Buried Glory: Portraits of Soviet Scientists, Istvan Hargittai, Oxford U. Press, 2013. $35.00 (352 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-998559-3
The title of the latest book by Istvan Hargittai, a physical chemist and member of Hungary’s Academy of Science, carries two meanings. Buried Glory: A Portrait of Soviet Scientists presents 13 famous scientists from the Soviet Union—all but one of them now deceased.
Also buried, Hargittai explains, is the memory of their scientific accomplishments, some of which did not receive sufficient recognition outside the Soviet Union because of linguistic, cultural, and political biases in the 20th century. Sadly, those scientists’ professional heritage is being buried in today’s Russia, too: In post-communist societies, the earlier tradition of privileging and supporting science at an exceptionally high level has been undermined for one full generation.
Hargittai’s selection of scientists understandably includes Nikolai Semenov, Igor Tamm, Lev Landau, Andrei Sakharov, Peter Kapitza, Alexei Abrikosov, and Vitali Ginzburg—a majority of Soviet Nobel Prize winners. Their life stories are not entirely unknown to Anglophone readers, but Hargittai’s biographical essays present interesting additional information based in part on his personal encounters and conversations with some of them and their Russian colleagues.
He also introduces scientists who have remained virtually unknown even if their accomplishments were on a Nobel-worthy level. Perhaps the most mysterious among that group is the reclusive chemist Boris Belousov (1893–1970), who discovered periodic, self-oscillating, chemical reactions. Peer-reviewed journals looked suspiciously at the phenomenon that seemed to contradict the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, and the first description of Belousov’s discovery was published with a 10-year delay, in 1959.
Five years later, biophysicist Anatoly Zhabotinsky (1938–2008) explained the paradoxical behavior theoretically as occurring in nonequilibrium systems. His insight made the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction a paradigmatic case for studies of nonlinear processes. When presented in the context of biography, the joint discovery may appear somewhat isolated, but I think it would not look accidental if analyzed alongside several other pioneering approaches to nonlinear dynamics that were coming out of the Soviet Union in the 1920s through the 1950s.
Other essays tell the story of Yulii Khariton (1904–96), who together with Zinaida Valta in 1926 discovered branching chain reactions in chemistry. Once such reactions became important for nuclear physics, Khariton and Yakov Zeldovich (1914–87) applied their expertise to the calculation of various scenarios for nuclear fission in uranium, and by 1941 they had estimated the critical mass for the fast-neutron explosion in uranium-235. A similar discovery in 1940 by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in the UK initiated the Anglo–American atomic-bomb effort that culminated in the Manhattan Project. For the rest of his long life, Khariton was the chief designer of nuclear weapons in the USSR, a role analogous to that of Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
The format of Hargittai’s biographies may appear slightly unconventional to American readers because it belongs to the Soviet scientific culture. There, famous scientists were typically honored posthumously with relatively informal collections of eulogies and short personal reminiscences penned by their friends, colleagues, and students. The hagiographic aspects of the genre originated around 1960 and reflected the then-unquestionable cultural authority of science. The prestige of scientists remained high in Soviet society until about 1990. The end of the Soviet Union abruptly brought about much more critical attitudes toward science in general but also triggered apologists’ efforts that emphasized scientists’ opposition to the communist regime. Many biographers, including Hargittai, consequently adopted the language of “heroes, villains, and conformists of Russian science,” also the title of an especially popular Russian collection.
Except for some cases, such as Sakharov’s, I find the discourse of scientists’ resistance, oppression, or victimization rhetorically overdramatized, at least for the post-Stalin period. More often than not, scientists designed their lives more or less according to existing social norms, without explicitly violating political rituals. They prioritized their professional research and took advantage of the financial and cultural resources available for it in Soviet society.
One finds a revealing illustration of such attitudes in Hargittai’s biography of Zeldovich, who, having worked on nuclear weapons for about 15 years after 1945, found a way to escape the classified world and return to academic science. He did so by shifting his research to Big Bang cosmology—a thermonuclear scenario of sorts, but of no interest to the military. The switch allowed him to leave a lasting influence on yet another fundamental science and enjoy the relative freedom of academic research and informal discussions with colleagues. Zeldovich clearly valued that freedom more than administration or other official business as a high-ranking member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He tried to keep politics at arm’s length; for example, he collaborated with Sakharov on science, but abstained from making any public statement, positive or negative, about Sakharov’s political actions.
Many of the sources that provide background information for Hargittai’s biographies are close to the oral tradition: eulogies, personal recollections, and stories told and retold in the scientific community. In some cases, such as Zeldovich’s, I can confirm the essence of his depiction in Buried Glory from my personal experience as one of Zeldovich’s last students. The surviving archival documents can sometimes correct or support the folklore tradition, though often they simply lack sufficient information. But as Thomas Kuhn once said about George Gamow’s personalized account of the 30 years that revolutionized physics: Even if some anecdotes cannot be fully verified, they are still important because they circulate in the academic profession and tell much about its culture.
Alexei Kojevnikov is a historian of modern physics and of science in its social context. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
