by Simon Ings
The contribution of the other ‘suspect’ delegate, Boris Hessen, was of quite a different order. Written with an eye to saving his career (and possibly his neck), and delivered in the presence of Ernst Kolman, a man he knew was spying on him, Hessen’s paper, ‘The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’, ought to have been a piece of utter humbug. It turned out, however, to be the most influential paper presented at the conference. In Britain it brought together under a common purpose an entire generation of left-leaning scientific celebrities, from John Haldane to John Bernal. Internationally, it inspired an approach to the history of science which still holds sway today.
Hessen used Newton’s work as an example of how good, valuable, proven science is at the same time a product of its time and class. Hessen demonstrated that Newton’s accomplishments in physics were both astonishing glimpses into the nature of reality and historically determined documents, full of philosophical and religious conclusions which Newton could not help but draw from the economic order around him.
Hessen’s paper contained a double message. As far as the audience in London was concerned, Hessen had expressed all that was valuable and timely and commonsensical about Marx’s views on science. Science was not the product of great minds somehow isolated, priestlike, from the world and its practical demands. It was a cultural practice: it was what people did. For an audience steeped in the animistic and often quite reactionary writings of Sir James Jeans (in The Mysterious Universe, 1930) and Sir Arthur Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World, 1928), Hessen’s talk was nothing short of a revelation.21
For his critics at home, meanwhile, Hessen had audaciously demonstrated why the political and philosophical tenor of scientific works didn’t impinge on their scientific value. If you reject the findings of science because you don’t like the philosophical or political conclusions the authors draw from them, then you not only have to reject Einstein: you also have to reject Newton. Ultimately, you have to reject everything that does not grow in your own precious back garden. Newton is celebrated for his laws of motion, not for his ‘general religio-theological conception of the universe’. The only test of science is the reality it measures. Measurement is the valuable bit of science; the rest hardly matters.
Politically, Hessen could not have been more badly out of step. In June 1934, a special session at the Communist Academy was held to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lenin’s unlovely work of philosophy, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. During the months preceding the conference, such journals as Frontiers of Science and Technology, Socialist Reconstruction and Science and Under the Banner of Marxism ran a series of articles which ‘exposed’ Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr and Born as lackeys of Western ‘idealism’, and subjected virtually every great name in Soviet physics, from Hessen and Ioffe to Iakov Frenkel and Igor Tamm, to the most violent abuse.
Physicists attempted to push back against this ignorant assault. Ioffe and Nikolai Vavilov’s brother Sergei participated in the commemoration, arguing that contemporary physics, far from being ‘idealist’, was as clear a demonstration of dialectical laws in nature as you could hope for.22 Ioffe borrowed from Hessen in his assertion that in field after field, seeming contradictions achieved a dialectical synthesis in the unity of opposites. Marxist philosophers found idealism under every stone, but only because they didn’t have a clue about what the new physics actually meant. He was even more forthright in an article which followed: ‘The Situation on the Philosophical Front of Soviet Physics’. Why, Ioffe asked, was Arkady Timiryazev siding with the European anti- Einstein lobby at the very moment it was acquiring a distasteful and frankly worrying anti-semitic edge? German Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark were going around calling relativity ‘non-Aryan physics’ – was Timiryazev really embracing that filth? Did he, too, consider Werner Heisenberg a ‘Weisser Jude’? And if he did, what did he have to show for it? The physicists he was so busy attacking – Fock, Frenkel, Tamm, Mandelstam and Landau – had produced theories in solid-state physics, come to a better theoretical understanding of metals, unpicked the photo-electric effect, explained the nature of magnetic polarity and contributed to the development of Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics. All Timiryazev’s party had come up with were ‘fetishes of the aether’, ‘force tubes’, ‘electrical bagels’ and like gibberish.
