nikolai Zelinsky’s doctoral student. Zelinsky was one of the great Russian organic chemists. Nesmeyanov, being his protégé, was assured a bright career.

Zelinsky was not only a superb chemist; he was also a man of social conscience. In 1911, he and his colleagues walked out of the university in protest against the educational policies of the czarist government and returned only in 1917. At that time Zelinsky was appointed department head of organic and analytical chemistry. This is when Nesmeyanov entered university, and his eventual involvement with Zelinsky coincided with one of Zelinsky’s creative periods. Nesmeyanov spent six years with Zelinsky, 1922–1928. The professor had a great impact on his disciple, but not by giving him ideas for research projects or instructions for using the literature; rather, by encouraging him to be independent. The two never published any paper jointly. In his later life, Nesmeyanov increasingly appreciated what he learned from Zelinsky’s example and felt “infinitely grateful to him.”1

After completing his studies, Nesmeyanov first worked in a pesticide laboratory. It was his entrance into the world of organic compounds incorporating a metal, first of all mercury. This turned into an interest that remained with him throughout his career. He created new routes to synthesis and new mercury-organic compounds, and nothing in his scientific career would surpass these early successes. Many years later he jokingly lamented that his organo-mercury chemistry overshadowed everything else he did. He sympathized with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said: “But I have written more than just Sherlock Holmes.”² His innovative approach was soon extended to the synthesis of large classes of other organic compounds. They included derivatives of a diverse set of metals and nonmetals. This gave the idea to Nesmeyanov to coin a new name, element-organic chemistry, to replace the previously popular, but more restrictive metal-organic chemistry. Through the preparation of a large number of new substances, he was involved with a variety of chemical concepts and structures. He did not invent new concepts; rather, he extended the application of existing ones with great success.

Nesmeyanov’s organizational talents were already manifested in his first work place. His fledgling unit started growing, and in 1930 he established the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the Institute of Fertilizers and Insect-fungicides. In 1934, he organized a separate Laboratory of Metal-Organic Compounds. This process of expanding would be a pattern he would repeat. In 1935, he moved to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with which he remained affiliated for the rest of his life. The expressions “rest of his life” and “rest of his career” can be used interchangeably for him, because his career and his life were one. Science was his life.

In 1939, he became director of the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Science Academy (today, the Zelinsky Institute). But he never abandoned his direct involvement in research, even if not with his own hands then through his trusted associates. In the institute, he remained in charge of one of the research laboratories, not surprisingly, the Laboratory of Element-Organic Compounds, which in 1954 had been spun off from the institute. It became the basis of a new institute, the Institute of Element-Organic Compounds (Institut elementoorganicheskikh soedinenii, INEOS), with Nesmeyanov as its director. Today, it is the Nesmeyanov Institute. In the meantime, his university career continued to advance. He was appointed a professor of organic chemistry, then chair of the Department of Organic Chemistry; and from 1948 to 1951, he was the rector (president) of Moscow State University.

His name became associated with the establishment of the conspicuous new university campus on the Lenin Hills in Moscow, known before and again today as Sparrow Hills. It is a beautiful area of the city, overlooking the Moscow River and downtown Moscow, but far enough away to enjoy broad spaces, plush vegetation, and fresh air. The decision about the new campus was not part of a broad plan for the development of the university. Rather, when Stalin decided to build several high-rises in Moscow, he started looking for uses for the buildings. One of the party leaders told Nesmeyanov to request one of the planned high-rises for the university. Nesmeyanov wrote a letter to Stalin to this effect, and the dictator approved it right away.

Nesmeyanov’s tenure as rector was cut short because in 1951, following the sudden death of the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, physicist Sergey Vavilov, Nesmeyanov was made the new president. He first heard about this possibility from his driver; then, Georgii Malenkov, one of Stalin’s closest aides, invited him for a meeting and told him that his presidency had already been decided. Nesmeyanov oversaw an extraordinarily intensive period of development in Soviet science, comparable only to the development in the 1920s. But this was at a different level. In the 1920s, the goal was to resuscitate science in the Soviet Union; in the 1950s, it was to achieve world preeminence.

Three generation of Russian organic chemists: Sergey Nametkin, Nikolai Zelinsky, and Aleksandr Nesmeyanov.

Source: Courtesy of the late Lev Vilkov, Moscow.

