Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

In 1939 and 1940 some mice, thinking that the NKVD cat was away, played. Censorship became so lax at times that one might have thought it abolished. The state printed the bawdy and irreverent letters written to Anton Chekhov by his oldest brother, Aleksandr, and even set in type Anna Akhmatova’s poetry of the last thirty years. All over the USSR journals printed material which a year ago would have doomed both editor and author. In Georgia the young Ivane Ioseliani published “Teimuraz III,” a pathetic tale of the last pretender to the Georgian throne; the Soviet Geographical Journal published the homosexual love letters of the great explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky to his favorite Cossack.

Beria’s false dawn soon ended. With advice from Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s new favorite, who both literally and figuratively played the piano while Stalin sang, Beria clamped down. The editor of Aleksandr Chekhov’s letters, Ivan Luppol, died in the camps; Akhmatova’s collected verse was pulped. “It is simply a disgrace, if I may say so, when collections of verse appear. How could this Akhmatova ‘fornication to the glory of God’ appear? Who promoted it?” Zhdanov scribbled in rage on a report which cited a hundred of Akhmatova’s best lines as damning evidence.³³

A few scientists and scholars were freed from prison in 1939 by Beria, including the soil specialist Academician Boris Polynov and the professors who specialized in the western and southern Slavonic languages—Czech, Polish, Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croat, and Bulgarian. This group had been repressed in the late 1920s and early 1930s because their subject linked them to the bourgeois governments of eastern Europe and the Balkans, and because of the medieval texts their students studied. Andrei Vyshinsky, as rector of Moscow University, would not concede that a student of Church Slavonic had to read the Gospels. By 1939 Stalin’s view of Russian history and of Russia as the elder brother in the Slavonic family overrode Marxist ideology, and the Slavonic linguists now dominated academia.

Whatever Marx and Engels had not foreseen in modern science upset Stalin’s minions. Einstein’s relativity and Max Planck’s quantum mechanics clashed with materialism, denied the infinity of time and space, and distorted the Newtonian symmetry of Marxism. Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, to whom Stalin referred questions of philosophy, were tactfully told that Einstein and Max Planck were indispensable to modern electronics and in the exploitation of atomic energy. With ritual denunciations of bourgeois idealism, physicists continued to work on bourgeois theories. Nevertheless, the German physicist Hans Helman, a refugee from the Nazis who had published Quantum Chemistry in Russia in 1937, was shot, and his colleagues Iuri Rumer and Nikolai Fuchs were arrested, one by Ezhov, the other by Beria. Lev Termen, the pioneer of television and inventor of one of the world’s most unearthly musical instruments, the theremin, was sent to the GULAG in July 1938. Three brilliant theoretical physicists, Matvei Bronshtein, S. P. Shubin, and Aleksandr Vitt, were shot or died in the camps in 1938. Professor Ivan Bashilov, the only scientist refining radium from uranium in the USSR, was arrested in July 1938 and sent to dig ditches around the radium refinery he had set up. When the plant, under NKVD management, could not work without him Bashilov was returned, as a prisoner, to his own laboratory.

Beria can take no credit, at this stage, for rescuing the Soviet atom program; first he wrecked it. Just one major nuclear or low-temperature physicist, Piotr Kapitsa, avoided arrest. Kapitsa argued with both Stalin and Molotov that they would never find a physicist to replace him. In 1934 Kapitsa was forbidden to return to Lord Rutherford’s Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge or to see his family. By sheer force of personality he made the Soviet government buy a replica of his Cambridge equipment and intervened with Ezhov, Beria, and Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s educated underling, to save his colleague Lev Landau and one of Russia’s finest mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin.