Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky tried everything in order to free his son. He lobbied leading SS officers, politically influential colleagues, and his superiors in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Heisenberg himself appealed on behalf of his friend. Nothing worked. Dmitry was sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen and died – so rumour had it – during an uprising of the prisoners just before the Americans came. (To her dying day, Elena Timofeev-Ressovsky nursed a wild hope that her son had somehow survived.)

  The tide of the war was turning. In 1944 the Brain Institute became a clinic for pilots with head and brain injuries. Anoxia from high-altitude flying became a focus for research, and the institute’s modest ‘pantheon of brains’ acquired new and gruesome holdings: brains from at least 500 patients murdered as part of the Nazis’ euthanasia programme.

  Soon all the ordinary food was gone. In Berlin people were told to gather herbs, mushrooms and snails, make coffee from acorns and bake bread from rapeseed. Staff at the institute got off relatively lightly, subsisting on cornmeal and molasses meant for their experimental fruit flies. (For some reason this stuff kept arriving by the truckload.) There were rabbits, too, meant for radiation experiments. Since you couldn’t eat an irradiated rabbit, the experimenters lowered the dosage. Eventually Timofeev-Ressovsky decided not to expose the rabbits to any radiation at all. Science could wait, and there was always a hot meal for you at the Timofeev-Ressovskys’ apartment.

  In the first half of February 1945, as Soviet forces neared Berlin, Hugo Spatz decided to transfer the staff of the brain research institute to Göttingen in the south-west of Germany. Timofeev-Ressovsky stayed put, saying that it was his responsibility to try to save his staff members from harm, and he could best explain the nature of the institute to the commanders of the advancing troops. His plan, as he explained it to Nikolaus Riehl, was to return to the USSR and to put his department at the disposal of the Soviet Union.

  Riehl was appalled: ‘I said to him, “Timofeev-Ressovsky, you are subject to treason. It can go very badly with you.” He said, “No. Nothing will happen.” I said, “I am formally in order being a German citizen, but you are a Russian citizen.” He repeated, “No, nothing will happen to me.” … Timofeev-Ressovsky said that the fact that his son was lost in itself should be regarded as justification for staying in Germany. That was, of course, not the case.’5

  The Soviet Army reached Buch on 21 April 1945. Timofeev-Ressovsky’s colleague I. B. Panshin, himself a Russian, recollects: ‘I and many employees of the Institute were in Timofeev-Ressovsky’s house. There was sporadic shooting. I saw our soldiers from the window. I went to them with a self-made white flag of surrender.’ On the whole, everything took place peacefully. ‘One of our first actions was sending a telegram to Stalin stating that it was necessary for us to serve in the Soviet Union and that the Institute with the staff and the equipment would be very valuable for Russia.’6

  When the Soviet troops arrived, Timofeev-Ressovsky was promptly arrested – and just as promptly released – by NKVD General Avrami Pavlovich Zavenyagin. Recognising the potential value of Timofeev-Ressovsky’s research in radiobiology, Zavenyagin took the institute under his wing, staff and all, and saw to it that Timofeev-Ressovsky’s work continued while he tried to sort out the institute’s transfer to the Soviet Union.

  Not everyone was so keen to welcome Timofeev-Ressovsky home, however. The first sign of trouble came when two physicists flew in from Moscow dressed in the uniforms of NKVD colonels, and one of them, Lev Artsimovich, flatly refused to shake Timofeev-Ressovsky’s hand. The physicists were part of a commission organised by the Academy of Sciences, and it is one of the great unexplained ironies of the time that, while the NKVD were working to keep Timofeev-Ressovsky free and productive, it was a denunciation from the Academy of Sciences, of all places, that, on the night of 12–13 September, got Timofeev-Ressovsky re-arrested.

  From October 1945, all trace of Timofeev-Ressovsky evaporated. Zavenyagin attempted to trace his charge, only to find that his own people had lost track of the paperwork. Some other division of the NKVD had got hold of Timofeev-Ressovsky and Zavenyagin had no means to know which.