The Soviets succeeded spectacularly if judged by their impact in shaking up American science and science education. But in reality, only selected areas of science progressed, primarily those related to defense, and especially to the development of nuclear weaponry and rocketry. For a while, the establishment of atomic and hydrogen bombs took precedence over everything else, but the nuclear program was not under the jurisdiction of the Science Academy. It was under the Ministry of Medium Machine Building—a camouflage; in practice it was under the close control of the security organs. These areas of science made fast progress with outstanding government support. Other fields suffered fatal blows, such as genetics, and generally, biology, and also areas that fall under the umbrella of “cybernetics,” including computer technology. The consequences of the destruction of modern biology were manifested in the disastrous performance of agriculture. The fate of cybernetics had similarly long-ranging consequences for the entire Soviet infrastructure, rendering it obsolete. On the other hand, Nesmeyanov’s presidency of the Academy saw the establishment of about twenty-five new research institutes, including one for scientific information.

The development of science in the 1950s was unfavorable with respect to international interactions when compared with the 1920s. In the 1950s, young researchers had few opportunities to gain international experience. This was not for want of trying on Nesmeyanov’s part. He tried and achieved some success, but the meagerness of his success tells us how hopeless the situation was. He made efforts to send young researchers abroad, but this he did as a private initiative rather than in any institutional way, which would have had a broader impact. The British chemist Alexander Todd of Cambridge University told the story that a Soviet deputy prime minister helped to put together an official agreement whereby Nesmeyanov could send two of his young associates to Todd.3 This was all he could achieve despite his high office. Years later, one of the two, N. K. Kochetkov, succeeded Nesmeyanov as director of the Institute of Organic Chemistry.

Nesmeyanov was one of the few Soviet scientists who had direct contact, though infrequent, with the supreme leaders of the land. He was in charge of the committee for the Stalin Prize between 1947 and 1961. The committee did not make decisions under Stalin, it only made recommendations, even though a member of the highest party organ, the Politburo, was always present during its meetings. The final word was Stalin’s at a Politburo meeting to which Nesmeyanov’s summon came always at a moment’s notice. The meeting usually started late in the evening and lasted till 2 a.m. Everything about these meetings was determined by Stalin. In case of the recommendations concerning scientists he asked only questions of clarification. In the fields of inventions and constructions, and especially weaponry, he participated much more. All those present sat at a table while Stalin walked around, asking questions, obviously in charge on the issue of who should and should not receive the prize named after him. Under Khrushchev, the procedure was simplified, and Nesmeyanov’s committee was given the right to make decisions rather than only recommendations.

Nesmeyanov’s dealings with Khrushchev were broader than with Stalin and went beyond who should be getting what prize.4 Once Nesmeyanov and the atom czar Igor Kurchatov initiated a conversation with Khrushchev about the impossible situation in biology where, following Stalin’s death, Lysenko’s damaging influence continued. Lysenko managed to convince Khrushchev that only he could lift Soviet agriculture out of a crisis characterized by terribly low productivity. The meeting with Khrushchev started ominously when Kurchatov told the Soviet premier about the success of hybrid corn in the United States and the damage to Soviet science caused by the denial of genetics. Khrushchev became visibly agitated and waved a couple of long ears of corn from his desk at his visitors. He advised in no uncertain terms Kurchatov and Nesmeyanov to stay with their physics and chemistry and leave biology and Lysenko alone.

Nesmeyanov appeared discouraged after this experience and shared his gloom with his associates at the department of organic chemistry of Moscow State University. However, he did not give up and began formulating an efficient approach to make changes. If the country’s leadership did not support his action, he decided to conduct it in a clandestine manner.⁵ He had a couple of courses organized at the chemistry faculty that would be concerned with the new directions in biology. It would have been impossible to organize such courses at the Faculty of Biology, but the Faculty of Chemistry was not under Lysenko’s influence; on the contrary, there Nesmeyanov held great authority. What happened was more like a conspiracy than the normal way of making changes in the curriculum and in the organization of scientific research.

One evening in early 1958, two leading biologists were invited to meet with Nesmeyanov, not at his Academy office, but at the university. He invited five young associates from his department to attend the meeting. Nesmeyanov told his visitors that the Academy was preparing a resolution about the development of chemistry and that it would be possible to sneak into that resolution a decision to develop a center for biological research, using a camouflage label like the “physical chemistry of biology.” Nesmeyanov appeared very practical, because he had in mind at once two biological institutes rather than only one, and he had already selected his two visitors, Vladimir Engelhardt and Mikhail Shemyakin, for the positions of the two directors.

Together they decided that the two biological institutes should have names that did not “smell” of biology. One would be called the Institute of Radiation and Physical-Chemical Biology, to be directed by Engelhardt. The other would be the Institute of Natural Products Chemistry, to be directed by Shemyakin. Nesmeyanov called their agreement “our little biological conspiracy.”6 The operation was not without danger. Just to give a sense of the risk they were taking, it was also toward the end of the 1950s that several articles critical of Lysenko appeared in the Soviet Botanical Journal. In response, Lysenko published an authoritative article in the central newspaper of the Communist Party, Pravda, and as a consequence all members of the editorial office of the Botanical Journal were fired and had to be replaced. However, Nesmeyanov’s plan worked; the Academy’s chemistry resolution was soon accepted, and nobody noticed or called attention to the insertion concerning biology.

