Abstract
Much of the information in this and the following chapters comes from the book “Delo” UFTI 1935–1938 by Jury Pavlenko, Jury Khramov and Jury Ranjuk, published in 1998 in Kiev [1].
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Notes
- 1.
The name Katod-Kredo was used in the telegram from Moscow, dated 24 July 1937, ordering the arrest of Shubnikov, Rozenkevich and Pëtr Komarov (Pëtr Frolovich Komarov was a party member and the UFTI party organiser; after Weissberg’s arrest in 1937 he led the construction of OSGO; was arrested and died in prison (Ref. [3], p. 136)). Jury Ranjuk did not succeed in finding a personal case on Komarov in the UFTI archives, nor a file at the NKVD (Ref. [1], p. 226). For details on Komarov, see also Ref. [2], Chap. 2 and p. 76, and Chap. 3, p. 118 and p. 126ff, which describes a confrontation with Komarov while in prison.
- 2.
Konrad Weisselberg (1905–1937) was born into a Jewish family in Bârlad (Bariach) in present-day Romania, not far from the border with Ukraine. At some point the family moved to Vienna, where Weisselberg studied chemistry at the university, earning a PhD in 1930. Like Weissberg, Weisselberg was first a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and from 1933 of the Austrian Communist Party (Ref. [4], pp. 546–547).
- 3.
According to the authors of Ref. [1], p. 197, who have not seen Weissberg’s file, which remains hidden in the KGB archives, people who have seen the file claim that it is in agreement with Weissberg’s book Conspiracy of Silence (Ref. [2]). From Weissberg’s book it is not apparent that at first a single joint case was opened for the two of them.
- 4.
Meant here is Karl Borromäus Frank (1893–1969), who was born in Vienna and was a member of the Austrian Communist Party. Weissberg knew him from 1918 when he was still a schoolboy (Ref. [2], p. 152). Frank emigrated to Germany in 1920 and was a member of the German Communist Party from 1920. From 1929 he was a member of a rightist opposition group within the party which adopted a critical attitude towards the policies of the Soviet Communist Party. He later became a member of the German Socialist Party and after Hitler’s takeover of power emigrated to the US.
- 5.
William S. Schlamm (1904–1978) was an Austrian journalist and writer. He wrote for communist journals until the thirties, after which he went into exile in the US and became a conservative. He is remembered for having coined the saying: “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”.
- 6.
Note that this application dates several months prior to the arrest of Shubnikov and the other UFTI scientists.
- 7.
The highest legislative body in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1938.
- 8.
This agrees with Conquest (Ref. [5], p. 279) who claims that the change to the so-called simplified interrogation procedures, which involved beatings and other maltreatment, can be dated precisely to 17–18 August 1937, when they suddenly came into force in Moscow, Kharkov and elsewhere.
- 9.
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Armand (1894–1967) was head of the Scientific-Research Sector of Narkomtjazhprom from 1933 to 1937. After Ordzhonikidze’s death Armand lost his job, was expelled from the party, but no further harm was done to him.
- 10.
Solomon Samojlovich Mazo (1900–1937), head of the Kharkov District of the NKVD, committed suicide in 1937, leaving a note saying “Comrades, come to your senses! Where does such policy of arrests and extraction of information from the accused lead to?”.
- 11.
Vsevolod Apollonovich Balitsky (1892–1937), People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukraine, executed in 1937. Like Shubnikov, the son of a bookkeeper and a gymnasium graduate. Arrested in June 1937 and shot in November, similar to Shubnikov. A difference is that he has not been rehabilitated. A petition to that effect was rejected in 1998. For one year the stadium of Dynamo Kiev was named after him; this stadium was then for a very short period named after Nikolaj Yezhov, and is now named after the football manager Valery Lobanovsky.
- 12.
His arrest was authorised in the same telegram as the arrest of Shubnikov and Rozenkevich.
- 13.
Shubnikov’s name seems to be out of place here.
- 14.
This would suggest that Rjabinin had already left UFTI before Weissberg’s arrest while in his book Conspiracy of Silence he says to have seen him at UFTI a few weeks before.
- 15.
This agrees with the information in Chap. 7, namely that in letters to Lejpunsky Landau and Shubnikov had written that they seriously considered moving to Moscow, and that Lejpunsky did not really appreciate the seriousness of the situation at UFTI.
- 16.
The person called Marcel in Weissberg’s book is in fact Weisselberg. The statements made about ‘Marcel’ by Weissberg and the entry about him in [4] are about all we know about Weisselberg who has all but been blotted out from the history of mankind.
- 17.
It had been founded in 1930 and still exists as the Ukrainian State Research Institute for Carbochemistry.
- 18.
Nothing is known about this person, nor about any statement he made.
- 19.