By then the debate had ceased to be about physics. What mattered now was affiliation. What saved you, or ruined you, was your network, the people you knew, the people who supported you and to whom you gave your support. To be identified with the European scientific community, with Leningrad, or with the wrong sort of Party scholar, was to be damned out of hand.
Of the eight-man delegation to London in 1931, all but Kolman would be purged. Six would perish at the whim of the state. Hessen himself was arrested in 1935 and died in prison in 1938.
*
Two years before Hessen’s death, a special week-long session of the Academy of Sciences was convened to evaluate the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. The institute’s founder, godfather of Soviet physics and practically a patron saint to many in the field, Abram Ioffe, described how in eighteen years his brainchild had grown into a system of fourteen institutes and three higher technical schools with almost 1,000 scientific workers, 100 of whom were first-rate physicists.
He was promptly ticked off for his ‘aristocratism’ and ‘empire building’.23
The criticism that enveloped Ioffe from all sides stunned many. For Ioffe, the most troubling comments came from the notoriously tactless young physicist Lev Landau.24 Landau pulled no punches, dismissing out of hand Ioffe’s claim that Soviet physics was in any sense ‘world class’. Granted, Soviet physics owed its very existence to Ioffe, for ‘in tsarist Russia up to the moment of the revolution physics practically didn’t exist’. But, said Landau, Ioffe’s rosy assessments of the present were laughable. Landau counted no more than a hundred independent researchers in Soviet physics, and few of them were engaged in training the next generation. As for Ioffe’s own research style, the best you could say about it was that it was careless. Ioffe’s habits, prevailing in the profession, had led to a tremendous waste of resources. His projections for future energy technologies were farfetched; the work of his physicists was messy; and he had a tendency to make claims about Soviet priorities in discovery where Western physicists had earlier achieved similar results. Worst of all was Ioffe’s over-blown, haughty and self-aggrandising leadership.
Landau’s individual criticisms were cogent, and even drew applause, but the spirit in which they were made left a bad taste in the mouth. It became apparent that, by stitching up Ioffe, a younger generation of physicists was hoping to free up opportunities for itself. As the session progressed, more and more junior researchers took Landau’s lead and unsheathed their knives. Only a few very senior figures were left to defend the man.
The price the field paid for bandying about cheap political accusations was high. Over 100 physicists were arrested in Leningrad between 1937 and 1938, as part of a general effort to extinguish Leningrad’s intellectual and cultural life. Ioffe and his colleagues could not save his institute from decline, and in the end even Ioffe adopted protective colouration, expressing in a public meeting ‘the anger and indignation of Soviet scholars at the ignoble work of Trotskyite bandits which demands from the proletarian court its destruction’.25
Landau ran no immediate risk from the Leningrad purges because in August 1932, having fallen out with Ioffe, he had left Leningrad for Kharkov to head the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Polytechnical Institute there. With his penchant for practical jokery more or less under control,26 Landau built Kharkov into an important and innovative department, centred around low-temperature and nuclear physics. The country’s first artificial accelerator of atomic particles was built there, while Landau’s low-temperature laboratory was the first in the Soviet Union to work with liquid helium.
As the pur
ges spread from Leningrad to the rest of the nation, however, inevitably Landau was drawn into trouble. If nothing else, Landau’s grating personal style was more than enough to get him labelled as a troublemaker. In December 1936 he had a personal quarrel with the rector of Kharkov University, and told his friends he was likely to be fired. His friends rallied round, resigning from their part-time teaching jobs in protest, and Landau retained his post. Twenty months later, this episode – ugly, but fairly ordinary – got the rector arrested. More: he disappeared, never to be heard from again. Paranoia and fingerpointing ensued and Landau, aghast at the accusations and denunciations being hurled at him, fled to Moscow. A few weeks later friends in Kharkov received a message: Landau had decided to take a job in Moscow, at the new Institute for Physical Problems directed by Peter Kapitsa.
