The Top-Secret Life
of Lev Landau
KGB archives reveal that
the Soviet genius co-authored
an anti-Stalin manifesto
by Gennady Gorelik
T
he theories of Lev Davido-
vich Landau built the back-
bone of 20th-century con-
densed-matter physics. They described
superfluidity, tenets of superconduc-
tivity, and diverse corners of astro-
physics, particle physics and many
other disciplines. To this day, Landau
levels, Landau diamagnetism, Lan-
dau spectrum, Landau-Ginzburg the-
ory and other Landau discoveries re-
main essential tools. His texts taught
generations of scientists: the library
at Harvard University contains four
times as many titles by this Soviet phy-
sicist as by the renowned American
physicist Richard Feynman.
For his achievements, Landau won
the Nobel Prize in 1962. His admir-
ers saw him as an ivory tower theo-
rist
—
bold, impudent and charming
but detached from the humdrum of
everyday existence. They ignored two
political aspects of his life: his year in
Joseph Stalin’s prisons in the late
1930s and his contributions to the
dictator’s nuclear bomb a decade later.
Only now do we know Landau had
a political persona that made him
permanently suspect to the KGB, the
Soviet secret police. This revelation
was partly accidental. In 1989 Maia
Besserab, the niece of Landau’s wife,
published the fourth edition of her
biography of the scientist. Glasnost
(or “openness”) had arrived, and the
author claimed she could finally an-
nounce the full story behind his 1938
arrest. A disgruntled former student
by the name of Leonid Pyatigorsky,
Besserab stated, had denounced Lan-
dau as a German spy. This during
Stalin’s Great Terror, when many
millions were executed on fanciful
charges.
Unfortunately for the biographer,
Pyatigorsky was still alive. It was in-
deed true that Landau had expelled
him from the theoretical group at the
Kharkov institute in Ukraine. “Dau,”
as the great man was called by his
adoring students, could be very hard
on them: a sign outside his office door
warned, “Beware! He bites!” But Py-
atigorsky nonetheless continued to
revere Landau, and shocked by the
accusation, he brought Besserab to
court in the summer of 1990.
Inside the KGB
T
he judge for the case asked the
KGB to check Landau’s files.
They contained no mention of Py-
atigorsky, and Besserab published an
apology. It was at this time, I believe,
that the KGB discovered that the
pride of Soviet science was no inno-
cent victim of Stalinist insanity but a
genuine anti-Soviet criminal. In 1991
the KGB published almost the entire
contents of Landau’s file in a short-
lived magazine designed for glasnost
called the
Bulletin of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party.
As it happened, I had seen Landau’s
file just a few weeks before its publi-
cation. Soon after perestroika (or “re-
structuring”) began in the late 1980s,
I obtained a research position at the
Institute for the History of Science
and Technology in Moscow. The in-
stitute’s director was the son of for-
mer defense minister Dmitriy Usti-
nov. Realizing that his name could
lower enormous barriers, I decided
to try my luck at getting into the KGB
archives.
With utmost care, I composed a let-
ter pointing out that almost nothing
was known about the fate of many
important Soviet physicists who had
been arrested in the 1930s. Listing
two dozen names, I asked if histori-
ans could study their files. After two
weeks of contemplation, Ustinov
signed this letter; to my great fortune
(I was later told), it landed next on
the desk of an exceptionally liberal
deputy to the KGB head.
Two months later the agency in-
formed me I could examine the files
—
inside its headquarters, located in the
Lubyanka building, where countless
prisoners had spent their initial terri-
fied hours. At the door a guard
searched me with intimate and em-
barrassing thoroughness. There was
no reading room, only a very small
room for prisoners’ relatives. Ex-
plaining that it would be uncomfort-
able for me to work in a room full of
weeping people, my hosts gave me
the office of someone who was out
sick. This room, still covered in 1930s
wood paneling, may even have been
the one where Landau was interro-
gated. Through the window, I could
see the inner prison where he had
been incarcerated.
