‘Amongst those arrested is the founder of the Institute, Professor Obremov—its first director; Professor Leipunsky, member of the Academy of Sciences and later again director of the Institute; Professor Lev Davidovich Landau, the leading theoretical physicist in the Soviet Union.fn1 Landau had already been forced out of the Institute by the G.P.U., and he went to Moscow to work with Professor Kapitza. I supervised the building of our low-temperature experimental station, but before it could be put into operation I was arrested. My successor was Komarov. He has also been arrested. Who is to carry on?
‘… You need five years to train an engineer, and even then the Government had a very great deal of trouble before it could get suitable engineers for its new factories. But a capable physicist needs from ten to fifteen years’ training.’15
Matvei Bronshtein, a brilliant young physicist, was married to the writer Lydia Chukovskaya. He was arrested, and shot on 18 February 1938. She then wrote the story “Sofia Petrovna” (which only appeared in Russia in 1988, in the Leningrad magazine Neva). She had actually read it to Anna Akhmatova and eight others, who agreed that it could not be kept in the flat of the “wife of an enemy of the people.” And the NKVD, in fact, soon heard rumors and searched her place. A friend took it, but died in the siege of Leningrad. Before dying, however, he dragged himself to his sister’s to give her the manuscript to keep. After the war, the sister kept it, by arrangement with Chukovskaya, until she died in 1956. Then, after the dead woman’s belongings were dispersed, Chukovskaya finally found it in the bottom of a dust-covered wastepaper basket. Few such documents (for the story is factual) survive. It might have been published in Khrushchev’s time, but she refused to change a word.16
The purge also extended into the more technical sciences. For example, Academician Berg writes:
Thereafter there came difficult times: 1937, the loss of one’s close friends. Soon I too was arrested on a basis of a ridiculous and stupid denunciation. I spent precisely 900 days in prison. I was let out shortly before the war. During these years radio-technology suffered an enormous loss. Institutes and laboratories were closed down and people disappeared.’17
Sergei Korolev, the unique genius behind the Soviet early space program, was sent to Kolyma, but eventually brought to the NKVD prison aviation group KOSOS near the Yauza River. He had been told that “our country doesn’t need your fireworks. Or maybe you’re making rockets for an attempt on the life of our leader?” He was contemptuous of the regime, and fully expected to be shot.18
The aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev was arrested on 21 October 1937. He was kept standing “for many hours on end. Since I am a heavy man it was rather tough.”19 But on the advice of Muklevich, who was one of his cell mates, he confessed before worse befell him.20 (His wife was also arrested.)21
The charge was of having sold plans to the Germans for use on the Messerschmidt 109.22 (The aviator Levanevsky had a couple of years earlier denounced him to Stalin as a wrecker.) In November 1938, Tupolev withdrew some of his testimony, and in the following years asserted his innocence in several appeals. He finally only got a ten-year sentence. He was later (foreign policy having changed) accused of being a French spy, but was in fact released in 1941. He had meanwhile worked, with other scientists, in one of the NKVD’s prisoner research units, of the type described in The First Circle.23
Another aircraft designer, Chaikovsky, was also arrested. His wife, arrested too, was one day given her clothes, taken to a manicurist and hairdresser, and told she was to meet her husband, but must not let him know that she, too, was in jail. He was reassured, and told her that he could now do the technical work they were giving him in the Lubyanka with an easy mind. However, he seems to have been shot later,24 as were most of the leading figures in the aircraft industry.25
Generally speaking, the sciences in some way connected with policy or ideology fared worst. Sciences impinging on agriculture fared badly on both counts. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933, for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.26 In part on similar grounds, astronomers connected with sunspot research fared badly. The Solar Service had in fact been set up in 1931 to help predict long-range weather patterns, with the usual imperfect results, though there were also charges of un-Marxist theories of sunspot development.27 But astronomy in general suffered a devastating purge, conducted by the Stalinist pseudo-astronomer Ter-Oganezov. This started in early 1936, and soon the press was attacking the great Pul’kovo Observatory, which had in its earlier days been known as “the astronomical capital of the world.” The distinguished astronomer B. V. Numerov, arrested in November, admitted after severe beatings that he had organized a counter-revolutionary astronomers’ group for espionage, terror, and wrecking. It had “drawn a significant number of scientific workers into its orbit.”
In all, about twenty-seven astronomers, mostly leading figures, disappeared between 1936 and 1938. Work at Pul’kovo almost ceased, and the observatories at Tashkent and elsewhere also suffered severely. Russian astronomy, which had led the world, was devastated.28 It is curious to recall that Stalin’s own first job was at an observatory.
Biology was, of course, a particularly sensitive field. With the rise of Lysenko in the early 1930s, a fierce “ideological” struggle commenced. Already in 1932, G. A. Levitsky and N. P. Avdoulov, cytologists, were arrested, but were later released. Other biologists were arrested about the same time.
In December 1936, the more prominent Professor I. J. Agol was arrested on charges of Trotskyism and was executed. Professor S. G. Levit, Head of the Medico-Genetic Institute, was expelled from the Party on the grounds that his biological views were pro-Nazi. (The People’s Commissar for Health, G. M. Kaminsky, was also criticized for defending him.)29 Levit was arrested in about May 1937 and died in prison. A number of other prominent biologists, such as Levitsky, Karpechenko, and Govorov, also perished, as did the celebrated N. M. Tulaikov, Director of the Cereals Institute, who was arrested in 1937 and died in 1938 in one of the White Sea labor camps. The botanist A. Yanata was shot, on 8 June 1938, for having proposed chemicals to destroy weeds, contrary to the urging of Lysenkoites.30 Max Levin, former head of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, seems also to have perished in his biological rather than his political capacity31
In this field, as in the political, the lesser figures were arrested first, and the net thus closed round their superiors. The biggest game was Academician N. I. Vavilov, the great geneticist, Lenin’s favorite. He had given up his position as head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1935 to A. I. Muralov, until then Deputy Commissar for Agriculture. Muralov was arrested on 4 July 1937 and succeeded by Professor G. K. Meister. Meister was, in turn, arrested at the beginning of 1938, and Lysenko took the job after a squalid and deadly intrigue.