Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  The hunt for enemy holdings of uranium began in Vienna, just four months after the Red Army fought their way over the German border and prior to the Soviet occupation of Berlin. Forty physicists were recruited to the effort – roughly half the workers of Laboratory No. 2. Their haul was tremendous: along with reams of valuable technical paperwork, they traced and seized nearly 340 kilograms of metallic uranium.

  The achievements of the Berlin search team under Avrami Zavenyagin,15 however, were of a wholly different order.

  Briefed on their mission only once their plane was in the air, Zavenyagin’s team arrived in Berlin on 3 May and took up residence in Berlin-Friedrichschagen, in a heavily guarded building big enough to house not only the team members, but also some of the German scientists recovered by the group.

  The next day, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, the Russian team acquired a complete description of the German uranium project. This was paperwork quite as important as any captured in Strasbourg by the ALSOS mission – America’s own effort to impound the enemy’s advanced technology.

  Then there was the uranium itself, found hidden among barrels of lead in a tanning plant. More than a hundred tonnes of uranium oxide were sent to Moscow – enough to power an experimental nuclear pile capable of sustaining a chain reaction.

  Uranium was vital to the Soviet atomic effort. In southern and south-western Saxony, in Germany’s Soviet zone, silver and cobalt mines were stripped to provide equipment for new uranium mines. The silver, cobalt, bismuth, nickel and other ores dug out along with the uranium were simply thrown on waste piles.

  Equally important, and in short supply, were the skills required to purify uranium. Georgy Flyorov and his colleague Lev Artsimovich found themselves bundled in with Zavenyagin’s ‘fishing expedition’. In the uniforms of NKVD colonels they went to pick up Karl Zimmer, the research radiologist who had collaborated with Max Delbrück and Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky on research into the size and nature of the gene.

  With Zimmer in tow, they visited Zimmer’s close colleague Nikolaus Riehl, inventor of the fluorescent lamp and, more to the point, the research director of Auer. Auer specialised in the production of special materials and in 1939, figuring uranium was a ‘special material’ of the future, Zimmer and Riehl had got Auer involved in the German bomb project.

  Flyorov and Artsimovich asked Riehl to join them for a ‘few days’ of discussion in Berlin. The Russian-born (and, it so happened, half-Jewish) Riehl offered no objections. Word had gone round that the Soviets were promising one- and two-year employment contracts. For Riehl, as for virtually everyone else the Soviets approached, such a business trip, with its chance to send regular food parcels to relatives in destitute Germany, was very welcome; certainly it overrode any political qualms.

  Riehl quickly discovered how important he was to the Russian effort. Zavenyagin’s group wouldn’t let him go home. They detained him in Berlin-Friedrichschagen until 9 June, when he was flown to Moscow, along with his family and some of his staff.

  In Moscow, Riehl was handed the task of purifying uranium metal. He was, he supposed, a captive. But having survived the Nazi regime, this was a captivity he found it hard to resent. He was treated like royalty. ‘In other respects it was really terrible, the living standard, terrible,’ he recalled. ‘But not for us. We had everything.’ More important, he was treated with civility: ‘We never experienced any direct expressions of hate toward us Germans, or even felt it. Teenagers sometimes made minor derogatory remarks in our early days … but were quickly called to order by older people.’16

  On 16 July 1945 at 5.30 a.m., the United States tested an atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The news was telegraphed to Harry Truman, who’d succeeded Roosevelt as US president: ‘Babies satisfactorily born.’

  The next day, the Potsdam conference began, at which Churchill, Truman and Stalin were to discuss the post-war settlement.

  On 24 July, says Truman’s official interpreter Charles Bohlen, the president told him that he would ‘stroll over to Stalin and nonchalantly inform him’ about the bomb. Truman walked around the conference table and sidled up to Stalin. He ‘casually mentioned’ that the United States had ‘a new weapon of unusual destructive force’.

  Stalin managed not to show the hit: ‘All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped that we make “good use of it against the Japanese”.’