I, too, was interrogated. Two offi-
cials asked me why the files of dead
physicists might contain anything in-
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
teresting. As I answered their questions,
I began to wonder why I had been per-
mitted to enter the KGB headquarters at
all. Surely my interrogators were aware
that my Jewish parents had just left
Russia for the U.S.
—
were they trying to
trap me? It took me some time to calm
down, to understand that the KGB was
simply trying hard to soften its public
image. When they finally asked me if
Andrei Sakharov was indeed a good
physicist or merely an overhyped dissi-
dent, I accepted that the two men were
also just curious.
After a few hours, they left me with
five files on the desk. The files were dat-
ed from 1930 to 1952; some were ex-
tremely haphazard. Landau, who was
arrested near the end of the Great Ter-
ror
—
when some sanity was returning
—
had a very neat file. Opening it, I first
asked myself if it was a 1990s forgery.
Eventually I decided that all the docu-
ments, including any fabrications, were
made back in the 1930s. Unfortunately,
I had no way of copying anything, ex-
cept by hand.
Physicists Yuri B. Rumer and Moissey
Koretz were arrested the same night as
Landau. Rumer was one of the pioneers
of quantum chemistry. Koretz, though
not a famous man, was Landau’s close
friend and ally, someone he turned to
for advice on the practical side of life.
In Rumer’s file I found three reports
by unnamed informers. One was un-
dated and bizarre
—
it stated that an ac-
quaintance of Rumer’s was the son of a
rabbi, lived in Berlin and worked for
Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo. The second re-
port, from March 1938, described a
conversation between Rumer and Lan-
dau about Soviet officials, in which Lan-
dau opined that nothing good could be
expected from people who were born
subhuman. In the third, from April 19,
the informer disclosed that Landau and
Rumer were aware of an anti-Soviet
leaflet that had been prepared for distri-
bution. The original, handwritten, copy
of this extraordinary leaflet was sup-
posed to be in Koretz’s file
—
which, I was
told, was in the office of the attorney
general. But Landau’s file contained a
typewritten copy.
The pamphlet was designed to be du-
plicated and discreetly distributed dur-
ing the May Day parade. Here is its
wording:
Comrades!
The great cause of the October revolu-
tion has been evilly betrayed.... Millions
of innocent people are thrown in prison,
and no one knows when his own turn
will be . . . .
Don’t you see, comrades, that Stalin’s
clique accomplished a fascist coup! So-
cialism remains only on the pages of the
newspapers that are terminally wrapped
in lies. Stalin, with his rabid hatred of
genuine socialism, has become like Hitler
and Mussolini. To save his power Stalin
destroys the country and makes it an easy
prey for the beastly German fascism . . . .
The proletariat of our country that had
overthrown the power of the tsar and
the capitalists will be able to overthrow a
fascist dictator and his clique.
Long live the May day, the day of
struggle for socialism!
—The Antifascist Worker’s Party
To my knowledge, this manifesto is
one of only three explicit denunciations
of Stalin made by a Soviet citizen dur-
ing the Terror. Another, an open letter,
was published in 1939 by a Soviet dip-
lomat who escaped to Paris; soon after,
he died under mysterious circumstanc-
es. The third was an entry in the per-
sonal diary of Vladimir Vernadsky, the
director of the Radium Institute. Writ-
ing, and especially planning to dissemi-
nate, such a denunciation took incredi-
ble courage, perhaps foolhardiness. To
understand why the KGB did not in-
stantly shoot the perpetrators requires
some background.
Ideological Impertinence
B
orn on January 22, 1908, in the oil
town of Baku in Azerbaijan, Lan-
dau was the son of Jewish parents. His
father was an engineer with the local oil
industry, and his mother a doctor. Lan-
dau was only nine years old at the time
of the Soviet revolution of 1917. At 14
he entered Baku University, transferring
two years later to Leningrad State Uni-
versity. Graduating in 1927, Landau
continued his studies at the Leningrad
Physico-Technical Institute, the cradle
of Soviet physics.
