The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman J. Dyson

  British prime ministers, soon after they come into office, customarily visit Washington and Moscow to get acquainted with American and Russian leaders. When Prime Minister James Callahan made his state visit to Moscow he had two amicable meetings with Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. At the end of the second day he remarked that he was happy to discover that there were no urgent problems threatening to bring the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union into conflict. Brezhnev then replied with some emphatic words in Russian. Callahan’s interpreter hesitated, and instead of translating Brezhnev’s remark asked him to repeat it. Brezhnev repeated it and the interpreter translated: “Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Callahan was so taken aback that he did not venture either to agree or to disagree with this sentiment. He made his exit without further comment. What he had heard was a distant echo of the Mongol hoofbeat still reverberating in Russian memory.

  After the Mongols, invaders came to Russia from the West—from Poland, from Sweden, from France, and from Germany. Each of the invading armies was a horde in the Russian sense of the word, a disciplined force of warriors superior to the Russians in technology, in mobility, and in generalship. Especially the German horde invading Russia in 1941 conformed to the ancient pattern. But the Russians had made some progress in military organization between 1238 and 1941. It took them three hundred years to drive out the Mongols but only four years to drive out the Germans.

  During the intervening centuries the Russians, while still thinking of themselves as victims, had become in fact a nation of warriors. In order to survive in a territory perennially exposed to invasion, they maintained great armies and gave serious study to the art of war. They imposed upon themselves a regime of rigid political unity and military discipline. They gave high honor and prestige to their soldiers, and devoted a large fraction of their resources to the production of weapons. Within a few years after 1941, the Russians who survived the German invasion had organized themselves into the most formidable army on earth. The more they think of themselves as victims, the more formidable they become.

  Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the classic statement of the Russian view of war. Tolstoy understood, perhaps more deeply than anyone else, the nature of war as Russia experienced it. He fought with the Russian army against the British and French at Sevastopol. He spent some of his happiest years as an artillery cadet on garrison duty in the Caucasus. In War and Peace he honored the courage and steadfastness of the ordinary Russian soldiers who defeated Napoleon in spite of the squabbles and blunders of their commanders. He drew from the campaign of 1812 the same lessons which a later generation of soldiers drew from the campaigns of World War II. He saw war as a desperate improvisation, in which nothing goes according to plan and the historical causes of victory and defeat remain incalculable.

  Tolstoy’s thoughts about war and victory are expressed by his hero Prince Andrei on the eve of the Battle of Borodino. Andrei is talking to his friend Pierre:

  “To my mind what is before us tomorrow is this: a hundred thousand Russian and a hundred thousand French troops have met to fight, and the fact is that these two hundred thousand men will fight, and the side that fights most desperately and spares itself least will conquer. And if you like, I’ll tell you that whatever happens, and whatever mess they make up yonder, we shall win the battle tomorrow; whatever happens we shall win the victory.” “So you think the battle tomorrow will be a victory,” said Pierre. “Yes, yes,” said Prince Andrei absently. “There’s one thing I would do, if I were in power,” he began again, “I wouldn’t take prisoners. What sense is there in taking prisoners? That’s chivalry. The French have destroyed my home and are coming to destroy Moscow; they have outraged and are outraging me at every second. They are my enemies, they are all criminals to my way of thinking.… They must be put to death.… War is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept it sternly and solemnly as a fearful necessity.”

  The battle was duly fought, and Prince Andrei was mortally wounded. The Russians lost, according to the generally accepted meaning of the word “lose”: half of the Russian army was destroyed; after the battle the Russians retreated and the French advanced. And yet, in the long view, Prince Andrei was right. Russia’s defeat at Borodino was a strategic victory. Napoleon’s army was so mauled that it had no stomach for another such battle. Napoleon advanced to Moscow, stayed there for five weeks waiting for the Tsar to sue for peace, and then fled with his disintegrating army in its disastrous stampede to the West. “Napoleon,” concludes Tolstoy, “is represented to us as the leader in all this movement, just as the figurehead in the prow of a ship to the savage seems the force that guides the ship on its course. Napoleon in his activity all this time was like a child, sitting in a carriage, pulling the straps within it, and fancying he is moving it along.”1

  I have been lucky to have had as a friend and colleague for forty years George Kennan, who spent the first half of his life as a diplomat serving in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe, and the second half as a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He died in 2005 at the age of 101. His fate, throughout his long double career as government servant and independent scholar, was to be a teller of complicated truths to people who prefer simple illusions. Sometimes he has been driven close to despair by the inability of the American political system to pay attention to people with expert knowledge of the world outside. In 1944, when he was a member of the American embassy staff in Moscow, deeply troubled by the gap between American perception and Russian realities, he wrote a thirty-five-page essay summarizing his firsthand view of Russia, for the benefit of his superiors in Washington. Kennan afterward described the concluding sentences of this essay as “a melancholy, but for me personally most prophetic, passage”:

  There will be much talk about the necessity for “understanding Russia”; but there will be no place for the American who is really willing to undertake this disturbing task. The apprehension of what is valid in the Russian world is unsettling and displeasing to the American mind. He who would undertake this apprehension will not find his satisfaction in the achievement of anything practical for his people, still less in any official or public appreciation for his efforts. The best he can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.