Nesmeyanov knew that he had to act quickly. It appeared that one of the Academy institutes was moving out of its building to take up residence elsewhere. Nesmeyanov directed his two co-conspirators to occupy the building right away. It was a big place, and they divided it between themselves, assigning one half of it to one new institute and the other half to the other. Much of the action took place overnight. Eventually, both institutes received the names their founders had wanted from the start; Engelhardt’s institute became the Institute of Molecular Biology and Shemyakin’s, the Institute of Bio-organic Chemistry. Today each of these two institutes carries the name of its founder.

Incidentally, in spite of Khrushchev’s protecting Lysenko and his unscientific domination of Soviet biology, the situation was slowly progressing. The international community had decided that in 1961 the Fifth International Biochemistry Congress was to take place in the Soviet capital. The organizers agreed to have this big meeting in Moscow provided they had the freedom to choose the speakers and topics. This was granted by the Soviet authorities, but not the freedom to select the titles of the sessions. Lysenko was still the director of the Institute of Genetics in Moscow, and the term “molecular biology” was still anathema to the authorities. When Engelhardt wanted to name one of the sessions “molecular biology,” he could not get it through, and they settled on a compromise name, “biological functions at the molecular level.”⁷

Ever since Nesmeyanov’s encounter with Khrushchev about Lysenko, he felt Khrushchev’s scorn toward him and, what was worse, toward the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Khrushchev intended to “improve” the activities of the Academy, and, referring to the Academy, he declared publicly: “For the watch to go, you have to shake it.”⁸ The airing of his wrath culminated at the end of 1960, when Khrushchev, again publicly, criticized the Science Academy for wasting its resources on “little flies.” This was another thinly disguised attack on the Academy and on genetics since the “little flies” were the famous Drosophila melanogaster, the favorite fruit fly in genetic research. To everybody’s—Politburo members and others—astonishment, Nesmeyanov just as publicly explained the importance of such investigations.

On another occasion, when Khrushchev threatened to abolish the Science Academy, Nesmeyanov remarked, “So this is the way it is; Petr Alexeevich [the czar, Peter the Great] created the Science Academy, and Nikita Sergeevich [Khrushchev] is going to destroy it.”9 But Nesmeyanov offered to step aside as president if Khrushchev so desired. Nesmeyanov was soon replaced. In a few years time, Khruschev was removed from office and his Politburo colleagues ascribed the need to replace him to Khrushchev’s damaging activities; as an example, they mentioned that he might have abolished the Academy of Sciences.

Nesmeyanov’s removal from the office of the Academy presidency did not cause any loss of his authority among his peers. Soon, they elected him to be head of the chemistry division of the Academy of Sciences. For the next dozen or so years he was responsible for the entire science of chemistry in the Soviet Union. He continued as director of his institute INEOS and as chair of organic chemistry at Moscow State University.

Nesmeyanov’s scientific output did not suffer just because he held high administrative positions; the numbers even show the opposite. For his entire career, from his first publication in 1923 to his last in 1979, a total of fifty-six years, he figured as author or coauthor on 1,133 publications. Of those fifty-six years, he occupied high offices for a total of twenty-seven years, during which time his name appeared on 1,040 publications. So the average annual number of publications he produced while holding various official positions was thirty-eight papers per year, which means that he needed barely ten days to do a paper on average, continuously, for a twenty-seven-year period that included his being rector of Moscow State University and then president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, along with other positions. This was a rare though not unprecedented accomplishment. A little later, during the period 1981–1990, a crystallographer in Nesmeyanov’s institute, Yurii Struchkov, had a higher frequency of publications, averaging a paper a little less than every four days.¹⁰ Unlike Nesmeyanov though, he held no administrative positions. Struchkov was a workaholic, and his X-ray diffractometer yielded structure data on crystals in an already near-publishable form. But Struchkov was known to rigorously scrutinize every manuscript before it left his desk.

Nesmeyanov had so many publications that their sheer number would have made it impossible for him to scrutinize them all, let alone to participate in all creatively. But he had great ideas and contributed to initiating a lot of new work. Also, Soviet publication habits were rather peculiar. Papers were often written and published that should have been considered only parts of a larger paper. Fragmentation of publications was very much in vogue, and not only to lengthen the publication lists of the big bosses—institute directors, for example. Very often, doctoral students needed those publications to get confirmed for their next year of study, and, ultimately, for the defense of their dissertation. Also, if there was a scientific discussion, the arguments flew back and forth, resulting in additional publications, and associates of INEOS often participated in such scientific debates. If both sides of the arguments involved INEOS people, it could happen that Nesmeyanov would appear coauthor of papers on both sides of the debate. It happened on such an occasion that he received two manuscripts for his signature at the same time, representing two sides of a debate, and he asked plaintively, “In which am I right?”

