From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute: Autobiography. Top Non-Secret, Isaak M. Khalatnikov, (translated from Russian by Sergei Esipov and Yurii Morozov) Springer, 2012. $69.95 (214 pp.). ISBN 978-3-642-27560-9
The publication of a memoir by leading Russian physicist Isaak Khalatnikov, known as “Khalat” to his friends, is an event to be welcomed by anyone interested in 20th-century physics. The author was one of Lev Landau’s first students before becoming his collaborator and senior associate. He was also the first director of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, which he and his colleagues founded in 1964, two years after Landau had been in a tragic car accident. Khalatnikov led the institute for a quarter century.
From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute: Autobiography. Top Non-Secret has two short chapters on Khalatnikov’s childhood and early education. But it really takes off when he encounters Landau and Pyotr Kapitsa, the two giants who dominated the first half of his life. Kapitsa was the on-and-off director of the Institute for Physical Problems, where Landau and Khalatnikov worked until the end of Landau’s career.
The narrative tells many stories about well-known and not so well-known figures in Russian science; the tales will be of interest primarily to readers who know something about their roles in the physics of their time. In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am not a distant bystander. I had the good fortune of spending the better part of the 1962–63 academic year—shortly after Landau’s accident—as a postdoctoral fellow in Khalatnikov’s theory group at the Institute for Physical Problems.
I found many tidbits to relish in Khalatnikov’s memoir, particularly the descriptions of the many interactions of this self-described master of intrigue and manipulation with the Soviet bureaucracy and of his work with Landau on the Russian bomb mentioned in the book’s title. But his overriding priority, Khalatnikov tells us, was the health and prosperity of the Landau Institute and the “Landau school” of theoretical physics. His encounters with the KGB and the influence of his past war work on his political fortunes, and even those of his daughter, make for entertaining, if puzzling, reading.
The personality of Landau, the “beloved teacher Dau,” dominates the memoir, both before and after the tragedy of 1962. There have been many other accounts published of Landau’s immense influence on his students, some of those by Khalatnikov himself, but this book is a good place to get a rounded picture of the man—his combination of benevolence and cruelty, of sophistication and naivety. One characteristic I had either forgotten about or had never known was that Landau never suggested research topics to his students, and he rarely helped them solve the problems they had chosen. In the few cases in which he did help, he would usually present his contributions as “gifts” to the deserving student without accepting coauthorship, since he set the bar very high to actually agree to have his name on a paper.
There are amusing and not so amusing anecdotes aplenty for those who know something about the atmosphere and culture of Soviet physics in the Cold War and post–Cold War eras. Examples are the descriptions of Landau’s “theoretical minimum”—his famous entrance exam—and the weekly Landau seminars; the intrigue surrounding the founding of the Landau Institute and the election of Anatoly Aleksandrov to the presidency of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; and the reception in the Soviet Union of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity, especially the role played by Nikolai Bogoliubov.
After the establishment of the Landau Institute, one issue seems to have dominated most of the waking (and sleeping!) hours of many of the Soviet scientists and certainly those of the author: permission to travel abroad. We are treated to many examples of how that matter affected everyone, regardless of their standing in the hierarchy. A refreshing and rather touching, if somewhat fanciful, account of that period—in which Alexander “Sasha” Migdal refers to his time at the Landau Institute as “Paradise Lost”—is presented at the memoir’s conclusion.
Throughout the book one notices Khalatnikov’s attempts to tell it like it was and to avoid as much as possible the clichés of East and West. Nevertheless, one wonders what he is not telling us, either because he does not want us to know or because he does not want to explore the darkest sides of the story. The subject of anti-Semitism is raised early in the book, but the word is not mentioned; it is referred to as “nationalism.” Interestingly, Khalatnikov claims that outright anti-Semitism came rather late, in 1944, and originated with Joseph Stalin. I will leave it to others to evaluate that claim, but the issue might have deserved a fuller discussion, especially considering the many Jewish scientists who found a home in the Landau school.
The author hardly discusses the issue of refuseniks—scientists, primarily Jewish, who lost their jobs after applying for permission to emigrate—which affected the Landau Institute, and Khalatnikov personally. Also hardly mentioned is the plight of Andrei Sakharov, a matter in which the Soviet Academy of Sciences bears great responsibility. Curiously, Khalatnikov also does not mention that he accepted a faculty position at Tel Aviv University early in the post-Soviet era, even though he describes the terrible toll that brain drain took on Russian science and on the Landau Institute in particular. Finally, I must share my disappointment in the quality of the translation. (The Russian original was published in 2007.) It is difficult to believe that the translator is a native English speaker, given, for example, the number of missing and misplaced articles.
In spite of the above caveats, I thoroughly enjoyed From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute. I believe that it will be of great interest to all those who have come into contact, either personally or through the literature, with the remarkable scientific achievements of Landau and the members of his school.
Pierre Hohenberg is a theoretical physicist at New York University in New York City. He specializes in condensed-matter and statistical physics and, like many of his colleagues who came of age in the second half of the last century, he considers himself a member of the worldwide Landau school of theoretical physics.