In 1929 Landau won a fellowship to
visit foreign scientific institutions. After
working for a year with Niels Bohr in
S
cientific
American
August 1997 73
A 1934 SNAPSHOT shows Lev Landau
(front, right) and his colleagues on the
steps of the Physico-Technical Institute in
Kharkov, Ukraine. Landau’s attempts to
save pure physics at the institute were
soon to land him in trouble.
C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Copenhagen, he came to think of
Bohr
—
already famous for his con-
tributions to the new quantum
physics
—
as his mentor. In England
he met Pyotr Kapitsa, an influen-
tial Soviet experimentalist who
had been working in the Caven-
dish Laboratory in Cambridge
since 1921. In response to one of
Kapitsa’s questions, Landau de-
veloped the theory of diamag-
netism of electrons in a metal, his
first major scientific contribution.
In 1932 Landau went to Khar-
kov to head the theoretical divi-
sion of the Ukrainian Physico-
Technical Institute. There he be-
gan his seminal studies on phase
transitions of the second kind
—
subtle
changes in a system, which, unlike the
freezing of water, do not involve the
emission or absorption of heat. In addi-
tion, he worked on ferromagnetism, the
process by which magnets form.
An able and enthusiastic teacher,
Landau also began to write, along with
his student Evgenni Lifshitz, the nine-
volume classic Course of Theoretical
Physics (Pergamon Press, 1975–1987).
His institute soon acquired a reputation
for creating world-class scientists adept
at tackling almost any problem in theo-
retical physics.
Hendrik Casimir, a physicist who
met Landau in Copenhagen, recalls him
as an ardent communist, very proud of
his revolutionary roots. The enthusiasm
with which Landau went about build-
ing Soviet science was part of his social-
istic fervor. In 1935 he published an odd
piece entitled “Bourgeoisie and Con-
temporary Physics” in the Soviet news-
paper Izvestia. Apart from attacking
bourgeois inclinations toward religious
superstition and the power of money,
he praised the “unprecedented oppor-
tunities for the development of physics
in our country, provided by the Party
and the government.” A committed
classifier, Landau designated himself
and his friends as “communists,” those
he hated as “fascists,” and faculty el-
ders as simply wisent
—
the Russian bi-
son, nearing extinction.
Despite his faith in the Soviet system,
Landau suffered attacks from some so-
cialist writers. In the late 1920s a newly
discovered nuclear decay, in which some
energy could not be accounted for,
caused quite a stir. Landau and others
initially supported Bohr in his idea that
this experiment violated the conserva-
tion of energy. Later, however, Landau
discovered that this hypothesis contra-
dicted Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity
and abandoned the concept. (Wolfgang
Pauli’s explanation
—
that an unknown
neutral particle, later named the “neu-
trino” by Enrico Fermi, had carried off
the missing energy
—
won the day.) Un-
fortunately, the co-founder of Marx-
ism, Friedrich Engels, had declared in
the 19th century that the law of conser-
vation of energy was to be forever fun-
damental to science, and Landau was
severely castigated in the local papers
for his (temporary) blasphemy.
In any case, his social views were soon
to undergo a phase transformation of
their own. In 1934 the Kharkov insti-
tute acquired a new director
—
with a
mandate to redirect the research into
military and applied ventures. Landau
fought fiercely to save pure science. He
suggested that the institute be split, so
that one branch could be dedicated to
physics. On the institute’s bulletin board,
which featured animated arguments on
the future of the institute, Koretz au-
thored a vigorous defense of Landau’s
plans. And Pyatigorsky, who did not
know that opposition to official direc-
tives was to be construed as sabotage of
the Soviet military enterprise, con-
firmed this plan to administrators (for
which offense Landau expelled him). In
November 1935 Koretz was arrested.