Nesmeyanov was a classical chemist who had experience in “wet” chemistry: he used to work in the laboratory with sizeable amounts of substances rather than with physical instrumentation that often required the use of only miniscule amounts of substances and no manipulation of the materials. He supported modern techniques and was interested in them, but could not always hide his unhappiness when they yielded results that differed from his expectations. But usually, sometimes after some persuasion, he accepted results that did not match what he had hoped for.11

His younger associates did not know that Nesmeyanov had helped his colleagues to acquire knowledge of these physical techniques. When, during the first period of the war in 1941, the research institutes in Moscow had to be evacuated, the Institute of Organic Chemistry moved to Kazan. The whole institute received two rooms at the local university, and the scientists were sent there without any equipment or other means to do their work except a few books. Nesmeyanov decided that the time should be used for learning. He divided the collective into six groups. Each group had to attend a course by a specialist in a given field. One of the specialists was a crystal chemist, later of international renown, Georgii Bokii. When Bokii started his course of crystal chemistry—the first course he ever gave in his life—he noticed among his “students” the director of the institute, Nesmeyanov.¹²

The year 1941 was sad for Nesmeyanov, not only because of the war in general, but for family reasons as well. His brother, Vasilii Nesmeyanov, fell victim to Stalin’s Terror and was executed in 1941. This tragedy may have helped Nesmeyanov develop sympathy for the persecuted. Years later, there was, for example, the Razuvaev case. The chemist Grigorii Razuvaev had been declared “an enemy of the people” and was working in a labor camp in the faraway Komi Autonomous Republic (northeast of Moscow, west of the Ural Mountains). He was involved with the extraction of radium from water. Once he had to transport the product of his work to Moscow, and he used the occasion to visit his old acquaintance Nesmeyanov. He at once decided that Razuvaev should be given the opportunity to acquire his Candidate of Science (PhD equivalent) degree on the basis of his earlier publications, whose reprints had miraculously survived. The defense was successful and Razuvaev received his degree. Soon, he was set free from the camp, and it was a mere few months after the granting of his first degree that Nesmeyanov organized for him his defense of the higher doctorate, again, on the basis of old works published ten years before. During the defense, Nesmeyanov made a statement that Razuvaev’s work had not become obsolete; on the contrary, it had withstood the test of the most objective judge—time. He called on everybody to vote “for” giving Razuvaev the degree. This happened under Stalin.13

Nesmeyanov was especially protective of his immediate coworkers although some of his actions may appear strange in hindsight. Thus, when in 1949, his close associate R. Kh. Freidlina’s husband was arrested on trumped-up charges, Nesmeyanov immediately demoted her from the position of laboratory head. Nesmeyanov’s action could be interpreted in different ways, but Freidlina was convinced that it saved her by making her “invisible.”¹⁴

Another remarkable episode happened in 1952 at Moscow State University. It was the time of the “fight” against the “doctors-plotters”—the mostly Jewish doctors accused of planning the assassination of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. There was a big meeting of the associates of the department of organic chemistry. It was a large collective, among them was a member of the protein laboratory by the name of Maria Botvinnik—long-time scientific secretary of the department. This fifty-year-old lady was popular among her colleagues both for her professional and human qualities. The only exception was her immediate boss Nikolai Gavrilov. Part of the reason for his belligerence was that her experimental results did not agree with his theory. Once, as Gavrilov was entering the crowded auditorium, he said in a loud voice: “Among us, there is a Zionist agent,” and pointed to Dr. Botvinnik. The accusation was the heaviest possible under the circumstances; the auditorium froze, and the silence was profound. It was broken by Nesmeyanov’s quiet voice. “What you are saying, Nikolai Ivanovich is beyond what a healthy brain could produce,” he said. He thus crushed at the outset a possible anti-Semitic campaign in the chemistry department.¹⁵

These incidents, though, were isolated cases. Nesmeyanov could not have occupied some of the highest positions in the Soviet hierarchy without showing harmony with Stalin’s and then Khrushchev’s regimes and without being their devoted servant. He did not tolerate political dissent in his INEOS. He did not like it when anybody deviated even to the minutest degree “from the only correct line,” the party line. When a scientist (not a Nesmeyanov subordinate) published a highly critical paper about Lysenko and his “teachings” abroad, one of the associates of Nesmeyanov’s institute, Natalya Gambaryan, organized a seminar about Lysenko, and only the strongest intervention of her boss, academician I. L. Knunyants, saved her from being fired.

