Abstract
From the history of the first few years and the stormy development of the institute in Kharkov, from Shubnikov’s role in building the low-temperature laboratory and Landau’s flowering theory group, one might assume that everything was going well at UFTI.
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Notes
- 1.
Forced suicide or possibly even plain murder according to Ref. [1], p. 167 ff.
- 2.
Pjatakov was the brains and driving force behind the industrialization of the country; Ordzhonikidze depended entirely on his genius. The former created a major industrial base against all the obstacles that resulted from Stalin’s system. His services to the Soviet government were extremely valuable, and still Stalin had him executed, although he had completely abandoned his former oppositionist stance. (Ref. [1], p. 140.)
- 3.
The conference, including its non-scientific program, has been described in some detail by Crowther who also attended the conference (Ref. [2], pp. 112–125).
- 4.
Which also explains why except for this letter, I have been unable to find any mention of it in the documents that discuss UFTI’s history or Obreimov’s life and work. The history of UFTI in this period (1932–1937) is anyway scantily dealt with in the literature.
- 5.
Such faculties had been organised with the laudable idea of giving young working class people who often lacked any proper school education a rapid preparation for a study at university. They reached their greatest importance at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s when there were more than 1000 rabfaks in Moscow, Leningrad and other important universities in the country. In the study year 1925/26 about 40 per cent of those enrolling at university were graduates of rabfaks.
- 6.
He returned to Russia in the early autumn of 1934 for a couple of weeks, travelling with the Kapitsa’s in their car to Leningrad. It was Kapitsa’s fateful trip after which he was not allowed to return to England.
- 7.
The stress is on the letter ‘o’ contrary to the patronymic Davídovich.
- 8.
State Political Directorate under the NKVD of the RSFSR (Gosudarstevennoe politicheskoe upravlenie pri NKVD RSFSR). The GPU was dissolved in 1923 and succeeded by the OGPU, which in its turn was dissolved in 1934 and succeeded by the Main Directorate of State Security under the NKVD.
- 9.
Why he is called ‘professor’ here is not clear; he was certainly not teaching anything. Here it should also be noted that Lejpunsky was abroad when Crowther was at UFTI; Crowther gives the impression, which is odd, that he had already returned, but that was not the case; Lejpunsky actually returned to Russia for a short while in the autumn of 1934 while travelling with Pëtr Kapitsa and his family; before 12 October 1934 (Ref. [3], p. 567) he was back in Cambridge and only returned in September 1935, so Crowther is unlikely to have met him at UFTI; Gej was acting director and it was Gej who was replaced by Davidovich. However, Weissberg says in his testimony that he met Lejpunsky in April 1935 in Moscow when he was called from England to report to Ordzhonikidze, so it is not excluded that Lejpunsky was more often in the USSR in that year.
- 10.
Nothing is known about Lejpunsky having expressed any of these sentiments.
- 11.
This would mean that many if not to all of the other Leningrad people at UFTI must have known him, while for instance Gorelik (Ref. [4], p. 77) says “nobody at the institute knew him and he had no relation to science”, while Crowther says that he studied physics in Leningrad.
- 12.
If he is of the same age as Lejpunsky (born 1903) he must have been born around 1900 or even a few years later, and exiled from Russia when still a minor! Confirmation of this information would be very welcome.
- 13.
Socialist competition (or socialist emulation) was a form of competition between state enterprises and between individuals practiced in the Soviet Union and in other East-bloc countries. The word emulation is introduced to distinguish it from ‘capitalist competition’. Implied was that ‘capitalist competition’ only profited those who won, while ‘socialist emulation’ benefited all involved. (Wikipedia)
- 14.
Stepan Trofimovich Shavlo (b. 1899) at the time a trainee in Gorsky’s X-ray laboratory. He was one of the students sent by the party to higher education (the movement of the ‘thousands’ (tysjachniki or parttysjachniki): workers and young people with a proletarian background selected by the party and sent to universities and other higher education institutions at the end of the twenties to create the cadres needed to replace the old specialists (http://www.famhist.ru/famhist/landau/000ae7ee.htm). At Kharkov University they played a role in the student unrest that led to Landau’s dismissal. Shavlo was still working as a physicist in the sixties.
- 15.
Collective responsibility (krugavaja poruka) also known as collective guilt is a concept in which individuals are responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harbouring them, without actively collaborating in these actions.
- 16.
