There are fourteen heroes in the twelve chapters of this book, and though I met personally only half of them, I no longer consider the other half to be strangers, either. I hope the reader will feel similarly. A few questions have puzzled me and might also have puzzled my readers. First, how could these extraordinarily gifted men stay loyal to an oppressive system for so long? Second, did conditions in the Soviet Union facilitate or hinder their creativity and productivity? Third, will the extraordinary performance of these Soviet scientists be continued by scientists in Russia and the other successor states?
The first question brings to mind the tragedies that the families of almost all the scientists suffered, particularly at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen. Tamm’s brother was murdered and so was Nesmeyanov’s; Khariton’s father perished in the Gulag; Landau was incarcerated for a year; and Sakharov spent seven years in exile. All the scientists in this book were treated as prisoners in their own country until the end of existence of the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s Terror did not appear out of the blue. The transition following the enthusiastic first years after the victory of the Socialist Revolution was gradual, in spite of the dictatorship of Lenin and his comrades from the beginning of their regime. From the very start, the Bolshevik terror led to tragedies for millions of human beings. Yet it is also true that in the 1920s tremendous creative forces were liberated in the Soviet Union. Suffice it to remember the peaks of creativity in the suprematist paintings of Kazimir Malevich and other avant-garde artists and in the discovery of the branched chain reactions in chemistry by Nikolai Semenov and his associates.
Initially, the Soviet State encouraged contact with Western scientists. This facilitated organized exchanges and the welcoming of foreign scholars. In the early 1930s the situation started to change. Parallel to buildup of Stalin’s isolationism and totalitarianism, a unique socialist nationalism developed. It was conveniently reinforced by the life-or-death necessity of defending the Soviet Fatherland from the Nazi invaders in a war that was labeled in the Soviet Union the Great Patriotic War. This blended Stalin, communism, and patriotism in the minds of many Soviet citizens. During the war, quite a few Soviet scientists who had stayed out of the party now joined it.
World War II was barely over when the Soviets perceived a new foreign danger, one that had bombs of unprecedented power. Both sides were afraid of each other. Stalin grabbed whatever territory he could in Eastern Europe in the wake of the victory over Nazism, and erected an Iron Curtain over his empire.1 This made Western Europe especially uneasy. And in the United States, there was talk of a preventive strike against the Soviet Union before it could fully develop its own nuclear capabilities. The great mathematician and contributor to the American nuclear power John von Neumann wanted a first nuclear strike on Moscow. In 1950, he declared, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”2 The input of scientists was essential for the Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself. The scientists participating in developing Soviet nuclear might—almost without exception—felt that it was their patriotic duty to work toward this goal.
Much of the letter-writing activities and other opinions expressed by scientists that were directed to the Soviet leaders also stemmed from the feeling of duty. Kapitza displayed extraordinary bravery in his sending his letters of protest to Stalin. Although the dictator seemingly ignored Kapitza’s letters, almost never answering them, he was hurt when Kapitza stopped writing them. Khrushchev may have lectured and humiliated Sakharov for his stand on nuclear testing, yet the Soviet leader did not feel immune to the criticism of his decisions by this scientist giant. The picture forms that the Soviet leaders were apprehensive about what the intellectuals might do or say. Otherwise, why would they have blackmailed Boris Pasternak into declining the Nobel Prize? The situation of intellectuals in the Soviet Union and in the United States was different. The American intellectuals could freely voice their opinion about, including strong opposition against, administration policies without risking anything, but then would the American political leadership be influenced by their criticism?
There was a universal feeling of relief—at least among the Soviet intelligentsia—when the thaw started in the Soviet Union. It culminated in Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956, on the closing day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, in which he unmasked Stalin and his crimes. But that this was done by one of Stalin’s closest aids in itself meant that there would be a limit to the liberating changes that were taking place. The restrictions of Soviet life eased greatly in comparison to conditions under Stalin, but the totalitarian and dictatorial character of the Soviet regime continued.
The post-Stalin Soviet Union never truly confronted its history under Stalin. Even though physical extermination of their opponents was no longer practiced, Stalin’s successors carried on his regime in other ways. In its actions, the post-Stalin regime recognized itself as the inheritor of Stalin’s times. Rather than getting rid of past crimes and their perpetrators, they were excused and absolved and their crimes hushed over. Trofim Lysenko continued his reign over biology under Khrushchev, and when both he and Khrushchev were finally removed, the past continued to haunt the field.