Landau had already worked with Kapitsa, albeit briefly, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. (This was at the turn of the 1930s, when foreign travel was much easier.) Kapitsa, the son of a military engineer and general of the Russian Army, had come to the Cavendish during the Civil War and had never wanted to leave. To his mother he wrote: ‘to go back to Petrograd – to struggle without electricity and gas, with the lack of water and equipment – is impossible. I have only now come into my own. I find success exhilarating and my work inspiring.’27 Kapitsa’s work, studying alpha particles, had required generating enormous magnetic fields, and the machinery he designed for his work had pushed the Cavendish Laboratory out of tabletop experimentation and into modern, large-scale machine research.28
Eventually the Soviet authorities, keenly aware of Kapitsa’s practical, industrial approach to physics, decided his talent was an asset they could no longer afford to keep lending out. In 1934, on one of his usual summer trips home (visiting his mother in Leningrad and the low-temperature laboratory in Kharkov) Kapitsa learned that he would not be allowed to leave the country.29
After an unconscionable delay, the new Institute of Physical Problems was set up within the Academy of Sciences and Kapitsa was appointed its director – news he came across by accident while reading the newspaper: ‘Without doing anything in reality, the Academy already published about the new institute. This is of course very touching and very characteristic of us; we always talk and do not.’30
After a year of humiliating privations – of holes in his shoes and worn-out clothes (‘I am a useful man [so I was told]’, he once wrote to his wife, ‘I cannot go about without pants’), Kapitsa acquired an apartment in Moscow, a personal Buick, and a dacha in the Crimea for his family. Still, as he wrote to Niels Bohr:
In general the position of science and research people is somewhat peculiar here. It reminds me of a child with a pet animal which is tormented and tortured by him with the best intentions. But indeed the child grows up and learns how to look properly after his pets, and make of them useful domestic animals. I hope it will not be long to happen here.31
Within a year, Kapitsa offered the world perhaps his greatest scientific discovery – the superfluidity of liquid helium. The problem now was to understand it, and for this Kapitsa required the help of a theoretician.
Kapitsa hired Landau in March 1937. Six months later the purges swept Kharkov. Landau’s colleagues Shubnikov and Rozenkevich were arrested, forced to confess to ‘espionage’ and ‘sabotage,’ and were executed after a short trial. Landau figured in some of their extorted confessions as co-conspirator, but his being in another city delayed his arrest for another half a year. He was arrested in Moscow on 28 April 1938.
Kapitsa immediately sent a personal letter to Stalin pleading for Landau’s release. He got no reply. A year later, in April 1939, he wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, the highly placed Old Bolshevik who had just been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, and claimed that he needed Landau’s help to understand his recent discoveries. Molotov permitted Kapitsa to bail Landau out of jail so long as he gave a written promise that he would keep Landau from committing further ‘counterrevolutionary’ acts. (The deal paid handsome dividends in the end: Landau won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his theoretical explanations of superfluidity and superconductivity; Kapitsa’s practical accomplishments in the field won him a Nobel in 1978.)
Kapitsa’s willingness to write personally to Stalin and his inner circle speaks to his courage, and also to his sense of his own importance. He once described himself wryly as ‘a hothouse plant under the special care of the government’. Playing the holy fool, telling truth to power, required not just bravery but arrogance. His letters convey the strong impression that he wanted the whole science base turned over to him.
But his strategy was not nearly as suicidal as it might at first appear. The Party could not abide opponents, but it actively encouraged critics. Only through criticism and self-criticism could democracy survive the necessary period of dictatorship by the proletariat.32 As long as you couched your argument as a grievance, rather than an opinion, you could get away with a great deal.