Aleksandr Nesmeyanov, third from the right, with his closest associates still at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. Seven of the seventeen scientists in this picture became corresponding or full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: From the left, 2-Kuzma Andrianov, 5-Mark Volpin, 11-Dmitrii Kursanov, 13-Martin Kabachnik, 15-Rakhil Freidlina, 16-Nesmeyanov, and 17-Vasilii Korshak.

Source: Courtesy of Jan Kandror, Wiesbaden, Germany.

When in 1968, Czechoslovakia was occupied and the Prague Spring was brutally suppressed, there was a meeting at INEOS to express support for this despicable action. Yet when a vote took place, a few did vote against and a few others abstained. They could not be penalized directly just for a vote, but one of them, Yurii Aronov, was made into a scapegoat, and his life was made miserable.16 He lost his job and his right of residing in Moscow (he was from a different place and living in Moscow was a special privilege). For a long time this excellent scientist was unable to find employment. Another unfortunate case involved Yulia Zaks, who made a statement in favor of the human rights activists Petr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, who in 1972 were being persecuted. Zaks was Jewish, which did not bode well for her because Nesmeyanov had been repeatedly accused of employing too many Jews in his Institute. She was summarily fired from INEOS.

When Sakharov was being denounced by some of his fellow members of the Science Academy for his dissident activities, Nesmeyanov asked the leading scientists of INEOS to sign a letter of condemnation. He was a true Soviet-style courtier. The readers of Nesmeyanov’s memoirs, published two decades after his death and one decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were astonished by the great deal of nonsense about the greatness of Stalin in them.17 It was impossible for Nesmeyanov to be oblivious to the conditions in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He must have been well informed in general, but also through the fate of his own brother. It was a puzzle why those memoirs were released in 1999. He was compared to the churchman who did not believe in God, but served the Church for such a long time that he was unable not only to speak, but also to think differently anymore.¹⁸

Soon after Nesmeyanov was made President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1951, his standing in organic chemistry was severely tested. There had already been attacks against science within the framework of Stalin’s anti-science campaign. Now it was chemistry’s turn. A meeting was called to discuss the structure theories of organic chemistry, and the irony in Nesmeyanov’s position could not be missed. Unfortunately, the chemists, similarly to the physicists, could not avert an ideological attack. It is true, though, that the attack on chemistry resulted in much less severe consequences than what happened to biology. The chemistry meeting lasted four days, June 11–14, 1951, in Moscow. Four hundred and fifty chemists, physicists, and philosophers attended, representing major centers of scientific research and higher education from all over the Soviet Union. There was a report, “The Status of Chemical Structure Theory in Organic Chemistry,” compiled by a special commission of the Chemistry Division of the Academy of Sciences, followed by forty-three oral contributions. An additional twelve contributions were submitted in writing.

The conference adopted a resolution and sent a letter to I. V. Stalin. This letter expressed self-criticism for past deficiencies in appreciating the role of theory and theoretical generalizations in chemical research. It stated that the foreign concept of “resonance” had spread among some of the Soviet scientists. It called this concept an attempt at the liquidation of the materialistic foundations of structure theory. The letter further mentioned that the Soviet chemists had already started their struggle against the ideological concepts of bourgeois science. The letter concluded that the falseness of the so-called theory of resonance had already been unmasked and that all efforts would be made to cleanse Soviet chemical sciences of the remnants of this concept. Looking back, this was obvious nonsense, but at the time it had serious consequences. It was ironic that at the meeting, which in itself was the manifestation of suppression of the freedom of research, there were repeated references to Stalin’s teachings on the importance of the struggle between differing opinions and of the freedom of criticism. In reality, Stalin’s regime did not tolerate any dissenting voice from the communist ideology or what was assumed to be the communist ideology. The minutes of the meeting have appeared in a hard-bound volume of 440 densely printed pages.¹⁹

The theory of resonance in chemistry described the structure of a molecule by a set of “resonating” forms. The approach proved useful when the structure of a molecule was difficult to describe in a unique way. For example, the benzene molecule, C₆ H₆, has a structure intermediate between two extremes that were shown as if resonating between the two. In reality there is only one structure of benzene, but it was found convenient to represent it by this “resonating” model.

The average of these two structures was found to be in perfect agreement with the experimental data. Linus Pauling, one of the giants of twentieth-century chemistry, was the most visible among the creators and propagators of the resonance approach. He used it extensively in his classical monograph The Nature of the Chemical Bond.20 Another American chemist, George Wheland, published a monograph about the theory and its applications to organic chemistry. In it Wheland stressed that “resonance is a man-made concept … it does not correspond to any intrinsic property of the molecule itself, but instead it is only a mathematical device, deliberately invented by the physicist or chemist for his own convenience.”²¹ Reviewing the Soviet chemical literature of the time reveals that an astonishing war was waged against this innocent approach, which, by the way, in the West had its proponents and opponents, without any ideological coloring.