Nikolai Vavilov, the world-renowned plant botanist, was one of the best-known victims of the Stalin-Lysenko terror. His principal “crime” was that he held fast to his scientific views and did not succumb to Lysenko’s unscientific “theories.” In 1943, he starved to death in prison in Saratov. Many years later, after he was exonerated from all his “crimes,” his pupils and former colleagues wanted to erect a memorial to him in the Saratov cemetery, where his remains rested. For years, Soviet officialdom stayed silent when petitioned for assistance. The money was raised from private contributions, and then the statue was done by a recognized sculptor. The official Soviet organizations now felt it incumbent upon themselves to participate in the planned unveiling ceremony, but they did their best to minimize the significance of the event. They changed its date so that people who had long planned to attend could not. When the statue was finally unveiled, the few hundred mourners who were there were stunned because the face bore no resemblance to that of Nikolai Vavilov. A representative of the Soviet cultural authority, without whose permission the statue could not be erected, had forced the sculptor to alter the features of the face. Wrinkles had to be removed lest they suggest the harsh conditions of Vavilov’s prison stay, and a smile had to be carved on it, radiating happiness rather than an expression that might imply an unhappy past.3 The Soviet authorities had been willing to allow the monument but preferred to mask what really happened rather than to acknowledge it, even though it had happened three decades earlier. This was in the 1970s when the Soviets were still in power.
Even in today’s Russia, there is a tendency to gloss over the darker sides of Stalinism. I happened to be visiting in Russia in August 2012 when there were commemorative programs on television about the recently deceased Sergei Kapitza, Petr Kapitza’s oldest son. He was a physicist, well known for his longstanding popular science programs on TV. His life and career were detailed in the commemorations. It was mentioned that he was born in 1928 Cambridge, England, and that when he was six years old, his family had moved to Moscow. There was, however, no mention that in 1934, on one of his father’s visits to his home country, on Stalin’s direct order, he was forced to stay in the Soviet Union, and that this is why the family “moved” there (see chapter 4).
The way the Soviet Union treated its people and its scientists changed only incrementally during its existence. Contrary to popular belief, things did not change dramatically when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in spring 1985. There were still political prisoners in the Soviet Union even though Gorbachev had assured the world that there were none. Sakharov remained in exile in Gorky for twenty more months after Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev knew about Sakharov’s plight, and not just because everyone knew about it, but also because Sakharov had written to Gorbachev, and the new Soviet leader did receive his letter. But it took painstaking and lengthy negotiations before Gorbachev finally “invited” the Sakharovs back to Moscow. I mention this to illustrate the point that until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet regime did not change in a fundamental way.
This does not, however, contradict the notion that the scientists, especially the top scientists in fields vital to the security of Soviet Union, received preferential treatment compared to the rest of the population. They did. But this was not altruism on the part of the regime; rather, it was pure pragmatism in that the regime recognized its own interests. In this, the Soviet leadership was more enlightened than, for example, the British at the time of World War I when they indiscriminately sent scientists to the front, or Hitler, who in 1933 declared that Germany would rather be without science for a few years than tolerate the presence of Jewish scientists. This difference in the Soviet treatment of scientists took time to develop. In the Terror of 1937–1938, scientists were arrested and executed just like anybody else. However, by the time World War II engulfed the Soviet Union, Stalin made sure that scientists were not sent to the front. When the Soviet atomic bomb program began, Stalin stressed the need to create improved working and living conditions for scientists and their families.
This brings us to the second question posed earlier about whether or not the conditions of Soviet life facilitated or hindered the creativity and productivity of scientists. It is generally felt that in the absence of free thought and free speech, science cannot flourish. The fates of cybernetics (informatics) and biology in the Soviet Union, from the mid-1930s on, are examples of the tragedy of science under such circumstances. Physics, in particular nuclear physics, was at the other end of the spectrum. The physicists made the Soviet leadership choose between adherence to rigorous Marxist ideology, on the one hand, and letting the physicists utilize theories that Soviet philosophers had declared to be ideological heresy, on the other. Only the application of the “heretic” theories of relativity and quantum mechanics would enable them to build the world’s most powerful bombs. Chemists were in an intermediate position. When they were attacked on ideological grounds, their most outstanding representatives did not let the hard-liners triumph. They let theoretical chemistry be the scapegoat—it did not appear to be too big a sacrifice—and for decades theoretical chemistry was suspect in the Soviet Union.
From the early 1930s to the late 1980s, travel restrictions were detrimental to the work of most Soviet scientists. Some of the top scientists (Zeldovich in chapter 2 and Abrikosov in chapter 7 figured as examples in our narrative) maintained a world map on which they marked all the places from which they had received invitations to visit, and were not allowed to go.