  Meanwhile the Soviet investigators to whom Timofeev-Ressovsky had been assigned began assembling the case against him. Not only were they unaware of his importance; they neither could nor wanted to understand his work, and put hostile interpretations on everything they learned.

  From Zimmer they learned what work Timofeev-Ressovksy’s institute had been assigned. This catalogue of projects – from the highly technical (investigating the biological effect of neutron radiation) to the frankly mad (using X-rays as a weapon against enemy aircraft) bore little relation to the actual work Timofeev-Ressovsky had conducted. But even this was vulnerable to hostile interpretation. A close colleague, Hans-Joachim Born, inadvertently incriminated his friend when he described radiation experiments on animals, on voluntary human subjects (Born himself was one of those), and on two human corpses. This grim-sounding project merely used safe dosages of thorium X to map blood circulation disorders – a research technique commonplace even in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Born’s testimony was used to imply that Timofeev-Ressovsky had experimented with Soviet prisoners of war – a rumour so persistent it turned up in the academic literature as late as 1988.7

  Having found ample material to conclude that Timofeev-Ressovsky’s institute had supported the German war effort, on 4 July 1946 the Soviet authorities convicted Timofeev-Ressovsky of having ‘betrayed the Motherland by going over to the side of the enemy’, and sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment in labour camps.

  On the way to Karaganda, one of the most terrible camps of the gulag, Timofeev-Ressovsky was lodged in a common cell where, twice a day, water was poured from a bucket without a spout into the prisoners’ teapot, usually spilling on the floor. ‘There was nothing at the Lubyanka … which so offended him as this spilling on the floor,’ recalled one inmate:

  He considered it striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers, and of all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of the Lubyanka’s existence as a prison by 730 times (twice for each day of the year), and then by 111 cells – and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to spill boiling water on the floor 2,188,000 times and then come and wipe it up with a rag the same number of times than to make pails with spouts.

  That inmate was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and his memoir, The Gulag Archipelago, became the founding document of the Soviet dissident movement. Solzhenitsyn also described the way Timofeev-Ressovsky, with his characteristic energy, organised a scientific and technical society, with lectures by members who included physicists, electronic engineers and a chemist.

  From August to November 1946, Timofeev-Ressovsky was kept in Karaganda. There, too, he organised a scientific society to save himself and his fellow scientists from despair. By now he was developing dystrophy and hovered on the verge of death. In the end, he recalled, ‘I remembered only that the name of my wife was Lyolka [a nickname], but I forgot her full name. I forgot the names of my sons. I forgot everything. I forgot my last name. I remembered only that Nikolai was my first name.’8 Neither friends nor family were able to learn where he was or even whether he was alive.

  It was the French physicist, Nobel Prize winner and resistance worker Frédéric Joliot-Curie who brought Timofeev-Ressovsky at last to light, when he appealed directly to Lavrenty Beria, the Minister of Internal Affairs.9 Where Zavenyagin’s enquiries had stalled, Beria’s impatience and terrifying reputation brought results. By then Timofeev-Ressovsky was close to death from starvation and nearly blind.

  He was immediately shipped back to Moscow in a crowded prison wagon, forced to stand crushed together with others most of the time, and arrived unconscious, in a carriage crammed with the dying and the already dead. Officers carried him from the prisoner transport in their arms.

  In the Central Prison Hospital, strenuous efforts saved his
life, but his vision, although improving, remained permanently impaired. He was never again able to use a microscope and could read only with a large magnifying glass and a brightly illuminated page. It took him months to recuperate to the point where he was strong enough to travel. At last, in the spring of 1947, he left Moscow, bound for a secret destination in the Urals.

  He found himself deposited on the shore of a blue lake. There were dark green stands of fir. There were deserted sandy beaches. He was very weak. ‘I could hardly climb a stair.’ Cottages, lab buildings and warehouses made up the village of Sungul. ‘When I put a foot on the next step, I had no strength to pull the second foot.’ When he got to the door assigned to him he looked back and saw that the lake was dotted with islands. To the west, there was a magnificent view of the mountains.