  In private, Stalin was rattled. He told Molotov, his minister of foreign affairs, ‘We’ll have to have a talk with Kurchatov today about speeding up our work.’ He still had no idea how far behind the Soviet Union had fallen in the race for the bomb. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, less than a month later, left him in no doubt: he had been trumped.

  ‘Stalin was really enraged,’ recalled Sergei Kruglov, Stalin’s minister of internal affairs:

  That was the first time during the war that he lost control of himself … What he perceived was the collapse of his dream of expansion of socialist revolution throughout all Europe, the dream that had seemed so real after the capitulation of Germany and was now invalidated by the ‘carelessness’ of our atomic scientists with Kurchatov at the top.17

  Construction of a Soviet uranium plant in Elektrostal, in Moscow’s Noginsky district, began immediately, using equipment brought from Riehl’s old company, Auer. ‘On one occasion Zavenyagin visited us in the tiny munitions laboratory where we were first located,’ Riehl recalled. ‘He asked the staff of Russian workmen, who encircled him respectfully, from where the various pieces of equipment had come. The response was uniform. Each had been liberated as war tribute from Germany. Just as this exercise was finished, a rat suddenly ran by. He said harshly, “That clearly is ours.”’

  By the end of the summer of 1946, three tonnes of uranium ore were arriving at Laboratory No. 2 every week. Nikolaus Riehl and his colleagues worked conscientiously and quickly. The effort won Riehl one of the batch of Stalin Prizes granted in November 1949. He was also made a Hero of Socialist Labour, with the Golden Star, ‘which, when worn on my breast, stirred looks of wonder on the faces of many top-ranking politicians’. And the rewards kept on coming: a Lenin Prize, a dacha in the woods west of Moscow, and best of all the opportunity to reassemble around him, as far as he could, the intellectual and professional circle that he had enjoyed in Berlin during the war.

  One day Zavenyagin, the Atomic Minister in Russia, called me and said, ‘Do you know a Dr. Zimmer and a Dr. Born?’ I said, ‘Yes, I know both of them very well.’ ‘Do you wish them?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ Then it became clear to me that the poor gentlemen were captives. I had not known it previously. I had thought they were walking about Berlin as free men and envied them … I tried to arrange the situation so that Zimmer and Born would not actually be working directly in the uranium activity but in ways that would be closely related to it. That was, of course, somewhat of a swindle, since we had no need for a geneticist and also had relatively little to do with radiochemistry. However, I wanted to keep them busy.18

  This, then, was the reason that Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky had been saved from the gulag and – as best the doctors could manage it – restored to health. Object 0211 (sometimes referred to as Laboratory B) was a fascinating, many-sided institute exploring radiation biology, dosimetry and radiochemistry. Timofeev-Ressovsky was there to work.

  He found himself among radiologists, chemists and botanists gathered from all over the Soviet Union and those territories under Soviet control. (One young geneticist, Nikolai Viktorovich Luchnik, arrived out of nowhere, caught on the wrong side of the lines at the end of the war. He had managed to blag his way out of the work camps by passing himself off as a worker on the Nazi atom bomb project.) Technically, Timofeev-Ressovsky remained a criminal (there were criminal prisoners among the service staff, including a rather likeable murderer), but he was housed very well, and treated as well as the Germans – a group which, to his delight, turned out to include his old friends fro
m Berlin, Buch. Better still, he was given leave to write to his wife in Germany.

  Since the end of the war, Elena had been working at Berlin University. In 1948, she left with her younger son Andrei for Object 0211. The couple, reunited, once more worked hand-in-glove – only now, Elena had also to be the purblind Nikolai’s amanuensis.

  In September 1950 there was another important arrival at Object 0211: Nikolaus Riehl himself. Now that he had solved how to purify sufficient quantities of the uranium arriving from Elektrostal, the authorities didn’t know quite what to do with him. It was Zavenyagin, in the end, who offered Riehl the chance to direct operations at the sharashka.