Article 54 had 14 basic components: Article 54-1: high treason; Article 54-2: bourgeois separatism and nationalism; Article 54-3: being an accomplice to the enemy; Article 54-4: being an agent of the world bourgeoisie; Article 54-5: inciting a foreign state to declare war on the USSR; Article 54-6: espionage; Article 54-7: conducting subversive activities; Article 54-8: terrorism; Article 54-9: committing acts of sabotage of the transport, communications or water supply system; Article 54-10: conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation; Article 54-11: being a member of an anti-Soviet organization; Article 54-12: not informing the Soviet authorities about forthcoming or already perpetrated counter-revolutionary crimes; Article 54-13: committing crimes against the working class or revolution movement; Article 54-14: committing sabotage and not fulfilling duties in order to weaken the Soviet power. (http://www.volhynia.com/his-nkvd.html)
- 20.
It is somewhat remarkable that all sentences in the UFTI cases have been signed by Yezhov and Vyshinsky, the highest officials in the land. On 30 July 1937 Troikas were set up on Stalin’s instructions with the power to impose the death penalty. They soon became Dvoikas (‘out of revolutionary urgency’) consisting merely of two members, one from the NKVD and one from the Prosecutor’s Office. All provinces and republics had such Troikas or Dvoikas established which, in principle, dealt with all local cases. Yezhov and Vyshinsky fulfilled this role of Dvoika at the centre. For UFTI it would have been more logical if the local Ukrainian Dvoika had passed the sentence in these cases. Apparently, UFTI was considered so important that Moscow remained closely involved. See Ref. [5], p. 286.
- 21.
Becoming a citizen of the USSR did not work in someone’s favour as regards treatment by the NKVD it seems. There are many cases of foreigners who became citizens of the USSR and were subsequently murdered, while those who didn’t, such as Weissberg, were in the end expelled from the country.
- 22.
Brilliantov is mentioned in several statements by various people, but he was never arrested; he was probably not targeted as he was not the leader of a group, laboratory or department. In 1937 Obreimov sent him to Kapitsa’s institute in Moscow for safety reasons. That action possibly saved him.
- 23.
Semën Jakovlevich Braude (1911–2003), pursued his higher education at Kharkov University, receiving his undergraduate degree from the Physics and Mathematics Department in 1932. He then joined the staff of the Laboratory of Electromagnetic Oscillations (LEMO) at UFTI, and also began graduate work at Kharkov University. His mentor was Abram Slutskin. In an interview with him in 1988 he does not mention Gorsky at all, nor that he at some time had to leave UFTI for one reason or another. Upon a question from the interviewer A.A. Kostenko as to how he can explain that Slutskin’s laboratory was the only one that was spared any arrests in 1937–1938, he gives a rather evasive answer (rian.kharkov.ua/library/exposition/file/braude.doc).
There are a few other scientists-engineers called Braude (notably the brothers Girsh (1906–1992) and Boris Vulfovich (1910–1999)) who worked on radio and television technology, but were never at UFTI.
- 24.
I have been unable to find anything about this in UFN.
- 25.
It had originated in 1935 as part of the Leningrad Electrophysical Institute (directed by the electrotechnician Aleksej Alekseevich Chernishev (1882–1940)), which in its turn had split off from LFTI in 1931.
- 26.
A playful touch is that Gej mentions Charlotte Schlesinger as a member of the second group. She was not a foreign specialist, but a distinguished pianist, who played in the Kharkov philharmonic, and had come to Kharkov with Houtermans and his wife Charlotte Riefenstahl (Ref. [7], p. 37). She was not working at UFTI, and although living on the premises in Houtermans’ apartment can hardly have been in a position to wreck the work at UFTI.
- 27.
However Dubovitsky (Ref. [8], p. 216) states that in 1936 Rjabinin first went to the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Leningrad, and only after the liquidation of that institute in 1940 to Semënov’s Institute of Chemical Physics, where he worked in the department of July Khariton. The institute moved to Moscow in 1943.
References
Ju.V. Pavlenko, Ju.N. Ranjuk and Ju.A. Khramov, “Delo” UFTI 1935–1938 (The “UFTI” Case 1935-1938) (Feniks, Kiev, 1998).
A. Weissberg, Conspiracy of Silence (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1952).
V.V. Kosarev, Fiztekh, Gulag i obratno (belye pjatna iz istorii leningradskogo Fiztekha) (Phystech, Gulag and back (white spots from the history of the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute) in: Chtenija pamjati A.F. Ioffe (Readings in memory of A.F. Ioffe) (Nauka, St. Petersburg, 1993), 105–177.
Barry McLoughlin and Josef Vogl, … Ein Paragraf wird sich finden. Gedenkbuch der österreichischen Stalin-Opfer (bis 1945) (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, 2013).
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Pimlico, London, 2008).
Ju.N. Ranjuk “Delo UFTI” Istoricheskie Kommentarii k knige Aleksandra Wajsberga “Obvinjaemyj” (“The UFTI Affair” Historical Comments to Alexander Weissberg’s book “The Accused”), Journal 22, no. 117 (Tel-Aviv, 2013).
Edoardo Amaldi, The Adventurous Life of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, Physicist (1903–1966) (Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2012).
F.I. Dubovitskij, Institut khimicheskoj fiziki: ocherki istorii (Institute of Chemical Physics: Historical Essays) (Chernogolovka, 1992).
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Reinders, L.J. (2018). The UFTI Affair: The Case of Weissberg and Weisselberg. In: The Life, Science and Times of Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72098-2_10
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