by Close, Frank
IMAGE 18.1. From left to right: Bruno Pontecorvo, Marianne Pontecorvo, and Maureen Jackson (daughter of J. David Jackson), 1970. (J. DAVID JACKSON, COURTESY AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES, JACKSON COLLECTION.)
RODAM AMIREDZHIBI
One summer, at the end of the 1950s, Bruno found himself alone: Marianne was away in a psychiatric hospital, Gil had gone on vacation in the north of the USSR with friends from the university, while Tito and Antonio were at a youth camp in Crimea. Bruno decided to go on vacation himself, armed with underwater fishing gear, to pursue one of his favorite athletic pursuits at Koktebel, a resort on the Black Sea known as the “Soviet Capri.” A physicist colleague, Arkady Migdal, joined him.
During the day they swam and fished. For Bruno this reawakened memories of the summer of 1950, when he and his brother Gillo had done much the same in the waters south of Rome. The privileges of being an Academician gave Bruno access to exclusive hotels. In Koktebel, Bruno and Migdal took advantage of this, staying in a lavish place of lodging frequented by artists and writers. In this elite company, the physicists relaxed over dinner in the evening, and socialized late into the night.
Among the guests was Rodam Amiredzhibi, wife of Mikhail Svetlov, the poet. She was Svetlov’s third wife, and this marriage was declining like his previous ones, due to his drinking and womanizing. Rodam and Mikhail were already leading separate lives, and she was in Koktebel with a group of friends. Tall, with dark hair, she looked “like a dark Anita Ekberg.”8 Bruno was smitten, and she, in turn, was attracted to the “sweet, intelligent, sensitive man.”
So began an intense and intimate relationship that lasted for the rest of Bruno’s life, waxing and waning depending upon whether Marianne was in the sanatorium. A few months later, Marianne was released from the hospital and Bruno resumed his role as husband in Dubna. Then, in Rodam’s memory, “Marianne was hospitalized again, and Bruno was back looking for me.”9
Anecdotal tales of Bruno’s keen eye for women were as common during his time in Russia as they had been in Canada. However, the intense relationship with Rodam was more than a passing fancy. A former student recalled that “on Saturdays and Sundays, Bruno came regularly to Moscow,” where he and Rodam would spend time together.10 Some have claimed, erroneously, that she became Bruno’s second wife.11 Their relationship became more public as Marianne’s condition declined, with many regarding them as partners.12 However, a Russian colleague, in halting English, told me enigmatically that she was not his wife “in the precise definition.”13 Even after Rodam’s husband died in 1964, Bruno remained married to Marianne.14 Toward the end of Bruno’s life, Miriam Mafai interviewed Rodam. Mafai summarized the situation as follows: “Bruno is able to lead a satisfying life, spending time with Rodam, while Marianne is in the psychiatric clinic, in a world of her own.”15
BRUNO AND THE STATE
When the Pontecorvos arrived in Russia in 1950, Stalin was still in power, terror was widespread, and the possibility of falling out of favor and being transported to the Gulag was very real. Pontecorvo himself was prohibited from traveling outside the Soviet Union, even to Eastern Europe, let alone visiting family in Italy. Following prolonged lobbying by the director of Dubna, in 1959 Bruno was finally allowed to travel to Eastern Europe, China, and Mongolia. Homesick for Italy, Bruno became depressed that it remained off limits.
Yet, although he suffered from these restrictions, Bruno remained more devoted to the communist cause than many, with one of his colleagues describing him as “convinced in the inspiring force of communism, like a person believing a religious credo.”16 Some Soviet intellectuals denounced their nation’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, for instance, but Bruno rationalized the invasion as necessary to “save” the Hungarians. His brother Gillo, by contrast, along with many intellectual communists in the West, left the party in protest. In the USSR, Andrei Sakharov, who played a key role in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, protested the action and was persecuted for years. Although Bruno Pontecorvo remained a party member at this juncture, he refused to sign a letter denouncing Sakharov, even though several other scientists did.
Two days before Bruno’s fifty-fifth birthday, in August 1968, Soviet tanks entered Prague. For Bruno, this was a tipping point. He had a soft spot for Alexander Dubczek, a reformist leader who preferred ice hockey games to political meetings. Bruno kept up with events in Czechoslovakia by reading l’Unità, which contained serious analysis of the developing crisis and its background. Pravda, however, was full of attacks on various Czech leaders, its tone ever more belligerent. Whereas previously Bruno had always toed the party line, on the principle that the leaders had more information than he did, he now felt able to judge the situation for himself. It seemed to him that Dubczek was attempting to combine socialism and democracy in a courageous manner that was supported by the Czech population.
Meanwhile, Soviet radio stations broadcast interminable testimonials from soldiers who had taken part in the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945 and now supported the overthrow of the counterrevolution. On Bruno’s birthday he reviewed his life, against the backdrop of the news. He later recalled, “The flood of words that spilled from the radio, the emphatic declarations, the solemn speeches, interspersed with classical music, made [me] feel more and more alone.”17 Without explanation, his subscription to l’Unità was canceled and Soviet media became his only source of news. For the first time he began to question whether the party was always correct.
