Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  The aviation industry was the first to benefit: the aviation designer A. N. Tupolev and the rocket pioneer Sergei Korolev both achieved greatness and world renown (albeit indirectly and after the fact) for their work within the sharashka system. Tupolev’s Tu-2 bomber became a sort of military design classic, remaining in service until the 1950s. Other contributions made to the war effort included engines, propellants, radio systems, guns and cannons. More than half these projects went into mass production – a superb success rate for wartime R&D. The sharashki were strong in communications technology, some of it quite bizarre. Cast into the gold mines of Kolyma in 1938 and ‘rescued’ by the sharashka system, the physicist and radio engineer Leon Theremin found a way of using an infrared beam to detect sound vibrations in window-glass. Beria used Theremin’s eavesdropping device to spy on the British, French and US embassies in Moscow. Another Theremin invention was called the Thing. In 1945 Soviet schoolchildren presented a ‘gesture of friendship’ to the US Ambassador – a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow, the Thing concealed there intercepting confidential conversations during the first seven years of the Cold War until it was discovered by accident in 1952. Theremin was released from the sharashka system in 1947, in time to receive a Stalin Prize for his work. He had enjoyed himself so much he went on working with the KGB until 1966.

  Who wouldn’t enjoy the life these prisons provided – given the alternative? A former sharashka worker, Leo Kopelev, understood the logic of such places:

  They grab him by the scruff of the neck, drag him to Lubyanka, Lefortovo or Sukhanovka – confess, bastard, who did you spy on, how did you wreck, where did you sabotage? … They lower him once or twice into the cooler when it’s freezing, when there’s water in it. They’ll hit him in the face, the ass, the ribs – not to kill or maim, but so that he will feel pain and shame, so that he will know that he is no longer a human being but just a nothing and that they can do whatever they want to him … And then, after all that, they will give him a magnanimous ten years … No days off. Vacation is a foreign word. Overtime is sheer pleasure; anything’s better than sleeping in a cell. You chase away thought of freedom, of home – they only bring on depression and despair … In the sharashki they address you by your name and patronymic, feed you decently, better than many eat on the outside; you work in warmth, sleep on a straw mattress with a sheet. No worries – just make sure you use your brain, think, invent, perfect, advance science and technology.7

  The other, unplanned and disconcerting change in the relations between government and its scientists came as a response to war itself. The Great Purge of the late 1930s had ensured that, in the coming war, there would be no White opposition to stage a putsch against Stalin’s rule.8 But the price paid was the virtual elimination of the Soviet high command. By declining to trust his experienced military men, Stalin was obliged to put his trust in the young and the untried.

  This generational shift was abrupt. It used to be, to join the Party, you were put on probation and had to pass political examinations. No longer: men with no experience of the Terror were joining the Party directly from the battlefield. What mattered to them, first and foremost, was winning the war, so naturally they paid attention to the professionals around them, ideology be damned.

  Those commissars for whom ideological correctness counted for more than military success were quickly put in their place. It had been the case, early in the war, that commissars were entitled to countermand orders issued by commanding officers. By October 1942 the number of military failures had risen so much that the commissars were ordered to stick to propaganda. As the conflict progressed, so party functionaries lost their status and professionals found themselves increasingly valued by the very state that had persecuted them.

  ‘Lucky stiffs’ they were called, and few made more of their luck than Alexander Luria who, in the wake of the pedology scandal, had been retraining as a medical doctor. Wartime experience brought Luria work that would establish his global reputation, when he went to treat wounded service personnel at Evacuation Hospital No. 3120, part of the Institute of Neurosurgery run by Nikolai Burdenko.

  The hospital had been established in 1942 at an old sanatorium on the banks of two small lakes near the city of Chelyabinsk in the southern Urals. Arriving there, Luria brought together old colleagues from his days in Moscow and Kharkov – the cream of Moscow psychiatry – and in a few months they transformed the sanatorium into a 400-bed neurological hospital, researching and evaluating every kind of rehabilitation technique. Evacuation Hospital 3120 produced some of the most important neurology and psychology research to come out of the war.