  For sixty years after those words were written, Kennan continued, as diplomat and historian, to bring us his reports from the mountaintop. At the end he knew that his efforts had not always been unappreciated.

  My own view of the mountaintop has been derived partly from conversations with Kennan, partly from brief scientific visits to Russia, and partly from readings in Russian literature. The readings in Russian literature began earliest and have left the deepest impression. As a teenager I worked my way through The Oxford Book of Russian Verse, guided by Maurice Baring’s magnificent introduction. I found there, among other things, the poem “On the Field of Kulikovo” by Alexander Blok, which tells more about the Russian view of war than a whole library of strategic analysis. The Battle of Kulikovo was fought a century and a half after the destruction of Vladimir, but Blok’s poem carries the same haunting message as the diorama in the Vladimir museum. Blok is riding over the steppe with the Russian horsemen the night before the battle:

  I am not the first, nor the last, warrior,

  Many years more will my country suffer.

  At Kulikovo the Russians for the first time defeated a Tartar horde. The battle was a turning point in the centuries-long struggle of Russians against Tartars, not the end of the struggle but a new beginning. Blok wrote his poem in the year 1908, at a time of peace and prosperity, but he felt already the shadow of approaching storms:

  I perceive you now, begi
nning

  Of high turbulent days. Once more

  Over the enemy camp the winging

  Of swans is heard, swans trumpeting War.2

  Ten years later, in January 1918, three months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, amid the chaos and cold of revolutionary Petrograd, Blok wrote his greatest poem, “The Twelve,” which told us more about the nature of Soviet power than a whole library of Kremlinology. The twelve are a group of young soldiers of the Red Guard, marching through the city in a snowstorm, rough and tough and profane and trigger-happy:

  “Grip your gun like a man, brother.

  We’ll pump some lead into Holy Russia,

  Ancient, peasant-ridden, fat-arsed Mother Russia.

  Freedom, Freedom! Down with the Cross!”

  “Open your cellars: quick, run down!

  The scum of the earth are hitting the town!”

  Abusing God’s name as they go,

  The twelve march onward through the snow,

  Prepared for anything,

  Regretting nothing.

  In the final scene of the poem, the twelve are chasing a shadowy figure who lurks in a snowdrifted alleyway. They shout at the figure to surrender, then open fire. The echoes of their gunshots die away. The howling of the storm continues:

  So they march with sovereign tread.

  Behind them limps the hungry dog,

  Ahead of them, carrying the blood-red flag,

  Unseen in the blizzard,

  Untouched by the bullets,

  Stepping soft-footed over the snow

  In a swirl of pearly snowflakes,

  Crowned with a wreath of white roses,

  Ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.3

  Blok remained in Russia until his death in 1921. Shortly before he died, he reaffirmed the vision which “The Twelve” had recorded:

  I do not go back on what I wrote then, because it was written in harmony with the elemental: for instance, during and after the writing of “The Twelve,” for some days I physically felt and heard a great roar surrounding me, a continuous roar, probably the roar of the collapse of the old world.… The poem was written in that exceptional and always very brief period when the passing revolutionary cyclone raises a storm in every sea.… The seas of nature, life and art were raging and the foam rose up in a rainbow over them. I was looking at that rainbow when I wrote “The Twelve.”

  My own personal encounter with the armed forces of the Soviet revolution occurred in a later and more tranquil time. It was in May 1956, when the Russians organized the first postwar international meeting of high-energy physicists in Moscow. Russian experimental work in high-energy physics had previously been kept secret, for reasons which had little to do with military security. The last years of Stalin’s life had been years of terror and silence for Russian intellectuals; even in the nonpolitical domain of physical science, publication had been severely restricted and contacts with foreign scientists almost nonexistent. When Stalin died, the icy grip of secrecy slowly weakened. In 1954 Ilya Ehrenburg was allowed to publish his novel The Thaw, which described the fresh stirrings of Russian life after the long winter. By 1956 the physicists were ready to celebrate the return of spring with a big conference to which colleagues from all over the world were invited. The conference was a joyful occasion for the Russians and for us too. Old friendships were renewed and new friendships established. The Russian newspapers gave us front-page coverage, and proudly described how the great leaders of international science were now coming to Moscow to learn about the great achievements of Soviet scientists.