Landau tried valiantly to defend his
friend, appealing to the KGB head in
The Top-Secret Life of Lev Landau
74
Scientific American
August 1997
ALL DOCUMENT
S C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
ARREST AND INTERROGATION by the KGB in 1938 were precipitated by a defiantly sub-
versive pamphlet written by Landau and Moissey Koretz. This typeset version (left) and the
arrest warrant (below) were published by the KGB in 1991. After two months of imprison-
ment, Landau wrote a confession (right) detailing his disillusionment with the Soviet system.
In 1991 the KGB supplied Landau’s prison mug shot (at bottom) to the Soviet magazine Pi-
roda; it declined, however, to provide the profile, on the grounds that it was too depressing.
AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISU
AL AR
CHIVES
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Ukraine. And amazingly enough for
those times, Koretz was released “be-
cause of lack of evidence.” (A few
months later the KGB official in Khar-
kov shot himself. He may have been
one of the many idealists who could
not live with the increasingly evident
gap between communist ideals and re-
ality.) But a note in Koretz’s file warned
that the KGB should keep an eye on he
whose “guilt had not been proved” but
who “was a member of a counterrevo-
lutionary wrecking organization head-
ed by Landau.”
In 1937 the KGB arrested several
German physicists working at Kharkov
and an assortment of other scientists.
Before being shot, Landau’s friends Lev
Shubnikov and Lev Rozenkevich “con-
fessed” that Landau headed a counter-
revolutionary organization. Landau felt
he had to flee to some other, possibly
safer, place. In Moscow, Kapitsa offered
Landau a position as head of the theo-
retical division of the Institute of Physi-
cal Problems, and there he went in Feb-
ruary. Koretz soon followed him to
Moscow; Rumer was already there.
Within a year, on April 28, 1938, Lan-
dau and his two friends were arrested.
In Prison
L
andau’s students and colleagues were
scolded for supporting Landau in
his preachings “against dialectical ma-
terialism, and even against the theorem
of energy conservation.” They believed
Landau had been denounced by an ene-
my for his past impudence. Certainly
Landau had enemies, for he liked to
step on toes. One April Fools’ Day, for
instance, he had posted an official no-
tice classifying the Kharkov institute’s
faculty by ability and rescaling their
salaries accordingly
—
a joke that did not
sit well with superiors.
The charges against Landau were in
fact much graver than scientific heresy.
He was accused of heading a counter-
revolutionary organization; the confes-
sions extorted from his associates
“proved” that charge to the KGB’s sat-
isfaction. The leaflet merely determined
the date of arrest
—
a week before the
traditional May Day parade.
Rumer, it turned out, was not involved
in the leaflet at all. Both Landau and
Koretz testified to that, and he was re-
lieved of this accusation. But the fanci-
ful charges of espionage for Germany
forced Rumer to spend 10 years in a
sharashka
—
a scientific and engineering
institute run like a prison.
Landau was taken to the Lubyanka
prison. A hastily scribbled note in his
file, apparently made by a KGB officer,
records that Landau was forced to stand
for seven hours a day and threatened
with transfer to the even more horrific
Lefortovo prison. After two months he
broke and wrote a six-page confession,
the most eloquent document in his file.
(Every prisoner signed an oath of secre-
cy on leaving prison, and Landau never
talked about this phase of his life.)
The confession states: “At the begin-
ning of 1937, we came to the conclu-
sion that the Party had degenerated and
that the Soviet government no longer
acted in the interests of workers but in
the interests of a small ruling group, that
the interests of the country demanded
the overthrow of the existing govern-
ment, and creation in the U.S.S.R. of a
state that would preserve the kolkhozes
[agricultural farms] and State property
for industry, but build upon the princi-
ples of bourgeois-democratic states.”