The report of the Chemistry Division of the Science Academy was submitted to the meeting by a special commission whose members included a number of academicians and future academicians.²² Some of them, M. I. Kabachnik and R. Kh. Freidlina, were Nesmeyanov’s closest associates. One section of the report discussed the mistakes of Soviet chemists. Here, we learn that G. V. Chelintsev actively criticized the concept of “resonance” in the open press. It was to a great extent attributed to him that Soviet scientific society had turned to this question. The basis of Chelintsev’s criticism was his own “new structure theory” which, however, completely contradicted the modern theory of chemical structure and was contrary to the experimental facts and theoretical foundations of quantum physics. Ya. K. Syrkin and M. E. Dyatkina were named as the main culprits in disseminating the theory of resonance in the Soviet Union. They were accused of having further advanced the erroneous concepts of Pauling and Wheland, ignoring the works of Soviet and Russian scientists, idolizing foreign authorities, and quoting works of secondary importance by American and English authors.

Others were also criticized, among them the organic chemists Nesmeyanov and Freidlina. They had interpreted the diverse reactivity of compounds of mercury using the resonance theory. These lesser sinners, however, along with many others, eventually repented, and have become critics of the application of resonance. This must have been humiliating for Nesmeyanov, but it was a lesser evil, and in the final account, it lifted him from a defensive position. In this situation, he certainly acted as a seasoned politician.

He and the other genuine scientists were lucky in that it was only a small, though very vocal, group that blindly attacked the theory of resonance and, especially viciously, the alleged proponents of the theory. Quantum chemistry and all of the science of the West were also under attack. Return to historical Russian achievements was advocated. Another lucky development was that the attackers of the resonance theory proposed their own theories for general acceptance. These theories were shown to be worthless by many. Nonetheless, all participants painstakingly dissociated themselves from the theory of resonance. At times, the self-criticism of some excellent scientists was humiliating in the extreme.

The philosopher B. M. Kedrov declared Erwin Schrödinger to be a representative of modern “physical” idealism, which put him in the same category as Pauling. Furthermore, he stated that Paul Dirac’s superposition principle was as idealistic as Werner Heisenberg’s complementarity principle and even more idealistic than Pauling’s theory of resonance. Kedrov was obviously joining in the attack and applying no self-restraint. He was a philosopher of natural sciences who had been trained in chemistry at Moscow State University and subsequently had become a philosopher. He had started a promising career, but suffered a setback when his father, an old-time communist was arrested during the 1937–1938 Terror. After the war, Kedrov served for a time as a relatively liberal editor of the new journal Voprosi Filosofii (Problems in Philosophy). In 1948, he was demoted from this position in the course of ideological struggles and was soon fired from the Institute of Philosophy, where he had risen to the post of deputy director. In subsequent years, Kedrov became a fierce fighter against alien ideologies, considerably improving his career prospects. His performance at the chemistry meeting must have pleased the most hardline party officials. His outbursts against modern physics and similar statements by a few others give the impression that previously prepared materials against the physicists were being used.

It was characteristic of the times when the writer V. E. Lvov, who was absolutely ignorant of chemistry, criticized the commission report for a serious political error. He lamented that the protagonists of the theory of resonance were still being considered to be the greatest Soviet scientists. These protagonists had been unmasked as spokesmen of the Anglo-American bourgeois pseudoscience by the press and by Soviet society. According to Lvov, the report was vague about the main thrust of the ideological struggle taking place in theoretical chemistry. He also quoted, as a positive example, the criticism of Mendel by T. D. Lysenko, who “proved” that Mendel’s work had nothing to do with the science of biology. Furthermore, Lvov fiercely attacked the theories of Heisenberg as well as those of Heitler and London—all universally recognized authorities in science. He protested the report’s view that quantum mechanics was a development of the classical Russian scientist Butlerov’s teachings. The most important political task of Soviet chemistry, he declared, was the isolation and capitulation of the group of unrepenting proponents of the ideology of resonance.

The last entry in the minutes of the meeting is a dissenting opinion in the form of a short letter by E. A. Shilov, member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He is critical of the report and the resolution of the meeting for looking backward rather than forward. He suggested concentrating on new results and new teachings instead of conducting scholastic debates about meaningless questions. Shilov added that the result of ending such debates would be that the efforts and time of Soviet organic chemists could be devoted to valid and productive work. Professor Shilov’s contribution was not delivered as an oral presentation during the meeting. Considering the prevailing atmosphere, it was a uniquely brave contribution.