Lacking other attractions, exceptionally gifted people could spend a lifetime on research without too much concern about anything else. They would be given homes, job security, reasonable access to health care facilities, freedom from teaching obligations if they so desired, and even a small allowance in hard currency so they could order Western goods and literature. To the end of his life, Petr Kapitza smoked imported pipe tobacco. Here, we are talking about the uppermost levels of the science hierarchy, but that is the circle we were concerned with in this book. On a lower but still quite privileged level, for example, the top professors had reserved tables and received preferential service in the cafeteria at Moscow State University. It was a scheme, superbly effective, that perks and privileges had many layers in Soviet society. There was always the incentive for someone to move up to the next level. Since we cannot do a control experiment, we must stay undecided on whether and how much the creativity and productivity of the top Soviet scientists suffered under the conditions of Soviet life. Where I have no doubt is that all those I knew personally would have given up their perks and privileges in exchange for personal freedom, including the freedom to travel. The scientists who got out and gained experience in Western Europe and the United States knew only too well that most of what were considered perks and privileges in Soviet society was freely available to members of the middle class in those countries, and considered nothing special.
As for creativity, Rita Levi-Montalcini describes the conditions in Fascist Italy when the racial laws prevented her from continuing her studies and research at the university. She continued them at home with added drive. Professor Giuseppe Levi and a few young people around him, including Levi-Montalcini, acted as if the outside world did not exist. They found refuge in science; it strengthened their resilience, and this helped them not only to survive but also to create.4
Resilience served also as protective cushion for the Soviet scientists whose lives and work we have read about in the preceding pages. This resilience manifested itself not only in the prisons and the gulag, but in their resistance to the constant temptations with which the corrupt regime tested its members. Our heroes remained faithful to science. Nor is the question we consider here unique to scientists. Regarding the exceptional poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, the question has already been asked: “Would the four have written less remarkable work if they had had an easier time?”5 Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva were as great in Russian literature as the scientists in this book were in their fields. These poets went through trying and tragic ordeals, and there were some who felt that, yes, those ordeals helped them to create their masterpieces. But for the widow of the martyr Mandelshtam, “There was nothing in the least elevating about her and her husband’s sufferings: there was only terror and pain.”6 Mandelshtam perished as a prisoner; others survived, but their fate was not easy. As Akhmatova noted: “Shakespeare’s plays—the sensational atrocities, passions, duels—are child’s play compared to the life of each one of us. Of the suffering of those executed and sent to concentration camps I dare not speak…. But even our disaster-free biographies are Shakesperian tragedy multiplied by a thousand.”7
Osip Mandelshtam expresses succinctly what Levi-Montalcini described about the necessity of continuing to create even under the most impossible conditions. The title of his poem is “In nightingale’s fever” (other titles have also been used). I quote here the last stanza of this poem in Ilya Shambat’s translation:8
Because it’s helpless here
As the innocent are killed
Heart is in nightingale fever
And remains warm still.
Other translations exist.9 The resilience of “nightingale fever” characterized both the poets and the scientists who were motivated to create.
As for the third question, about whether we might soon see the extraordinary performance of these Soviet scientists replicated in Russia and the other successor states, my guess is that the answer is in the negative. Of course, by inertia, most of the older scientists have continued their dedicated work in the mostly deteriorating conditions for research in Russia. It is not only that material conditions have worsened, but the prestige of science has also suffered. Thus far, formerly nonexistent or underrecognized professions have gained prominence in Russian society, for example, banking, marketing, and advertising—generally, all kinds of business-related activities as well as communications and communication technologies. These professions have attracted talented young people, as they would in any society, but this seems to have been at the expense of the research professions. Furthermore, many former Soviet scientists sought better working and living conditions, and better futures for their children, abroad. There were top scientists among them; Alexei Abrikosov was merely one example. Tellingly, many of the scientist children of the top Soviet scientists now live and work in Western Europe and the United States. But the migration was even broader. A few years ago, I was invited to be on the jury on a top Middle Eastern international science prize in a country hardly distinguished for its science. I used the occasion to visit a local university and was impressed by the laboratories equipped with the most expensive instrumentation. The researchers were dressed in conventional Western attire, quite different from my hosts’ traditional robes, and they made me curious. On impulse, I turned to the researchers in Russian, and they responded in Russian without batting an eye.
On my latest visit to Moscow, in 2011, just as before, I was most favorably impressed by the high level of scientific discussion. But the absence of long-term governmental commitment and the lack of other sources of support does not make one optimistic about the future of science in Russia. There is great difference in how scientific research is administered in Russia compared with the United States, where private foundations and companies provide a considerable share of support for basic science.
None of the heroes in this book was an angel, or a devil. They were outstanding scientists, some even geniuses. As human beings, they had faults, and I did not try to hide them. It is only by finding ourselves under similar conditions that we could know how we would have responded to the challenges they had to face. This comment is not meant to condone any condemnable behaviors, merely to suggest viewing them against the backdrop of the historical conditions. This book was not intended to present Soviet history or the history of Soviet science. The portrayal of scientists in this book is intended to provide a small contribution to the bigger picture. They are scientists of a bygone era, and such a concentration of talent in a relatively small area of human endeavor within one community will probably remain a unique phenomenon for a long time to come.