  Alongside several extraordinary clinical achievements, Luria also wrote a book that was to transform the genre of popular science when he assembled, edited and introduced the diary of one of his more badly damaged, and more superhumanly determined, patients, Lev Zazetsky.

  Shot in the head, Zazetsky had woken from his coma to a shattered world. Nothing made sense to him. He found himself in a world without left and right, without cause and effect, without grammar. There was no way ‘out’ of Zazetsky’s world – and no way ‘in’ either. No before or after. No with or without.

  Eventually, as Zazetsky came to understand what had happened to him, he began a diary. He could write, but he couldn’t read. If he studied a page, half of it would vanish. If he peered at a word, half of it would vanish. He could just about figure out words a letter at a time, but it was hard, because he could never see entire letters: only halves of letters. So he was never truly able to appreciate what he spent the rest of his life composing: I’ll Fight On, his handwritten memoir, is 3,000 pages long.

  I’ll Fight On has never been published in its entirety. It is frankly unreadable: thousands of pages of fractured recollection, ripped out of time, stripped of context and causality. Luria preserved and published the clearest passages, however, and these form the kernel of one of the most widely translated and highly regarded science books of all time: The Man With a Shattered World.

  Luria, working with patients whose injuries had left them struggling with language, began to formulate the idea of a brain divided into a hierarchy of executive levels. In Zazetsky’s case, his higher executive functions were undamaged. Writing his memoir was proof enough of that. Zazetsky could plan, strategise, form intentions and pursue them. What he lacked – what the German bullet had ripped away – were certain more basic executive levels. In particular, that part of the brain that processed symbols was irreparably damaged. Zazetsky couldn’t comprehend a whole word, understand a whole sentence or recall a complete memory, because to do so would require relating symbols. All he could grasp were fleeting fragments. He couldn’t read, which is a perceptual activity. He could write, because it is an intentional one.

  On the basis of more than 800 cases of brain dysfunction caused by military wounds, Luria began to assemble Traumatic Aphasia, the monograph that founded modern neuroscience. He remained Zazetsky’s friend and physician, his amanuensis and his editor, till the end of his life.

  Other ‘lucky stiffs’ had a rather more unorthodox time of it. Dmitry Fedotov’s notoriously chequered career could quite easily have got him shot for the very same reasons that, in the actual course of things, brought him to high government office.

  In territories occupied by the German Army, hospitals had been destroyed and patients murdered. Without enough food, soap, or fuel, the survivors fought a losing battle against dysentery, malnutrition and tuberculosis. Everywhere psychiatric patients died at an alarmingly high rate.

  In January 1942 Dr Dmitry Fedotov was given the task of rebuilding the fire-damaged and vandalised Litvinov Psychiatric Hospital at Burashevo, a small village in Kalinin district. All of the hospital’s 530 wartime patients had been killed.

  Fedotov did what he had to do to get the hospital running again. He stole from the local government warehouse and handed
out clothing, no questions asked, to his doctors and staff. He bought meat for the hospital on the black market. He restored the hospital’s water supply. Most audacious of all, he ran high-voltage cables to the hospital from a local power station and charged local farmers to piggy-back off the line. In 1945 Fedotov joined the Party. He was an exceptionally lively example of that generation for whom Party membership was an act of simple patriotism, rather than an expression of political conviction.

  In 1946 the Ministry of Health9 brought Fedotov to Moscow to answer for his entrepreneurism. ‘How could you allow yourself such things?’ the minister exploded, reviewing the electricity scheme. Others were either condescending (he was inexperienced) or harsh (‘out of control … outside the law’). Fedotov earned a ‘stern demerit with a warning’ and was sent back to Kalinin.

  In his absence, however, the conversations continued. Say what you like about his unorthodox methods, Fedotov was a man of action, a practical man who got hold of what he needed when he needed it. In the poverty and ruin of the early post-war years, with half the country in ruins and the population living on the edge of famine, were men like Fedotov really to be discouraged? By 1947 the official mood toward specialists and entrepreneurs had warmed considerably, and Fedotov found himself in Moscow once again – and being put in charge of all the hospitals in the Soviet Union.