  The smallest of all the laboratories under Zavenyagin’s care, 0211 was a pure research effort, investigating the effects of the radiological weapons that were being developed in the USSR until 1954. The atmosphere was set by the scientists, and life was good, though the weather was, as Riehl put it, ‘intensely continental’. (In winter, the temperature regularly dropped below –40 °C.)

  Left to set their own research agenda, the Timofeev-Ressovskys and their German colleagues set about trying to understand how radioactivity impacted living organisms and ecosystems. Their experiments were simple affairs, done in slab boxes and rain barrels. The barrels were filled with boxes of earth; a mixture of radioisotopes was poured in from one end, and the components could be measured as they came out the other.

  This new field of study, radiation ecology, revealed how radioactive isotopes spread, accumulated and migrated through experimental and natural biological systems. It was conducted very much in the spirit of Vladimir Vernadsky’s major environmental work. When, much later, Timofeev-Ressovsky finally got the chance to publish, he acknowledged the debt: he called this field ‘Vernadskology’.

  Object 0211’s gaoler was Alexander Konstantinovich Uralets, an NKVD colonel who knew nothing whatsoever about genetics, and very little about science in general. He was an economist. Uralets turned out to have a lively mind, however, and the more he learned about the work of the scientists in his care, the more he wanted to learn from them. Timofeev-Ressovsky took him under his wing, and Uralets proved an able and conscientious student. When genetics once again came under attack, he proved an extremely loyal ally. Do what you would usually do, he would say: just don’t publish. As a consequence (and at considerable personal risk), Uralets’s ‘jail’ became virtually the only place in the USSR where geneticists were not harried or repressed.

  *

  Despite enjoying privileged living conditions, Russian scientists and engineers hit the walls of their little world quite easily. Beria, whose suspicion of his own intelligence-gathering had delayed the development of the Soviet bomb by years,19 infected the staff of the NKVD with the same malady. His men were not above asking scientists handling plutonium hemispheres daft questions like ‘Why do you think it is plutonium?’ At the very end of 1946, a few days after Kurchatov’s pioneering reactor20 went critical, generating 100 watts of electricity (enough to power a decent light bulb), Beria himself visited and was given control of the three cadmium cooling rods. Raising and lowering these through the lattice of uranium lumps, each embedded in a graphite sphere, controlled the rate of the chain-reaction. The Geiger counter screamed as Beria raised the rods, but Beria was unimpressed: ‘Is that all?’ he demanded, suspiciously. ‘Nothing more? Can I go to the reactor?’ Kurchatov stopped him.

  Beria, a notorious sadist, was a natural manager of sharashki. More than most, he thrived on the entrepreneurial possibilities of terror. The rumour went that he had a system: those who were marked to be shot in case of failure would receive the title of Hero of Socialist Labour should they succeed; those who would have received maximum prison terms would be given the Order of Lenin, and so on. He told one of his managers ‘You’re a good worker but if you’d served six years in the camps, you’d work even better.’21

  He was far less effective at managing his free personnel – figures often highly regarded in their own fields, who had taken full personal advantage of the relaxed ideological atmosphere of the war years. His run-ins with the physicist and inveterate letterwriter Peter Kapitsa were particularly revealing: the old police chief had no reputation for being polite or tolerant, and Kapitsa had a reputation for leaping fiercely to his own defence. When Kapitsa joined the bomb project, tensions developed quickly.22

  Just before the war, Peter Kapitsa had developed a new method for producing liquid oxygen for industry – work that had earned him his first Stalin Prize. Not one to take success lying down, Kapitsa made plans for factories, and planned to transport the liquid oxygen throughout the country in specially designed railway tanks. He lobbied hard and, as usual, his letters took no prisoners. To Molotov he wrote: ‘all this time, I have worked as a mule driver, and I have been denied both a stick and a switch. I think that in one way or another, I should be granted official power to direct all the processes of industrial inculcation.’

  Within a month, he had been put in charge of a new Chief Directorate for Oxygen. This high bureaucratic post got him listened to far more than his scientific achievements ever had, and at the end of the war his achievements as an administrator earned him the country’s highest civil title, Hero of Socialist Labour, and a brief involvement in the Soviet bomb project.

