Pál Nyíri and Joana Breidenbach, University of Oxford
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Volume 20, Number 2 LIVING IN TRUTH: PHYSICS AS A WAY OF LIFE Pál Nyíri and Joana Breidenbach, University of Oxford © 2002 Pal Nyiri and Joana Breidenbach All Rights Reserved The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. What does it mean to live in truth? Putting people today. After the war, nuclear physics in it negatively is easy enough: it means not particular attracted young people around the lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating. – world as not just the key to powerful weapons Milan Kunderai and unlimited energy but also the answer to fundamental questions about the structure of the The figure of the physicist has a particular universe. Until the late sixties, faith in progress fascination for the popular imagination, and the was as strong a driving force in the Soviet Union figure of the Soviet physicist carries as it was in the West, and physics was seen as connotations of James Bond-ian villainy or, for the central means to that end. Here in particular, the more highbrow, a technocratic elite that countless talented young people studied it. Why? benefited from a good education provided by an To begin with, physics had a solid oppressive society. In this ethnographic study of institutional basis. Right after their takeover, the a group of physicists centered around one of the Bolsheviks decided that physics, which had leading figures of Soviet theoretical physics, lagged far behind the West in Imperial Russia, Vladimir Gribov (1930-1997), we wanted to should be at the cutting edge of scientific explore the ethos and habitus of Soviet scientists research. Natural sciences were to revolutionize who worked at the cutting edge of quantum field the forces of production. As civil war raged theory, plasma physics, nuclear and elementary across the land in 1918, Abram Ioffe, Wilhelm particle research at a time when mediocrity or Roentgen’s student in Göttingen, opened the decay (by international measures) ruled in many Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute, the first of other fields of science, art, and industry.ii We many research institutes to be founded in the argue that in the group we studied, the choice of coming years. After the atomic bomb was physics as a profession was influenced less by dropped in 1945, physics in the Soviet Union the benefits of belonging to the technological gained additional momentum. A nuclear project elite in itself than by the belief that physics was created, huge secret research installations offered both a tolerable living and an officially and important “open” institutes sprang up across sanctioned exemption from ideological make- the country, and a generation of outstanding believe. The physicists of the group we studied scientists matured and catapulted Soviet physics neither lived in ivory towers nor were willing to a premier position on the world stage.iii For accomplices in the state’s nuclear project. instance, Lev Landau was the key figure among Instead they created a non-state social space in the Leningrad theoreticians. Inspired by the which lifestyle and values were substantially cosmopolitan scientific community he had influenced by their belief in physical truth. experienced in Niels Bohr‘s milieu in Window to freedom Copenhagen, he designed a system of physics The fate of theoretical physicists of education consisting of seminars, textbooks, and Gribov’s immediate postwar generation was examinations. Charismatic, provocative, and shaped by a totalitarian state that needed them in uncompromising, Landau created a unique order to modernize and assert itself but was intellectual microclimate that attracted and strongly influenced many disciples and co- deeply suspicious of and hostile to their intellect iv – a state that offered them optimal working workers. conditions, and at the same time wiretapped and When Gribov’s generation entered killed them. university, the Cold War had just started, and Physics was in the 20th century what physicists were in urgent need. Their salaries biotechnology and computer science is to young were increased fourfold, and ample research Volume 20, Number 2 funding made available (Gorelik 2000:133-134). actually impressed with the attacks on More physicists were inducted into the Academy “idealism.” of Sciences, which meant faster access to a Boris Altshuler, today a professor of bearable flat or a dacha and special food theoretical physics at Princeton, recalls his deliveries. Yet salaries stagnated under decision to study physics in the sixties: “Career Khrushchev, and an average physicist in the choices in the Soviet Union were obviously seventies earned less than the bus driver that limited. Many careers either didn’t exist or took him to his institute. Families of physicists, offered no intellectual freedom. The natural like everyone else, spent considerable energy in sciences were the only profession that secured order to satisfy their basic needs, not to mention relative independence both in intellectual and obtaining luxuries. economic terms.” Nevertheless, it was not just the Consequently, many of those who had euphoria for science and privileges that made actually wanted to pursue other professions also young people study physics after World War II; ended up in physics. When Lev Okun, who today it was also the restrictive intellectual climate of divides his time between the Institute of the Soviet Union. The post-Stalinist generation Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in of physicists who had come of age in the last war Moscow and CERN in Geneva, finished years lived in a society that denied them secondary school in 1947, he wanted to study opportunities to express the horrors they had literature: experienced under Stalin. To critically minded My friend and I went to Moscow people physics offered a rare ideology-free niche University, to the Department of Philology…and in which one was officially allowed, even we wanted to talk to the dean. But before that, a compelled, to search for the truth. professor [appeared] in this position [bent In the thirties and forties, physics had forward], and he opened the door as if a god was faced attempts of ideological cleansing. there, and he was very frightened and Relativity and quantum mechanics had to be humiliated.… And my friend and I looked at defended from “philosophers’” accusations that each other, and we turned back and never entered they were “bourgeois” and “idealistic” theories. this building again.… I never saw anybody [in Most of the key physicists in Leningrad, physics] who behaved like this. Moscow, and Kharkov were arrested in the The desire for freedom played a role in purges of 1938-39. In 1948, the threat of a prompting many of the most talented students to massive attack on physics arose again, as plans specialize in theoretical physics in their senior were made for a congress at which leading years of study. Experimentalists were vulnerable physicists were to be denounced for ideological to material conditions, whereas the only thing mistakes. If the congress had taken place, the theoreticians needed to work was their brains. In fate of Soviet physics may well have mirrored the country in which they lived, this was a big that of Soviet genetics: Stalin’s protégé, the advantage: Landau performed the calculations agricultural “scientist” Trofim Lysenko had just for his theory of the shock wave in prison; later, succeeded in having genetics banned in the physicists who did not find jobs in science could Soviet Union (Gorelik 2000:162-163). Two days work at home. Not until the seventies was the before the physics congress was due to begin, Soviet Union’s lag in computerization felt in however, it was cancelled. Lavrentii Beriia, the theoretical physics. chief of the secret service, had learned just in While work on projects related to time that work on the bomb was based on the bombs and nuclear power stations was expected, “bourgeois” theories that were heading for outside that obligation physicists enjoyed wide- damnation. According to an anecdote recorded ranging freedoms and little pressure to achieve by Gorelik, Stalin responded with the words, quick results. Boris Altshuler describes the “Let them go. We can always shoot them later.” informal work style of theoreticians at the Landau called this the first case of nuclear Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics in deterrence in history.v Gatchina, where he worked between 1978 and Despite such threats, ideology had little 1989, in this way: impact on physics. Although textbook passages We had no particular obligations. We about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle didn’t have to teach, and we were basically free proclaimed that the principle’s interpretation to decide what we wanted to work on. People in should follow Lenin’s thought, only a score of the U.S. can’t imagine that kind of freedom. opportunists and mediocre scientists were Here, you spend a lot of your time writing Volume 20, Number 2 applications for grants that you may or may not said, “Do something like this one more time and get. In Leningrad, if you wanted to switch from we won’t say hello to you again.” solid-state to particle physics, no problem: all Tania Altshuler, later Lionia’s wife and you had to do is perhaps move to another group. who today teaches physics in New Jersey, was From the beginning, Soviet ideology one of the friends. “We had a toast,” she recalls.