Hargittai - Buried glory: portraits of Soviet scientists

Buried Glory

PORTRAITS OF SOVIET SCIENTISTS

Istvan Hargittai

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hargittai, Istvan, author.
Buried glory : portraits of Soviet scientists / Istvan Hargittai.
pages; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780199985593 (alkaline paper) 1. ScientistsSoviet UnionBiography. 2. ScienceSoviet Union. I. Title.
Q141.H263 2013
509.2247dc23
2013005419
9780199985593

987654321
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

I dedicate this book to the memory of my father,

Jen Wilhelm (19011942). He was a Budapest lawyer, the first member of his family who acquired higher education. He coauthored a book about unfair competition. In 1942, anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary sent himunder most humiliating conditions in a so-called labor-service unitto the Eastern Front. He was ordered to sweep mine fields with his bare hands, and was blown apart. His remains rest in a mass grave in Western Russia.

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With Magdolna Hargittai and Balazs Hargittai, Candid Science IVI: Conversations with Famous Scientists (Imperial College Press, 20002006)

With Magdolna Hargittai, In Our Own Image: Personal Symmetry in Discovery (Plenum/Kluwer, 2000; Springer, 2012)

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During the Cold War in the period 19451991, the balance of power between the two superpowersthe United States and the Soviet Union, including their alliesmaintained a tenuous peace. Each of the two superpowers possessed enough destructive weaponry to annihilate the other many times over. In many other aspects the two superpowers were vastly different. The United States was more technologically advanced, whereas the Soviet Union had a troubled economy and a backward infrastructure. The sophisticated weaponry of the Soviet Union was to a large extent due to the outstanding achievements of its scientists and the communist regimes ability to concentrate its limited resources on selected tasks. The Soviet Union could not have become a superpower without a strong scientific background that relied on some traditions in science dating back to czarist Russia, but whose foundations were created from the beginning of Soviet power and developed in the 1920s and 1930s.

To be a scientist was one of the most privileged professions in the Soviet Union. It was a magnet for talent in view of the very restricted possibilities where gifted young people could aspire for a career. In contrast, the current Russia pays diminishing attention to science. One of the vice presidents of the Russian Academy of Sciences recently noted, The demise of the Soviet Union hurt Russian science very much.

Although communist ideology advocated a classless society, there was strong stratification in Soviet society. This is conspicuously demonstrated by the differentiation of its burial places. They had a hierarchy, with the Lenin Mausoleum on the Red Square in Moscow at its topbetween 1953 and 1961 it was Lenins and Stalins mausoleum. Behind the mausoleum are buried the next echelon of Soviet leaders, each represented by a bust. Stalin is one of them; his bust was erected as late as 1970, indicating how hesitant post-Stalin Soviet leaderships were in condemning one of the bloodiest dictators in world history. When I last saw these graves (in June 2011), of the twelve, only Stalins was covered with fresh flowers. Many of the most distinguished Soviet (and some international) politicians, military leaders, and communist revolutionaries are interred in the Kremlin wall, among them Sergei Korolev, the chief Soviet rocket constructor, and Igor Kurchatov, the nuclear czar.

The Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow is Russias most distinguished cemetery.In addition to political and military leaders, buried here are many of the topmost representatives of Soviet (as well as pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian) intelligentsia: writers, artists, scientists. A walk in the cemetery reveals such a plethora of great scientists of the Soviet decades that in itself is a manifestation of the importance that science played in the Soviet regime.

When I was a masters degree student in Moscow in the first half of the 1960s, I heard a lot about the Novodevichy Cemetery, but could not visit it. For years, it was closed temporarily for reconstruction. When I visited Moscow in the early 1980s, it was possible to visit the Novodevichy, but at the entrance the police took away all cameras, which they returned when the visitor left the cemetery. I was very much taken by the modern tombstone recently erected over the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchevs gravethe work of sculptor Ernst Neizvestny.

Nowadays, it is possible to visit Novodevichy freely, and on the occasion of my rare visits to Moscow, I never miss the opportunity to return there. Quite a few scientists whom I knew personally are buried there, some in their own right, others because they inherited the right from their families. Walking along the alleys of this beautiful memorial place, the thought is always with me that during the Soviet era there was an extraordinary accumulation of talent in science. They were the very men (there were hardly any women among them) who made it possible for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.