Even as the purges rolled across the country, Soviet citizens were being encouraged to write critical letters to public officials or to the newspapers. Kapitsa was hardly an ordinary citizen, but he acted as though he was as entitled as any factory hand to tick off officials who got in the way of his work. All in all Kapitsa wrote about forty-five letters to Stalin, dozens each to Politburo members Molotov and Malenkov, and several dozen to other political leaders. These letters were neither servile nor formal. He was not a bourgeois scientist claiming rights for himself he did not possess. He was a diligent worker struggling to get something done in the face of an inefficient bureaucracy:
But then, what sort of a Government are you, that you can’t get a little two-storey house built on time and put its ten rooms in order after assembly? In that case you are simply wets! … Well, that’s the picture of what’s happening. Imagine you saw a violin at your neighbour’s and you were able to take it from him. And what do you do with it instead of playing on it? For two years you use it to hammer nails into a stone wall.33
Only later, when Kapitsa began to wield real industrial power, did his complaints land him in trouble. That was the problem with having Stalin as a patron – an unavoidable problem, as Stalin rid the country of every patron but himself. You were safe only as long as you could demonstrate your powerlessness. And if Stalin raised you, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, he would cut you down.
*
By extinguishing the intellectual life of Leningrad, Stalin ensured that power in the Soviet Union was concentrated exclusively in Moscow. Everything was to be drawn to the centre. Obsessive centralisation was to be a defining characteristic of the rest of his rule. Centralisation took many forms, from Stalin’s own neurotic insistence on his own expertise in every imaginable field, to the way unlike institutions were folded into each other, so that everybody had to compete for half as many jobs. Though the consequences of centralisation were often harmful, things rarely descended into chaos, and this was thanks to the party’s system of nomenklatura. Nomenklatura was, literally, a list of posts that could not be occupied or vacated without permission from the appropriate Party committee. All Party committees, from the Central Committee to the remotest rural outpost, had a list of jobs for which they were responsible. Originally meant as a way of organising the Party itself, the nomenklatura system spread, as Stalin’s influence spread, through all institutions of government. By the early 1930s the nomenklatura system had subsumed the scientific community.
The nomenklatura system was hierarchical. The higher your post, the more important the committee you answered to. The posts of president, vice-president, and scientific secretary of major institutions were the purview of the Politburo. Institute directors and the editors-in-chief of academic journals answered to the secretaries of the Party’s Central Committee. Running a laboratory brought you onto the nomenklatura of a regional Party committee. Even librarians were hired or fired by local Party committees. Meanwhile a special government agency, the Supreme Certifying Co
mmission, was created to approve every degree and title awarded throughout academia.34
Centralising intellectual work inevitably favoured those with a talent for bureaucracy. No matter the quality or originality of your thought, your career depended on how well you served your institution. Could you be trusted to approve research budgets? Could you procure enough paper for books? Did you know the right people to obtain permissions to travel abroad to conferences?
In such an environment, only bureaucrats flourished, and inevitably the best of them had learned at the feet of the Party. In January 1939, a number of Party functionaries were ‘elected’ to the Academy of Sciences, notably ‘Stalin’s Prosecutor’ Andrei Vyshinsky and the philosophers Pavel Iudin and Mark Mitin, a Marxist nihilist who memorably declared that ‘There is not and cannot be a philosophy that wants to be considered Marxist-Leninist philosophy while denying the necessity of ideational-political and theoretical leadership on the part of the Communist Party and its leading staff.’35 Mitin’s belief that science was nothing but an instrument for the development of technology endeared him to Stalin. In the 1930s, he was considered the leading Soviet philosopher.
No one was much surprised when, in 1939, Stalin himself threw his hat into the ring, establishing a prize in his own name for scientific research, the Stalin Prize. At the same moment the Academy of Sciences elected this great patron as an honorary member. ‘The Coryphaeus of Science’, they called him. The leader of the band.
Notes
1. In Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism, p. 213.
2. Ivanov, ‘Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?’, p. 61.
3. Maxim Gorky, The White Sea Canal: Being an Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea.
4. Maxim Gorky, Sobranie sochinenij [Collected Works], vol. 27, p. 43. Bolotova, ‘Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union’, p. 110.