As Bruno approached his sixties, disillusion set in rapidly. He had lived through a period of great change. As a young man in Italy he had seen the ugly specter of fascism, which threatened to replace culture with barbarism. He had joined a group of intellectuals who saw communism as a way to combat the evil. In these circles, there was an almost irrational belief in a city of the future, built on communist ideals. Bruno Pontecorvo subscribed to that religion, equating capitalism with military adventurism. All such traditional ideologies would have to be overthrown to reach the new world. By Bruno’s final years, however, the Soviet Union had fallen apart, as had many of the ideas that had attracted him there. In 1991 he remarked, “For many years I thought communism a science, but now I see it is not a science but a religion.”18
If facts disagree with a scientific theory, you change the theory; when they disagree with a religious doctrine, you reinterpret the facts. There in a nutshell is the difference. Gillo described himself and his brother, in their youthful certainty, as being “like the early Christians, who believed in something beautiful, which did not exist.” He hinted that the ideals that had driven the two brothers in those days were lost, for himself and for Bruno too: “We bet on something which turned out to be false.” After glasnost, when contact with the West was at last restored, Bruno bluntly evaluated his previous convictions for a British reporter: “I was a cretin.”19
ONE RUSSIAN COLLEAGUE, SEMEN GERSHTEIN, REMARKED, “TO EVERYBODY who knew Bruno it was obvious that he could have achieved much more working in the west and could have realized his ideas himself.” This led Gershtein to ask the obvious question: “Why did he come to the USSR?”
Even in and around Dubna, no one seemed to know. Some in the 1950s believed that it was because he held the “naïve belief of many foreigners, faithful to the ideals of communism, that the USSR, the country of victorious socialism, was building a communist society.” Only later, when it became “more or less safe” to openly discuss these issues did some people call such ideas “stupidity.”
Gershtein admitted that a small number of people, rivals of Bruno who envied or disliked him, “adhered to the version [believed] in America—that he was a Soviet spy who fled when the danger arose of his being unmasked.” Gershtein, whom I know as a polite and sensitive man, was a friend of Pontecorvo for many years, but never asked him about this issue because he “understood that it might be quite painful.” Instead, Gershtein formed his own opinion as to what had happened. One particular event stuck in his mind�
�a day in the mid-1960s when he sat next to Pontecorvo during a scientific presentation by former atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, who had moved to East Germany after being released from British prison in 1959.
Fuchs was giving what Gershtein regarded as a rather tedious presentation, but Pontecorvo was “very excited.” Bruno whispered, “You know—Fermi was very severe in estimating scientists, but he considered Fuchs a star of the first order.” Gershtein expected that Pontecorvo would talk to Fuchs after the session ended, but he didn’t. As they left the auditorium together, Gershtein recalled that Pontecorvo was “agitated,” as if remembering the years just before he came—“or one can say, fled”—to the USSR.
Bruno told Gershtein, “I would be very interested in reading Fuchs’ memoirs if he wrote any,” and then explained that when Fuchs was arrested, “we were all sure that it was a police provocation against the communists, since we learned that Fuchs was a communist.” Pontecorvo claimed that he’d “had no idea that Fuchs was a spy and thought it was a provocation in the spirit of McCarthyism, which had overflowed America and extended to England.”
Gershtein felt that this had the ring of truth: “From these words of Bruno it becomes quite clear what he, a communist since 1936, could be afraid of in England after the arrest of Fuchs, and why he decided to change his life so drastically.”20
For Gershtein, who had lived in the USSR all his life, this was a natural reaction. However, in reality, McCarthyism never reached the United Kingdom. Indeed, Britain often served as a refuge for communist sympathizers from the United States, including the prominent American physicist David Bohm, who became a British citizen. Gershtein’s assessment that colleagues who openly regarded Pontecorvo as a Soviet spy were driven by personal motives has some credibility; the opinions of Bruno’s friends tend to have been more nuanced. Vladimir Gribov, with whom Bruno wrote his seminal paper on neutrino oscillations, is one example. The two knew one another well, but Gribov claimed, “I never talked about history; intuitively I knew not to.”21 Gribov’s view that this was a no-go area was shared by other friends and relatives. This was not because they knew that Bruno had a secret history, for he never admitted this to them; rather, it was because they suspected intuitively that he might have such a history, and they did not want to damage their relationship with Pontecorvo by confirming this.
Gershtein’s bland interpretation of the incident with Fuchs seems to be an example of this. Bruno was usually gregarious with former colleagues, a “hail fellow well met.” And he had worked with Klaus Fuchs for two years. Indeed, Fuchs had invited Bruno to the nuclear physics conference in Edinburgh in 1949, and the two men clearly had much in common. Yet Pontecorvo made no effort to talk to him, as if by choice. However, it is now known that the KGB had placed restrictions on contact with Fuchs, and issued clear instructions to that effect. Even the head of the East German Stasi was forbidden to contact Fuchs of his own volition; it is safe to conclude that Pontecorvo too was briefed in advance.