  Object 0211 was a sharashka: a prison village built on a small, wooded peninsula. It was barricaded on the land side by a barbed-wire fence. There were guard posts, and dogs patrolled the shore. None of that mattered. Here, at last, was a haven. A place to work. A place that understood him. Someone had even left flowers on his doorstep, ready for his arrival.

  The only puzzle was, why had Timofeev-Ressovsky been so favoured? What made him so important? What work was he expected to perform?

  *

  Leo Szilard had spotted it first. The Hungarian physicist moved to Britain in 1933 and in September that year it occurred to him that if a nuclear reaction produced neutrons, and those neutrons then caused further nuclear reactions, then he knew of no pressing reason why process would ever stop. Szilard’s dream, or nightmare, was the nuclear chain reaction. The fear that nuclear chain reactions, once started, would proliferate through all available matter, remained a slim but besetting possibility right up until the test of the first atom bomb by the United States on 16 July 1945.10 For Szilard, in 1933, the prospect did not even seem particularly slim. The more likely possibility – that nuclear chain reactions might set off an explosion of as yet unimaginable power – was worrying enough. In any event, he was sufficiently exercised by the idea that in 1939 he wrote to Enrico Fermi saying that the United States should from now on conduct its fission research in secret.

  ‘Nuts!’ Fermi replied.

  It was a French team, in the end, who put flesh on Szilard’s anxieties, announcing in Nature on 7 April 1939 that nuclear chain reactions were real. Each fission would generate three or four neutrons, each of which would trigger further fissions.

  Physicists would later look back on the 1930s – with some incredulity – as a golden age: a period of naive speculation, collaboration and friendly competition. The possibility of fission, far from being a dread secret, fast became the hottest topic in physics, and a new weapon in the discipline’s insatiable quest for funding. In 1939 Heisenberg used the possibility of making an atom bomb as leverage to get funds for reactor research.

  At the end of April 1940 William Laurence, who followed nuclear research in Germany for the New York Times, learned that a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was being turned over to uranium research. The Germans, he concluded, were working on an atom bomb. On Sunday, 5 May 1940, the New York Times broke the story on its front page: ‘Vast Power Source In Atomic Energy Opened by Science’. According to Laurence, ‘every German scientist in this field, physicists, chemists and engineers … have been ordered to drop all other researches and devote themselves to this work alone’.

  The US government assumed (rightly) that Laurence was exaggerating. Still, the article was serious enough that it caught the attention of George Vernadsky, émigré son of the geologist and environmental visionary Vladimir Vernadsky, and now a professor of Russian history at Yale. George clipped the article and sent it to his father with a note that read, ‘Don’t be late!’

  Vernadsky, by then in his eighties, received his son’s letter while staying at a sanatorium on the Uzkoe estate, near Moscow – a monument of aristocratic culture whose facilities included a functioning church (Easter was celebrated; May Day was not). Though his failing health did not permit him much of a direct role in the development of the Russian nuclear programme, he acted a deal more promptly than the American authorities did. He assembled a Uranium Commission for the Academy of Sciences, bringing on board distinguished scientists Igor Kurchatov, Sergei Vavilov, Dmitry Scherbakov and Peter Kapitsa. Equally important, he argued that the field’s practical problems should be given priority. It was all very well for physicists to bandy theories back and forth, but they would get nowhere unless they actually started separating isotope 235 from uranium. In his diary for 16 May 1941 Vernadsky recorded a conversation with one of the Academy vice-presidents:

  I pointed out to him that now obstruction was caused by the physicists (Ioffe, [Sergei] Vavilov – I did not name names). They are directing their efforts to the study of the atomic nucleus and its theory and here … much of importance is being done – but life requires the mining-chemical direction.11

  Progress was steady, if unhurried. A story in Pravda on 22 June 1941 described the construction in Leningrad of ‘a building which looks like a planetarium … This is the first powerful cyclotron laboratory in the Soviet Union for splitting the atomic nucleus.’12 It never operated. German armies invaded the Soviet Union that very day, forcing the physicists to abandon their work and hurriedly evacuate much of Ioffe’s Physico-Technical Institute to Kazan by train.