The significance of the Moscow meeting can be evaluated on a number of levels. At one level, the records speak for themselves and provide an excellent demonstration of Orwellian doublespeak; but even George Orwell’s famous book 1984 pales by comparison. They also show the fear in the Soviet political system of everything coming from the West, even if it was only a chemical theory. The inferences of the theory of resonance appear exaggerated beyond any reasonable limit, and the statements reflect the atmosphere of a staged trial rather than a scientific discussion. There are chemists who do not like the description of molecular structure as a series of resonance structures. What is mind-boggling is that such a dislike was made into an official dogma with philosophical justification. The story of resonance, however, should not be viewed in isolation from the rest of Soviet life in the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s reign. To me, the question that is most telling is the one asked of M. E. Dyatkina: “How do you explain that you are so conspicuously familiar with the teachings of foreign scientists? May it be that you, along with Professor Syrkin, are intentionally bowing to foreign scientists?”

According to a different evaluation, the Moscow meeting had a distinctly positive significance. It was governed by a healthy mechanism of self-defense by the higher echelons of the Soviet chemical establishment. Rather than letting harsher outside interference crush it, as had happened to some other fields of science, this establishment organized itself a milder purge. By the same stroke, it ridiculed and marginalized the pseudoscientific extremists in its own ranks, whose most vocal representative was Professor Chelintsev. It is true that jobs in chemistry were lost due to ideological controversy, but lives were not lost due to political interference as occurred in other areas.

There were long-term negative consequences of the resonance controversy for Soviet chemistry. Many of the brightest young scientists in the Soviet Union stayed away from theoretical chemistry, if not from chemistry, for decades. Theoretical chemistry was just not the field to be associated with. Vladimir Tatevskii, one of the most influential chemistry professors at Moscow State University, had participated in the attacks against the theory of resonance. He exerted influence at the Faculty of Chemistry for decades. His statements in 1951–1952 were as vitriolic against Pauling as against Syrkin and Dyatkina.23 He was a meticulous specialist and a demanding one, so he was both revered and feared for a long time. Even today, six decades later, at the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, there is a great deal of ambiguity in judging him and his role in the resonance controversy.

One of the surprising features of the debate was the fierce attacks on Linus Pauling, who at about the same time was having also difficulties in the United States because of his leftist views. His passport was taken away to prevent him from attending conferences in Europe. When in 1993, I asked him about the Soviet resonance controversy, he put all Soviet chemists into the same group and opined that the Soviet chemists needed some time to properly appreciate the resonance theory.²⁴ Pauling’s response appeared as ignorant as it was unfair. There were chemists at the Moscow meeting who not only understood the resonance concept but had applied it extensively. Syrkin and Dyatkina were the best known among them. Nesmeyanov had also utilized the theory, even if he subsequently dissociated himself from it. After Pauling’s leftist politics became known, he was never again attacked in the Soviet Union; he was considered to be a great friend of the socialist state.

In the academic year 1964/65, Dyatkina gave a course on inorganic structures. It was not for credit, and it was not given at the University but at one of the research institutes in Moscow. I traveled every week to this institute to attend her lectures. The large audience came from all over the city. The theory of resonance was no longer an issue of ideology, but she freely used another concept, electronegativity. It also came primarily from Pauling’s teachings, and it was also a useful though not very exact concept about the affinity of the atoms of different elements for electrons. At the University, there was a group of influential professors who considered the concept of electronegativity ideologically unacceptable. This was fifteen years after the resonance controversy. The opposition to the concept of electronegativity was, however, much less fierce than the opposition to resonance had been, and ideology had a diminished influence on science at the time, compared with the Stalin years; yet it seemed as if history was repeating itself, though on a mini-scale.

Aleksandr N. Nesmeyanov may have been humiliated at the 1951 meeting, but he was not defeated, and those who claim that he saved Soviet chemistry from graver damages may be right. Only a control experiment could have provided a more exact answer to this question. Nesmeyanov was a pragmatic person, and after this meeting he continued to serve as president of the Academy for almost a decade. In this position he survived Stalin, but did not survive Khrushchev. This was a paradox of his career.