  After the Moscow meeting ended, I went with a group of foreign scientists to Leningrad. Accompanied by two Intourist guides, we went sightseeing along the shore to the west of the city. We walked by mistake into a coast guard station, evidently a restricted military area. An ordinary Russian seaman came out to shoo us away, shouting Nelzya, which means “forbidden.” At that moment we noticed that our guides, afraid of being held responsible for our error, were walking rapidly away in the opposite direction. So we stayed and had a friendly chat with the seaman in our broken Russian. When I said we were foreign scientists, he broke out into a broad smile and said, “Oh, I know who you are. You are the people who came to the meeting in Moscow, and you know all about pi-mesons and mu-mesons.” He pulled out of his pocket a crumpled copy of Pravda which contained a report of our proceedings. After that, he invited us into the station and proudly introduced us to his comrades. We sat with them for some minutes and did our best to explain to them what we had learned in Moscow about pi-mesons and mu-mesons. When we said good-bye, our host shook our hands warmly and said, “Why do you not come to our country more often? Be sure to tell the people in your countries, and your wives and children, that we would like to see more of them.” As I walked back into Leningrad and reflected upon this encounter, I found myself sadly wondering whether an average American coast guard sentry, confronted unexpectedly with a group of Russian physicists speaking broken English, would have greeted them with equal friendliness and understanding.

  Postscript, 2006

  My most recent trip to Russia was in October 2003. Another unexpected encounter, this time with a young woman tour guide at the monastery of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow. Instead of talking about the churches and the famous works of art, she talked about her own spiritual experiences as a believer. She told how her life was changed when she came to one of the old tombs and smelled a holy scent emerging from the tomb. She knew then that she was called to be a guide and teach others about the mystical powers of the old saints. This is a religion very different from our Western versions of Christianity. It is a religion based on holy magic rather than Bible stories, mystical dreams rather than theological arguments.

  1. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Constance Garnett (Random House, 1931).

  2. The Oxford Book of Russian Verse, edited by Maurice Baring (Clarendon Press, 1924).

  3. Alexander Blok, The Twelve and Other Poems, translated by John Stallworthy and Peter France (Oxford University Press, 1970).

  10

  PACIFISTS

  THOUGHTLESSLY I SAID to the Russian sailor in the coast guard station, “You should also come and see us in America.” He looked at me, laughing, with his broad young face. “How could we come to America? That’s impossible. We are warriors.” It was strange to hear him use that word, voyenniye—“warriors.” He looked so unwarlike, sitting with his friends around the table and chatting with us about pi-mesons and mu-mesons. And yet the word spoke truth. His trade was war. He belonged to that ancient brotherhood of warriors which Alexander Blok described in his poems, the horsemen riding by night over the field of Kulikovo, the twelve marching in the snowstorm through the desolate streets of Petrograd. All his friendliness, his intellectual curiosity, his boyish humor could not alter the fact that he was a willing tool of Soviet power. A warrior he was, and a warrior he would remain, even after he finished his term of military service and found his niche in civilian society. All his life, he would be proud to have been a part of the Soviet navy. If ever he was called to sail into battle and die for his country, he would hesitate no more than those who sailed with Nelson at Trafalgar. If ever he was called to launch the missile that would obliterate a city, he would hesitate no more than those who aimed the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I imagine nuclear war, the nightmare begins with that young Russian sailor pressing the button which blows us all to smithereens, and as he presses it, he says, “We are warriors,” with that same laughing voice of murderous innocence which I heard in Leningrad long ago.

  Is there no other way? Is there no other tradition for our young men to follow than the tradition of warriors marching into battle to defend the honor of their tribe? Indeed there is another tradition, the tradition of pacifism, which also has a long and honorable history. For hundreds of years there have been religious sects which held warfare to be contrary to the will of God. Anabaptists and Quakers were preaching the gospel of nonvi
olence in the seventeenth century, and suffering persecution for their beliefs. This old tradition of nonviolence was personal rather than political. The Quakers allowed no authority to come between the individual conscience and God. They refused, as individuals, to bear arms or to take any part in the waging of wars. They did not seek political power for themselves or attempt to control the actions of governments. They simply declared that they would not take any action forbidden by their consciences. The tradition of personal pacifism which they established has proved durable. It has lasted for three hundred years and has taken root in many countries. Pacifism as a code of personal ethics has proved itself able to weather the storms of war and political change.

  Pacifism as a political program is a more recent development. A political pacifist is one who advocates the ethic of nonviolence as a program for a political movement or for a government. Theorists of pacifism make a sharp distinction between personal and political pacifism. In the real world, this distinction is useful but never sharp. There is a continuum of pacifism, extending all the way from the private faith of the traditional conscientious objector to the modern rituals of nonviolent demonstration staged by political action groups in front of television cameras. Pacifism may be a matter of individual conscience or a matter of tactical calculation. Most commonly it is a mixture of both. If pacifism is ever to prevail in the modern world, it must be both personal and political, cherishing the deep roots of the religious pacifist tradition and at the same time exploiting the opportunities provided by modern communications to mobilize public protest. Gandhi, the first and greatest of modern political pacifists, showed us how it can be done.