  Here, and for a long while, the story was paused, as scientists switched from nuclear physics to more pressing problems. Yakov Zeldovich and Yulii Khariton, who had been conducting experiments on uranium chain reactions, moved over to the development of chemical explosives. Igor Kurchatov, whose own interest in chain reactions led him to invent nuclear reactors, for the moment was working to protect ships against magnetic mines. Some of his colleagues laid physics aside entirely and joined the army.13

  It was left to one young physicist, Georgy Flyorov, to notice just how quickly the hottest topic in physics was becoming a matter of global security.

  Flyorov’s own work in the field was considerable: in 1939, with Konstantin Petrzhak, he had demonstrated spontaneous fission – a form of radioactive decay found only in very heavy chemical elements. Now he was a lieutenant, studying to be an aviation technician at a training airfield near the city of Voronezh. In late 1941, at a local university library, it occurred to him to see how work on fission was progressing. He leafed through the latest available English-language physics journals. Pique at finding no references to himself quickly turned to disquiet. His wasn’t the only name missing from the conversation. In fact, there was no conversation. His casual literature trawl revealed no papers on nuclear fission. This could mean only one thing: the allies had classified the problem as a military project.

  Flyorov wrote to Kurchatov, urging a return to uranium research. He wrote to Sergei Kaftanov, who supervised scientific work at the State Defence Committee. He may even have written to Stalin. He travelled to Kazan, where most academic institutes had been evacuated, to discuss the matter with as many senior colleagues as he could find. He sketched out the workings of a crude atomic bomb. But Ioffe and Kapitsa, in particular, were sceptical. A bomb, if possible at all, would require uranium they did not have and ten years they could not afford.

  As the war dragged on, however, and became primarily a war of attrition, people began to suspect that an atomic device might prove decisive. Neither the Russians nor the Western Allies knew much about the German effort: what if they got the bomb first? Britain was first to respond seriously to the threat, and news of its ‘Tube Alloys’ project reached Moscow in October 1941 thanks to Klaus Fuchs, a communist refugee from Nazi Germany who had started work on the atomic project in Britain.

  Fuchs proved to be a gift that kept on giving: in 1943 he arrived in Los Alamos as a member of the British team working on the Manhattan Project, and carried on sending information to the Soviets. A pupil of Nobel laureate Max Born, Fuchs was a brilliant mathematical physicist, likeab
le, polite and sincere. (When his new Russian contact offered him $1,500 for his trouble, Russia’s most valuable spy held the envelope containing it ‘as if it were an unclean thing’ and flatly declined the offer.)

  Fuchs understood that the war could not be won without the Red Army. It made sense to him, therefore, to keep the Russians informed of any technological or military advance. The idea of sharing the bomb with the Russians did not seem at all outlandish to his colleagues at Los Alamos. The consensus there was that Russian physicists were quite capable of building their own bomb, so the sooner they were made partners in controlling this fearsome technology the better. Physicist Martin Deutsch, an Austrian émigré and MIT professor, remembers that such discussions at Los Alamos were frequent and quite open; only Fuchs seemed lost for words.14

  *

  The Germans had stocks of heavy water and uranium. They had brilliant physicists, and excellent facilities. Nevertheless, for one reason or another – some say sabotage, others say dumb luck – the German atomic project stalled. In the USA and Britain, meanwhile, industrial facilities were being built for atom bomb construction. In 1943 the Soviets launched their own project – not to contribute to the war with Germany, but more as a hedge against the atomic future.

  In 1943, with the worst of the siege over, Leningrad’s Radium Institute managed to dig up and ship out some vital parts of its cyclotron on two goods wagons and reassemble it in the newly established ‘Laboratory Number 2’ in north-west Moscow. This was Kurchatov’s nuclear facility, created in secret by the Academy of Sciences in buildings originally intended for the Institute of Experimental Medicine. Here, Kurchatov and others worked on constructing and operating an experimental atomic pile – and for that they needed, and needed urgently, supplies of uranium.