The Great Terror

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Our Institute is one of the most important of its kind in Europe. In fact there is probably no other institute with so many different and well-equipped laboratories. The Soviet Government has spared no expense. Our leading scientists were partly trained abroad. They were constantly being sent to leading physicists all over the world at Government expense to supplement their knowledge and experience. Our Institute had eight departments each headed by a capable man. And what’s the situation now? The head of the laboratory for crystallography, Obremov, is under arrest, and so is the head of the low-temperature laboratory, Shubnikov. The head of the second low-temperature laboratory, Ruhemann, has been deported. The head of the laboratory for atom-splitting, Leipunsky, is under arrest, and so are the head of the Röntgen department, Gorsky, the head of the department for theoretical physics, Landau, and the head of the experimental low-temperature station, myself. As far as I know, Slutski, the head of the ultra-short-wave department, is the only one still at work.

‘Amongst those arrested is the founder of the Institute, Professor Obremov—its first director; Professor Leipunsky, member of the Academy of Sciences and later again director of the Institute; Professor Lev Davidovich Landau, the leading theoretical physicist in the Soviet Union.fn1 Landau had already been forced out of the Institute by the G.P.U., and he went to Moscow to work with Professor Kapitza. I supervised the building of our low-temperature experimental station, but before it could be put into operation I was arrested. My successor was Komarov. He has also been arrested. Who is to carry on?

‘… You need five years to train an engineer, and even then the Government had a very great deal of trouble before it could get suitable engineers for its new factories. But a capable physicist needs from ten to fifteen years’ training.’¹⁵

Matvei Bronshtein, a brilliant young physicist, was married to the writer Lydia Chukovskaya. He was arrested, and shot on 18 February 1938. She then wrote the story “Sofia Petrovna” (which only appeared in Russia in 1988, in the Leningrad magazine Neva). She had actually read it to Anna Akhmatova and eight others, who agreed that it could not be kept in the flat of the “wife of an enemy of the people.” And the NKVD, in fact, soon heard rumors and searched her place. A friend took it, but died in the siege of Leningrad. Before dying, however, he dragged himself to his sister’s to give her the manuscript to keep. After the war, the sister kept it, by arrangement with Chukovskaya, until she died in 1956. Then, after the dead woman’s belongings were dispersed, Chukovskaya finally found it in the bottom of a dust-covered wastepaper basket. Few such documents (for the story is factual) survive. It might have been published in Khrushchev’s time, but she refused to change a word.¹⁶

The purge also extended into the more technical sciences. For example, Academician Berg writes:

Thereafter there came difficult times: 1937, the loss of one’s close friends. Soon I too was arrested on a basis of a ridiculous and stupid denunciation. I spent precisely 900 days in prison. I was let out shortly before the war. During these years radio-technology suffered an enormous loss. Institutes and laboratories were closed down and people disappeared.’¹⁷

Sergei Korolev, the unique genius behind the Soviet early space program, was sent to Kolyma, but eventually brought to the NKVD prison aviation group KOSOS near the Yauza River. He had been told that “our country doesn’t need your fireworks. Or maybe you’re making rockets for an attempt on the life of our leader?” He was contemptuous of the regime, and fully expected to be shot.¹⁸

The aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev was arrested on 21 October 1937. He was kept standing “for many hours on end. Since I am a heavy man it was rather tough.”¹⁹ But on the advice of Muklevich, who was one of his cell mates, he confessed before worse befell him.²⁰

(His wife was also arrested.)²¹

The charge was of having sold plans to the Germans for use on the Messerschmidt 109.²² (The aviator Levanevsky had a couple of years earlier denounced him to Stalin as a wrecker.) In November 1938, Tupolev withdrew some of his testimony, and in the following years asserted his innocence in several appeals. He finally only got a ten-year sentence. He was later (foreign policy having changed) accused of being a French spy, but was in fact released in 1941. He had meanwhile worked, with other scientists, in one of the NKVD’s prisoner research units, of the type described in The First Circle.²³