TITO FIGHTS BACK
As we have just remarked, it was as the Soviet Union began to fall that Bruno finally accepted that he had made a bad choice. While the changing world was forcing all Soviets to evaluate their beliefs and establish their place in the new society, for Bruno, who remained a communist, there was also a strong family pressure. The effect of his decision to come to the USSR on Marianne was already clear. As for his sons—who “grew up lonely,” in the opinion of Bruno’s companion, Rodam Amiredzhibi—they displayed a range of attitudes toward their new home.22
Gil, the eldest, followed in his father’s footsteps, in terms of both his interest in science and his belief in communist ideals. He explained how in the postwar period it was quite natural for communists to join the party and to appreciate the Soviet Union as a nation that had made great contributions to the war against Nazism. The goal of equality and social justice—the “city in the sky”—had developed during the revolution of 1917 and the USSR was its torchbearer. In Gil’s view, that dream still survives, but the means of achieving it has evolved: “It’s like an experiment in physics. You set out to find the truth and discover features that lead you to refine the approach. Your opinion on how to complete the experiment may evolve but the goal remains.”23
Gil has remained in Dubna to this day, having watched over Marianne and working as a nuclear physicist. He has never married. Bruno’s youngest son, Antonio, lives in Moscow. Married, with a family, he works as a computer scientist. The middle child, Tito, was “independent, something of a rebel,” and quit Russia after Bruno’s death to live in the United States.24 It is ironic that the two sons with traditional Italian names have remained in the former Soviet Union, whereas the one named for a communist hero, Josip Tito, has rebelled and returned to North America.
As it turns out, the seeds of Tito’s rebellion go back to the days of the Soviet Union, when he witnessed firsthand his father’s strained relations with its oppressive system.
In the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, the USSR expanded its contacts with the outside world. Bruno began to hope that it might be possible for him to visit Italy, either as a member of a scientific delegation or as a guest of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). However, there were tensions between the USSR and the PCI, many of whose members had resigned in protest over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Even though Bruno too was upset by the Czechoslovakian adventure, he did not rock the boat. Nevertheless, his name was never included on the official lists of delegates selected to attend scientific conferences outside the USSR and its satellites, nor did he ever receive an exit visa to travel outside these boundaries. Finally he was forced into action, following a confrontation with Tito.
Tito, by then thirty years old, had completed his university studies in Moscow and begun conducting research in oceanography. On the occasions when his team was working in the Arctic or Pacific, outside the territorial waters of the USSR, Tito was not invited to join them. The first few times this happened, Tito thought it was just a coincidence, but when it became a regular occurrence he realized that his exclusion was a deliberate act. The reason, he felt sure, was that although he was a Soviet citizen, he was the son of Bruno Pontecorvo, had been born in the West, and as such was regarded as a security risk. In the eyes of the Soviets, once in a foreign port, Tito might “escape” and return to Italy or Canada. He had been blacklisted. The obtuse and perverse apparatchiks of the Soviet state were interfering with his career by cutting him off from essential research.
When he raised a protest, he was dismissed with sly disdain: “Is there not enough ocean in the USSR for you?” He confronted Bruno, calling him “an idiot for having left the West to come to the Soviet Union.” He accused his father of being blind to what was going on, of being seduced by the money and privilege that went along with his status as an Academician, and ruining Tito’s opportunity for a career in science.25 Years later, Bruno admitted, Tito’s accusation still rang in his ears.
Bruno, meanwhile, was stirred into action.
Until then he had meekly accepted the state’s right to forbid him from traveling outside the borders of the communist world. Following Tito’s outburst, Bruno began to feel that he was being treated unfairly. He knew that no one in Dubna had the authority to intervene, so he decided to see someone in the Politburo, the central governing body of the Soviet Communist Party.26
In 1975 there were twenty-three members of the Politburo.27 It is intriguing that, out of all the possible members, Bruno chose to consult Yuri Andropov, the hawk who had convinced a reluctant Nikita Khrushchev to invade Hungary in 1956 and who had also been a central player in the 1968 invasion of Prague. In 1975, when Bruno Pontecorvo decided to visit, Andropov was head of the KGB.
Announcing himself at KGB headquarters as “Academician Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo,” Bruno asked to see Andropov in person. After some time, he was informed that Andropov was in a meeting but that his deputy was available. Bruno insisted that he had to see Andropo
v himself. This was not possible, and Bruno left.
Not long afterward, Bruno received a visitor at Dubna: the KGB officer who had been assigned to him a quarter of a century earlier, when the Pontecorvos had first arrived in Moscow. Bruno never revealed the details of their conversation, beyond the fact that he explained to the KGB officer how Tito was unable to pursue his career, and how Bruno himself was never included in the groups that were allowed to travel to the West. The KGB contact promised to arrange for Bruno to meet someone who could make a change.
More time passed, after which Bruno was summoned to Moscow to meet a “very important person” whose identity remains unknown.28 Bruno told this person that he was now over sixty years old and wanted to see Italy while there was still time, specifically denying any possibility that he would try to defect. It was no use. A few weeks later, Bruno received a call saying that he could not have an exit visa. Tito’s situation also remained the same, which drove him to quit oceanography to rear horses in Dubna.29