  The brevity was largely down to Lavrenty Beria. Under Beria’s supervision the Soviet bomb was evolving by slow, expensive, deliberately painstaking and redundant steps, as it slavishly reproduced the American effort. Kapitsa could not understand why Beria persistently ignored the Soviet Union’s great advantage – their certain knowledge that an atomic device would work. ‘We want to retry everything the Americans did rather than try to follow our own path. We are forgetting that to follow the American path is beyond our means, and will take a long time.’23

  It seemed to Kapitsa that he himself could do a better job if only he was given more power over the project. On 3 October 1945 he wrote to Stalin in terms that just a few years before would have got him shot:

  There was a time when the Patriarch stood alongside the Emperor; the Church was then the repository of culture. The Church is becoming obsolete and the patriarchs have had their day, but the country cannot manage without leaders in the sphere of ideas … it is time for comrades like Comrade Beria to begin to learn respect for scientists.

  After Beria saw the letter he turned up at Kapitsa’s institute carrying a double-barrelled shotgun. It was a gift, a peace offering – but the men could not work together.

  Kapitsa was a member of both the Special Committee gathered for the bomb project and its Technical Council. In his letter to Stalin he had offered to resign from both posts – a gesture that he probably meant rhetorically. In December, Stalin called Kapitsa’s bluff, met his ‘request’ and released him from his duties.

  Beria, still smarting from Kapitsa’s patrician criticisms, did not let the matter lie. In 1946 he tried to have Kapitsa arrested, but Stalin told him: ‘I will remove him for you, but don’t you touch him.’ Stalin was as good as his word, and eventually signed the official decision that said that Kapitsa had failed to fulfil government orders for the production of gaseous oxygen.

  Having lost almost all his official positions except the Academy membership, Kapitsa retreated to his dacha outside Moscow. There he arranged a garage laboratory, ironically nicknamed the ‘Hut for Physical Problems’, published a few academic publications, and otherwise disappeared from public view.

  Stalin had raised Kapitsa; now Stalin had cut him down. It was a pattern that took no one by surprise – a pattern repeated in small ways across the science and engineering base of the country. In the sharashka system you were invisible, but safe. Though physically a captive, you had freedom of thought. Outside the sharashki, you earned good money, had the ear of the state, and had all the privileges of a bureaucratic career. But it was a precarious business.

  Notes

  1. Richard L. Garwin, ‘Enrico Fermi and Ethical Problem
s in Scientific Research’, presented at Enrico Fermi and Modern Physics, Pisa, Italy (19 October 2001).

  2. Rokityanskij, N. V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky in Germany, p. 576.

  3. Interview of Nikolaus Riehl by Mark Walker. Transcript, 17 October 1985. American Institute of Physics. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4844–2.

  4. Georgy S. Levit and Uwe Hossfeld, ‘From Molecules to the Biosphere: Nikolai V. Timoféeff-Ressovsky’s (1900–1981) Research Program within a Totalitarian Landscape’, Theory in Biosciences 128, no. 4 (16 October 2009), pp. 237–48.

  5. Nikolaus Riehl, Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb.

  6. Quoted in Rokityanskij, N. V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky in Germany, p. 578.

  7. See for example A. Kuzmin, ‘K kakomu khramu ischchem mi dorogu?’ [‘Toward What Sort of Cathedral Are We Searching for a Road?’], Nash Sovremennik 1988, Vol. 3, pp. 154–64.

  8. Timofeev-Ressovsky, The Stories Told by Himself with Letters, Photos and Documents, p. 360.

  9. Vadim A. Ratner, ‘Nikolay Vladimirovich Timofeeff-Ressovsky (1900–1981): Twin of the Century of Genetics’, in Genetics 158, no. 3 (July 1, 2001), p. 936.

  10. In the run up to the Trinity test, while they were waiting for suitable weather, Enrico Fermi broke the tension among the American bomb development team by offering a wager on whether or not their bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.

  11. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 60–9.

  12. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, p. 182.