Leonid Moiseevich Pjatigorsky (1909–1993) was a co-author of the first volume (on Mechanics) of Landau’s famous course on theoretical physics. Pjatigorsky was a true Soviet child who lost both his parents and was himself heavily wounded (his right arm was later amputated) in 1919 in the anti-Soviet Grigorev rebellion in the Southern Ukraine, but was saved by the Soviets. He owed everything, down to his bare existence, to the Soviets and was therefore not surprisingly a faithful supporter of the Soviet government, which later brought him into difficulties with Landau, who suspected him, quite wrongly, of giving false testimony to the authorities, of having reported him to the NKVD as a German spy, accusations which were repeated later in biographies of Landau, but had to be rectified after a court case. From the NKVD documents the court established that Landau had never been accused of being a German spy. Weissberg (Ref. [6], p. 60) writes that Pjatigorsky was an informant of the NKVD. For more details about this tragic figure, see Ref. [9], p. 64 ff and Ref. [11].
- 17.
Sir Francis Simon (1893–1956) was a German and later British physical chemist and physicist who invented a method for liquefying helium in which helium is first cooled at high pressure by liquid or solid hydrogen and is then liquefied by a single adiabatic expansion. He also devised the method, and confirmed its feasibility, of separating the isotope Uranium-235. Among his other important achievements when working under Nernst in Berlin were the solidification of helium and of other gases by high pressures and the discovery of the specific heat anomaly in solid orthohydrogen. In 1936 he was able to produce the first liquid helium by using magnetic cooling at a laboratory at Bellevue near Paris. In the thirties he moved from Germany to Oxford. (N. Kurti, Franz Eugen Simon 1893–1956, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 4 (1958) 224–256).
- 18.
The letter was given by Korets’s daughter Natasha Golfand-Korets to Mikhail Shifman at a conference in Jerusalem and published by Shifman in the Russian journal Priroda [12].
- 19.
Modest Iosifovich Rubinshtejn (1894–1969) was a Soviet economist. He worked at Gosplan from 1931 and was a member of the Party Control Commission from 1934.
- 20.
This affair will be discussed later in this chapter.
- 21.
A copy of this note was kindly given to the author by Professor V.I. Sokolenko during a visit at the Kharkov institute in June 2016.
- 22.
Others, such as Sinelnikov and A.K. Valter, were likewise put under pressure, and also refused to cooperate. This was the reason why Landau later never wanted to meet Sinelnikov (Ref. [9], p. 65). There was more friction between Landau and Sinelnikov as can be read in B.I. Verkin, S.A. Gredeskul, L.A. Pastur, Ju.A. Frejman and Ju.A. Khramov, Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov, Priroda 1 (1989) 89–97.
- 23.
Protocol of 5.12.1935 at http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/document/ufti/piat1.htm.
- 24.
Landau had a passion for classifying, making lists of things and people (Ref. [11], p. 82).
- 25.
The letter has been reprinted (in Russian) in Ju.N. Ranjuk, “Delo UFTI” Historical comments to the book “The Accused” of Aleksandr Weissberg, http://www.sunround.com/club/22/ufti.htm.
- 26.
Aleksej Ivanovich Neforosnyj (1897–1937). In January 1937 he was excluded from the party and relieved from his function as rector. He was accused of participation in a counter-revolutionary nationalistic organisation and executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957–1958.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
Ref. [15]. It concerns a report of the conference reprinted from the Russian journal Zhurnal tekhnicheskoj fiziki 7 (1937) 884. Some information in this paragraph is from B.G. Lazarev, Zhizn’ v nauke, izbrannye trudy, vospominanija (Life in Science, Selected Papers, Reminiscences) (Kharkov, 2003), p. 337.
- 30.
Sergej Ivanovich Vavilov (1891–1951) became one of the most important organisers and managers in Soviet Physics, vying with A.F. Ioffe for the top spot in this respect, culminating in his presidency of the Academy of Sciences from 1945. From 1932–1945 he was the scientific director of the State Optical Institute in Leningrad. He was the brother of the well-known biologist and geneticist Nikolaj Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), who starved to death in prison after having become victim of Lysenko’s persecution of genetics in the Soviet Union.
References
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P.E. Rubinin, P.L. Kapitza and Kharkov. Chronicle in letters and documents, Low Temp. Phys. 20 (1994) 550–578.
G.E. Gorelik, Lev Landau i Aleksandr Lejpunsky, Priroda 9 (2016) 77–83.
O.N. Trapeznikova in B.I. Verkin et al. (1990), p. 256–291.
A. Weissberg, Conspiracy of Silence (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1952).
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Reinders, L.J. (2018). History of UFTI in the Thirties. In: The Life, Science and Times of Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72098-2_7
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