  Fedotov joined a new elite of administrators and scientific workers who, from March 1946, enjoyed high wages, bonuses, and priority access to housing, food and goods. Members of academies dined in special restaurants originally meant only for Party officials. They used special government hospitals and sanatoriums. Specialists were so few in number, and in such high demand, that a doctor of sciences heading a laboratory in the Academy of Sciences now earned nearly twice as much as an official in the Central Committee.

  Even as Fedotov was taking stock of Soviet psychiatry (‘catastrophic’, in his own estimation, with numerous cases of hospital workers violently beating patients), Sergei Gurevich, a hygienist, was arguing that psychiatrists should help design new apartment blocks, sunny, uncluttered and quiet, to help people overcome the effects of ‘grief for the killed and the lost, deprivation, illness, [and] evacuation’. Each apartment ought to have a view of ‘river banks, forest, meadows … an apartment without a piece of land to go with it is flawed,’ he wrote.10 You could be forgiven for thinking that the purges of the late 1930s had never happened, such was the speed with which Russia’s mandarin class reasserted itself.

  Meanwhile thousands of Soviet citizens were still living in dugouts and struggling to get enough to eat.

  Notes

  1. Quotation adapted from Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991). See also Vladimir Hachinski, ‘Stalin’s Last Years: Delusions or Dementia?’, European Journal of Neurology 6, no. 2 (1 March 1999).

  2. Andreev-Khomiakov & Healy, Bitter Waters, pp. 163, 166.

  3. The American journalist Harrison Salisbury remembered Zhdanov as a ‘dark-haired man with brown eyes and, in his early years, considerable physical attraction. But as with many Soviet functionaries the ceaseless hours of work (often at night because of Stalin’s habit of keeping late evening hours), the lack of physical exercise, the multitude of ceremonial banquets took their toll. By the eve of the war Zhdanov was overweight, pasty-faced and prey to severe asthmatic attacks. He was a chain smoker, lighting one Belomor after the other until the pepelnitsa [ashtray] on his desk was cluttered with stubs.’ Quoted in Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, p. 219.

  4. Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, p. 235.

  5. Directive to the Chief of Staff of German Navy on the destruction of Leningrad, 22 September 1941. Available at bit.ly/1nTEqNi.

  6. In February 1945, Brücher had been ordered to destroy the eighteen research facilities under his control to avoid their capture by advancing Soviet forces. He refused. After the war he took part of the Russian material with him during his move to South America. On 17 December 1991, at the age of seventy-five, Brücher was murdered at his vineyard in the Mendoza district of Argentina. Burglary seems the most likely motive, though the police report hinted that cocaine traffickers were responsible. Just before his death, Brücher had discussed in public the possibility of using a viral disease – Estella, or coca wilt – to destroy illicit Andean coca crops without damaging other plants. See Carl-Gustaf Thornstrom and Uwe Hossfeld, ‘Instant Appropriation: Heinz Brücher and the SS Botanical Collecting Commando to Russia 1943’, Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter, no. 129 (March 2002), pp. 54–57; and Daniel W. Gade, ‘Converging Ethnobiology and Ethnobiography: Cultivated Plants, Heinz Brücher, and Nazi Ideology’, Journal of Ethnobiology 26, no. 1 (1 March 2006), pp. 82–106.

  7. Lev Kopelev, Ease My Sorrows: A Memoir, pp. 4–5.

  8. This, at any rate, is the persuasive argument of Oleg V. Khlevnyuk in ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, in Stalinism, ed. David L. Hoffmann, pp. 82–104.

  9. In 1946, all Soviet commissariats were renamed ‘ministries’.

  10. Benjamin Zajicek, ‘Scientific Psychiatry in Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Politics of Modern Medicine and the Struggle to Define “Pavlovian” Psychiatry, 1939–1953’, p. 211.

  17: ‘Can I go to the reactor?’

  Yulii Khariton sits beside a copy of his brainchild: the first Soviet atomic bomb, detonated on 29 August 1949. This photograph was taken in 1992.

