From the series Atom and industrialisation of science
Nikolai Krementsov, of the St. Petersburg Institute for the History of Science and Technology, writes in Science in the Twentieth Century [1997] that at the end of the 1920s, the scientific community in the Soviet Union was completely co-opted into the system of power relations and occupied a prominent place in the social structure of the State. The global economic crisis in the 1930s changed the situation.
World autarchy
The crisis, which began with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929, led to a contraction in world trade and to the spread of autarchy among the leading nations. Russian State capitalism adapted to the new situation with forced industrialisation, which found its political expression in the Stalinist terror. The Bolshevik Party kept its name, but became something entirely different: adopting the theory of socialism in one country
, it abandoned Lenin’s internationalist policy. The consequences for the scientific community were inevitable.
The history of Russian science in the twentieth century is full of contradictions and enigmatic events, making it difficult to evaluate individual scientists. Between 1924 and 1933, the main organiser of Soviet science, Abram Ioffe [1880-1960], travelled to Europe and the United States every year. In that period, he sent more than one third of the researchers at his institute abroad to do research. After 1933, Soviet scientists were forbidden to go abroad and relations between Russian physicists and those of other countries collapsed.
Stalin’s nationalist policy and his growing fear of sabotage and spies had already begun to create an increasingly impenetrable barrier between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. In 1937-38, about a hundred physicists were arrested. Amidst the cyclone of Stalinist nationalist paranoia, two important figures, Ioffe and Pyotr Kapitsa [1894-1984] — perhaps because of their personal ability, or perhaps because of their international prestige — managed to avoid ending up before the tribunals and were able to protect a small circle of physicists. This group would go on to create the Soviet atomic bomb.
The first Five-Year Plan [1928-32] concentrated on the rapid development of heavy industry, resulting in a conflict between the engineer-managers, committed to industrialisation-electrification, and the physicists Ioffe represented.
Physicists and industry
The conflict between physicists and engineers is not a specific Russian feature; similar tensions occurred in other countries too. Engineers trained in classical physics, where the processes can be visualised, find it hard to understand relativistic and quantum physics, where abstract concepts which cannot be visualised play a central role. All over the world, nuclear physicists appeared to be finding it hard to make themselves understood. Theoretical physics achieved universal recognition only when abstract theories were experimentally realised, and the $E = mc^2$ formula turned into the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The Soviet Union’s specific conditions created a contradiction between world-level nuclear physicists and the backwardness of industry. This was not only a question of theoretical understanding; it also involved the practical application of new physics, which electrical engineers questioned in terms of its usefulness. The relationship between physics and industry was the subject of the Academy of Sciences session held in Moscow in March 1936 [David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 1994].
The Soviet physicists found themselves in a difficult situation when faced with the industrialisation plans. Relativistic and quantum physics could offer little help to the electrical development of the period: an Einstein or a Heisenberg are not needed to build a hydroelectric power plant or an electric motor; on the contrary, they are fundamental to the building of an atomic power plant or an atom bomb, which did not yet exist.
Criticism of Ioffe
On the first day of the Academy’s session, the government newspaper Izvestia carried an article deploring the failure of Ioffe’s Institute to help industry. The article set the tone for the debate, in which many hundreds of scientists and government officials participated.
Ioffe began his report saying that his institute had been founded with the aim of making physics the scientific base of Soviet technology. In his opinion, the Soviet Union was one of the world’s leading centres of physics because of his work. Ioffe’s Physical-Technical Institute had grown into a network of fourteen institutes and three technical high schools, with 1,000 scientists.
Ioffe criticised the industrial engineers, whom he considered reluctant to communicate their needs to the physicists and not very interested in making proposals that could advance Soviet science. He argued that his institute had made a significant contribution to the Soviet economy. Its most important results were acoustic methods for measuring stress in new materials, new methods for studying the structure of steel and alloys, the invention of new insulating material, the protection of high voltage power lines and transformers, work on polymers and artificial rubber, and new biological measurement methods.
Ioffe accused the engineers of a lack of cooperation. Even though physics had played a marginal role in the two Five-Year Plans, he argued that it would become increasingly important in the years ahead, because it would contribute to the development of new technologies. In the debate which followed, many speakers cast doubt upon Ioffe’s assertions. Criticism came from two camps: a number of other physicists, and engineers.