Although such confessions cannot be
taken too seriously given the circum-
stances under which they were extract-
ed, this statement is so unusual that I
believe it to be true. The two physicists
had somehow reached a conclusion
that eluded most of their countrymen
for the next half century. It was Koretz
who had convinced Landau of the need
for practical action and whose hand-
writing was on the leaflet. But the polit-
ical intelligence behind it was Landau’s.
Landau was known for his “grapho-
phobia,” and most of his writing was
actually done by his colleagues, includ-
ing the famous Courses. (The confes-
sion was the longest piece of handwrit-
ing Landau accomplished in his life.)
The two conspirators had signed the
manifesto with the name of a fake or-
ganization so that people would take it
more seriously.
Koretz spent 20 years in the Gulag,
returning to Moscow in 1958, where I
met him a few times before he died of
cancer in 1984. He was enthusiastic
about science and worked for a popu-
lar science magazine. Wonderfully live-
ly and vigorous despite his travails, he
told me many stories about Landau
—
but never the circumstances of their ar-
rest. Nor was Koretz ever rehabilitated
(that is, officially acknowledged as hav-
ing been unjustly accused). This was a
The Top-Secret Life of Lev Landau
Scientific American
August 1997 75
LANDAU’S ASSOCIATES
Koretz (left) and Yuri B. Ru-
mer (below) were arrested on
the same night. Koretz spent
20 years in the Gulag; Rumer
spent 10 years in a penal sci-
ence institution, or sharash-
ka. Pyotr Kapitsa (right)
saved Landau, by claiming
that only he could explain a
great new discovery. It turned
out to be superfluidity.
C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISU
AL AR
CHIVES
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
hint that unlike most victims of the Ter-
ror, his arrest was for some real reason.
Kapitsa saved Landau. By virtue of
having invented a new technique for
production of oxygen
—
vital for metal-
lurgy and therefore industry
—
Kapitsa
had acquired very good relations with
the government. He was also extraordi-
narily gifted in communicating with
officialdom and in his lifetime wrote
more than 100 letters to the Kremlin on
matters of science policy, as well as to
save physicists such as Vladimir Fock,
the quantum-field theorist.
In 1938 the head of the KGB “disap-
peared,” and Lavrenti Beria succeeded
him. After two years of carnage, Stalin
had achieved his purpose
—
to destroy
all rivals, real and imaginary. Sensing
an opportunity, Kapitsa wrote to Prime
Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, saying
that he had just made a discovery “in
the most puzzling field of the modern
physics” and that no theorist other than
Landau could explain it. And on the eve
of May Day, 1939, after a year of im-
prisonment, Landau was freed on bail.
In a few months, he had explained Ka-
pitsa’s superfluidity using sound waves,
or phonons, and a new excitation called
a roton. It earned both of them a Nobel
Prize a few decades later.
In 1939 Landau married K. T. Dro-
banzeva, and in 1946 they had a son,
Igor. The marriage was unusual. Appar-
ently Landau believed in free love and
urged his students and his distraught
wife to practice it as well.
A few years after Landau’s release,
Stalin instituted the Soviet atomic proj-
ect; after Hiroshima, it was pushed full-
steam ahead. Kapitsa’s institute was re-
cruited for this purpose, and Stalin ap-
pointed Beria as the supreme officer
overseeing the effort. Kapitsa was not a
pacifist but found it unbearable to work
under Stalin’s chief gendarme in an at-
mosphere of deep secrecy. He wrote to
Stalin, charging that Beria was unfit to
be heading such a project.
Enter the Hydrogen Bomb
T
his was an exceedingly dangerous
ploy. General Andrei Khrulev, a
friend of Kapitsa’s, related to him a
conversation he overheard between Be-
ria and Stalin. Beria wanted Kapitsa’s
head, but Stalin told him that although
he could dismiss Kapitsa from all posi-
tions, he could not kill him. Apparently
Stalin respected Kapitsa’s worldwide
reputation as a physicist: he was a mem-
ber of the British Royal Society.