  Nuts!

  Physicist Enrico Fermi, responding to the suggestion that nuclear fission might become an issue of national security1

  ‘I am born a Russian,’ Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky explained, declining the offer of German citizenship, ‘and I do not see any way to change that fact.’

  It was 1938, and no less a figure than Bernhard Rust, minister of science and education, was lobbying for Timofeev-Ressovsky and his family to stay in Germany. Timofeev-Ressovsky’s high standing had come about in a bizarre way. In May 1935 the Nazis had insisted that Oskar Vogt resign as director of his own institute. In March 1937 a new director was appointed: the neuropathologist Hugo Spatz, a staunch Nazi supporter. Spatz said that he did not want to deal with Russian scientists. In fact he wanted to dismiss Timofeev-Ressovsky then and there, judging his department of genetics ‘an alien body’ in the institute. Oskar Vogt, however, managed to convince the Ministry of Science and Education that Timofeev-Ressovsky’s work was important. To keep Spatz happy, the genetics department was taken out of the institute and reorganised as an institute in its own right, directly under the supervision of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. So it was that Timofeev-Ressovsky, far from being thrown out of his job, found himself completely free to do what he wanted. And his work, studying the basics of genetics, was an asset the minister was determined to hold on to.

  Rust need not have feared losing the celebrated geneticist. Timofeev-Ressovsky had already overcome temptation. In the mid-1930s colleagues from the United States had offered him a position at the Carnegie Institution – but Hermann Muller had spoken so discouragingly of life and science in the United States that, even after the war, Timofeev-Ressovsky showed not the slightest interest in emigrating there.2

  It helped that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research was located in the suburbs, where the Nazi presence was not so overbearing. The political pressures on scientists were anyway remarkably slight. You didn’t have to be a Nazi Party member to get a grant; in fact membership didn’t make funding more likely.

  Timofeev-Ressovsky’s position was further helped by his collaboration with the physicist Karl Zimmer, who worked for Auer, a metallurgy company involved in uranium production. Though Timofeev-Ressovsky had nothing to do with this business, the friendship lent him an aura of untouchability. So did his being on first-name terms with Werner Heisenberg, the man in charge of the development of the German atom bomb, at another institute just down the road. ‘No one followed him,’ Auer’s research director Nikolaus Riehl recalled in 1
985. ‘The Nazis left him alone. He lived there and we all supported him. We had very close contact. We were all good friends …’ This friendship circle extended even to the local Gruppenführer, who ensured that anyone denouncing Timofeev-Ressovsky’s staff was roundly ignored. (Later in the war, and with food in short supply, Timofeev-Ressovsky repaid the favour by making him a regular guest at experimental-rabbit dinners.)3

  When war began, Vogt’s institute became a modest intellectual safehouse, successfully sheltering Jews and political refugees for the duration of the conflict. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin were classified as important to the war effort, and this qualified them to apply for labourers. Timofeev-Ressovsky diverted several prisoners to his genetics department, wildly inflating their importance and qualifications. Forged documents magically transformed displaced persons and prisoners of war into ‘guest-workers’. The anti-Nazi resistance found work for them where they could – usually on distant farms – and while they waited, they hid in Timofeev-Ressovsky’s lab.

  As the war developed, and he found his freedom of movement restricted – there were to be no more family vacations on the Baltic coast – Timofeev-Ressovsky made minor compromises. He delivered gloomy and discouraging lectures to SS doctors on the technicalities of mutation research. His respirator studies, using isotopic markers to test the filters, were certainly of military significance.4

  But even minor compromises were too much for Dmitry, the Timofeev-Ressovskys’ eldest son, whose hatred of the Nazis grew ever stronger as he associated with Russian groups in Berlin. Much against his father’s advice (their arguments were terrible), Dmitry involved himself in the work of an underground resistance group, providing support to prisoners of war. Because he knew French, he was chosen to shelter two French pilots from arrest. The group was betrayed and Dmitry was arrested by the Gestapo on 30 June 1943.