Aleksandr Leipunsky [1903-1972], a physicist and director of the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute (UPTI) in Kharkiv, was among the former. He argued that it was totally misleading to speak of Soviet science being at the level of the United States, Britain, and Germany. The young physicist Lev Landau [1908-1968] also criticised Ioffe for lacking global standing. In previous meetings, he had described him as an ignoramus in the field of physics. On the other hand, the representatives of industry accused Ioffe of being unable to apply physics to engineering activity.
Gleb M. Krzhizhanovsky [1872-1959], vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and previously in charge of the country’s electrification plan, and Nikolai P. Gorbunov [1892-1938], a chemist, engineer, and permanent secretary of the Academy, sent a report to Vyacheslav Molotov [1890-1986], who was prime minister at the time, on the results of that session of the Academy in March 1936. Their opinion of Ioffe was strongly critical. The conflict amongst the physicists, and between them and the engineers responsible for industrial development, was obvious. Ioffe was at the centre of the criticisms of both sides.
Holloway, however, credits Ioffe with the development of Soviet physics, highlighting his exceptional qualities as an organiser, in addition to his scientific distinction. He could recruit gifted young scientists, choose the direction of research, obtain resources from the government, and build research institutes. His policy aimed at compromise with the government, in order to enable his institute to become a major centre of European science. He attached particular importance to relations with foreign scientists and to international conferences and seminars, which he considered essential to the development of science.
The escalation of Stalinist repression, wielded in order to eliminate all opposition to his politics, also hit physicists. In September 1937, Leipunsky was arrested as a German spy and subsequently released. In 1938 Landau was also arrested.
The tragedy of the Ukrainian scientists
We are unable to assess the extent to which Leipunsky and Landau’s criticism of Ioffe in the March 1936 session of the Academy of Sciences was related to the wave of Stalinist repression which struck the UPTI in 1937-38. It had undoubtedly revealed deep divisions in the scientific community and the weakness of the sector in the face of State power. Regarding this episode, we refer to an article published by Gennady Gorelik in the American magazine Scientific American in August 1997.
Gorelik, a physicist by training and a historian by profession, was a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was able to access Soviet archives, including those of the KGB, interview physicists, and shed light on the repression of the UPTI. Some physicists, among them Lev Vasilyevich Shubnikov [1901-1937], considered to be the founding father of low-temperature Soviet physics, were arrested and shot for anti-State activities. In April 1938, Landau and his friend Moisei Korets were also arrested. The pretext was a leaflet which was to be published on the occasion of the 1938 May Day celebrations. Its content clearly indicated that the opposition of the UPTI physicists was not confined to physics, as it explicitly accused Stalin’s government.
The leaflet read: Comrades! The great cause of the October Revolution has been vilely betrayed. [...] Millions of innocent people are being thrown into prison and no one knows when it will be their own turn. Don’t you see, comrades, that Stalin’s clique has carried out a fascist coup d'état? [...] With his rabid hatred of true socialism, Stalin has become like Hitler and Mussolini. In order to safeguard his power, Stalin is destroying the country and is making it an easy prey of bestial German fascism. [...] Long live May Day, the day of the struggle for socialism!
. It was signed by the Anti-fascist Workers’ Party.
Landau was freed after a year, thanks to Kapitsa’s intervention with Stalin. The effects of the purge on the institute were far-reaching, and it was greatly weakened. On the eve of the discovery of nuclear fission, the Soviet authorities had destroyed one of the country’s most important physics institutes. Although Landau was just 30 years old, by that time he was already a scientific institution in his own right, having helped shape twentieth-century mathematical physics. In 1962, he received the Nobel prize for his theories on the phenomena of low-temperature physics, such as superfluidity and superconductivity.
A few years after the repression of the UPTI, Stalin launched the Soviet project for the atomic bomb, in which the survivors of the Ukrainian institute participated. In the Stalinist system, a scientist could be a government adviser at the highest level one day, and an enemy of the people
, under threat of the firing squad, the next.
The full story has yet to be told about the factional infighting which occurred both within the Stalinist apparatus and among the scientists. It is a scenario from a Shakespearean tragedy, involving both collaboration with and opposition to the Stalinist system, in which it is necessary to set in context such complex personalities as Ioffe, Kapitsa, Landau, and Leipunsky. Each were at the same time both victims and architects of the violent process of the industrialisation of science in Russian State capitalism.
Lotta Comunista, May 2025