It was the period following his Academy presidency that brought considerable publicity for Nesmeyanov on account of a special direction in chemical research he was developing, aimed at creating synthetic food. There could be two reasons he embarked on this path. His dedicated vegetarianism prompted him to ease the food situation in case animal sources ceased to be used for human consumption—this was an unlikely scenario. The other was more realistic, the continuing poor state of Soviet agriculture that was unable to feed the people in spite of the addition of tremendous virgin areas to arable land. Nesmeyanov’s institute devoted a great deal of effort to working out the techniques for producing synthetic food. They produced black caviar, which was a popular item and proved to be a publicity success—I remember the excitement it caused in Moscow. In addition to the chemical syntheses, many other problems of technology would have to be solved before consumers could be offered the synthetic black caviar. Nesmeyanov held quite utopian views about the role of his synthetic food, and he declared, in part (italics added):25

The laborious and poorly productive agriculture is a thing of the past…. Those industries will also be gone that produced machines, fuel fertilizers, and herbicides for agriculture. 34% of the population who worked in agriculture is now available for more creative work….

There are no more years of crop failure or places of failure. There are no more the vast food losses owing to inclement changes in the weather, natural disasters, pests, spoiling, rotting, freezing, etc., which now destroy the greater part of the harvest. The villages will become towns and the towns will be transformed to garden towns. The professional cooks and waiters associated with domestic food preparation will have completely disappeared. The housewife will be free since the food is ready, packed and tinned but complete with vitamins. It needs at most heating….

The ploughed area gradually reduces while parks and forests expand. River drying and shoaling ceases and the great problem of water pollution is solved along with food excess.

When Nesmeyanov spoke about the poor productivity of agriculture and the large proportion of the population, one-third of the total, engaged in agriculture, he was obviously referring to the Soviet conditions. He let his imagination go, but it was a typical Soviet approach to get carried away by the potential benefits of a project while forgetting about the potential drawbacks.

Nesmeyanov was very good in thinking up projects on a smaller scale as well, and in particular in designing new molecules. One example is mentioned here. Among the element-organic substances, Nesmeyanov was thinking of carbon cages which would envelope one or more hetero-atoms within their cages. These were the endohedral polyhedral clusters, labeled M@C_n H_n where C_n H_n means a hydrocarbon skeleton; M, the heteroatom, a metal, for example; and @ meant that the first part of the formula was enveloped by the second part. It was decided that first the feasibility of such structures would be tested by computations. The Quantum Chemistry Laboratory of Nesmeyanov’s institute was assigned to the task. These structures were too large for the available computational possibilities at the time, so the task was simplified. First they wanted to examine the stability of cages without anything inside them, and ignoring the hydrogen atoms bound to the respective carbon atoms of the cage.

A young associate of the laboratory, Elena Galpern, was charged with the work under the supervision of the laboratory head D. A. Bochvar. She started with the carbon cage consisting of twenty carbon atoms, C₂₀, called “carbododecahedron.” The name referred to the exclusively carbon cage having the shape of the dodecahedron. However, the cage of the C₂₀ molecule would have been too small to house anything. The next target, C₆₀, was large enough to envision a metal atom inside. First, however, the shape of the cage had to be determined.

As she was computing various shapes, her mathematician colleague Ivan Stankevich, who often played soccer, brought his soccer ball into the laboratory one day. He told her that “twenty-two healthy men are kicking this ball for hours and it is not destroyed. A molecule of its shape must also be very sturdy.”26 The recently introduced soccer ball was sewn together from pentagonal and hexagonal patches; the ball resembled a truncated icosahedron, and the truncated icosahedron has sixty apexes. The subsequent computations showed this shape to be stable, and this result constituted a discovery whose significance Galpern, Bochvar, and Stankevich could not appreciate at the time. Nonetheless, they published a report about it in the prestigious Soviet periodical of the Science Academy, Doklady Akademii Nauk (Proceedings of the Science Academy).²⁷ Nesmeyanov acted as the academician sponsoring the manuscript for publication.

Elena Galpern, whose calculations predicted the molecule that later became known as buckminsterfullerene.

Source: Courtesy of Elena Galpern, Moscow.

A truncated icosahedron–the shape of the buckminsterfullere molecule, represented here by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing for Luca Pacioli’s De divina proportione.

Unknown to Galpern and the others, by the time they did this work, there had been a suggestion for an all-carbon truncated icosahedral molecular shape by Eiji Osawa in Japan. He based his suggestion on qualitative geometrical considerations. A dozen years later, the actual discovery of C₆₀ happened, eventually leading to a chemistry Nobel Prize for the leading members of the British-American team.28 In that work, the molecule was given the name “buckminsterfullerene,” after the American designer R. Buckminster Fuller whose exhibition hall at the 1967 World Exposition in Montreal was constructed from pentagons and hexagons. The process culminated in yet another work in which for the first time C₆₀ was produced in the laboratory by a German-American group.²⁹ This was when all those interested in the C₆₀ story wanted to learn about the antecedents of the discovery, and Galpern’s study entered the limelight. When asked about her computations, she always gave credit to the assistance she received from her colleagues and pointed to the originator of the idea, Aleksandr Nesmeyanov.