Kapitsa escaped execution
—
although
he remained under a kind of house ar-
rest until Stalin’s death. Landau was,
however, engaged in the top-secret affair.
His bomb duty was numerical mathe-
matics rather than theoretical physics.
Along with the physicists he directed,
Landau calculated the dynamics of the
first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, called
sloyka
—
or “layer cake”
—
filled with
lithium deuteride. (According to Hans
Bethe, one of the creators of the Ameri-
can bomb, the Americans had consid-
ered this compound, along with other
fillers, for the original “alarm clock” de-
sign, which was analogous to the sloy-
ka. Unlike Landau’s calculations, how-
ever, those of the Americans could not
predict the yield.)
Part of the mathematics developed to
this end was declassified and published
during the first nuclear thaw in 1958.
The resulting paper on numerical inte-
The Top-Secret Life of Lev Landau
76
Scientific American
August 1997
Landau’s Science
I
n 1927 Lev Landau became one of the first to introduce the density matrix, a
mathematical tool for dealing with mixed quantum states. He went on to de-
scribe the behavior of an electron gas, finding that electrons in a magnetic field
are confined to orbits of discrete energy, now called Landau levels. In the realm of
astrophysics, he postulated the existence of neutron cores, which have come to
be known as neutron stars. And simultaneously with an American group, he ex-
plained how cosmic rays produce electron showers.
Landau’s greatest contributions involve phase transitions of the second kind, in
which a substance changes from an ordered to a disordered configuration with-
out absorbing heat. One such transition is that of helium from a normal to a su-
perfluid state. Landau described superfluidity by means of a roton, an excitation
that has since been discovered but whose true nature remains mysterious. He also
introduced the order parameter, a kind of large-scale wave function. Applied to
superfluid helium, the order parameter described the behavior of atoms in their
common quantum state; applied to superconductors, it revealed such properties
as how current flows around an intruding magnetic field; applied to superfluid he-
lium 3, it described a host of complex configurations.
In 1950, with his student Vitaly Ginzburg, Landau developed a framework in
which the universal phenomenon of broken symmetry
—
by which, for example,
quarks are believed to acquire mass
—
can be simply described, again by means of
an order parameter.
Landau also studied how ferromagnets
—
the magnets of ordinary experience
—
divide into domains in which the microscopic components point in different di-
rections. He worked on plasma physics and in 1956 developed the theory of Fermi
liquids, which contain strongly interacting electronlike particles. His interests en-
compassed particle theory as well: he developed a statistical picture of a nucleus,
challenged the consistency of quantum electrodynamics and, along with others,
postulated the principle of charge-parity conservation. And this is only a partial
list of his achievements.
—
The Editors
C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
TEN COMMANDMENTS of Lan-
dau, an engraved list of his major dis-
coveries, were drawn up by Landau’s
students to celebrate the physicist’s
50th birthday in 1958. Landau creat-
ed a “school” of physics
—
a style of
describing the natural world
—
which
he passed on through his teachings.
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
gration looks rather strange in Lan-
dau’s Collected Works. Also in this vol-
ume is perhaps his most far-reaching
publication ever, co-authored with Vi-
taly Ginzburg in 1950 in the midst of
bomb research. The paper describes a
simple and powerful framework in
which an enormous variety of sys-
tems
—
superconductors, elementary par-
ticles, chemical mixtures and so on
—
can be described. It anticipates the gener-
ic phenomenon of symmetry breaking,
vital to particle theorists, among others.
For his contributions to the atomic
and hydrogen bombs, Landau received,
ironically enough, two Stalin
Prizes, in 1949 and 1953.
In 1954 he was awarded
the title “Hero of Socialist
Labor.”
In 1957, I believe Landau
asked the central Communist
Party for permission to go
abroad. At the party’s request,
the KGB produced transcripts of
Landau’s conversations with his
friends between 1947 and 1957.
These drew on “special tech-
niques”
—
as the KGB described
them
—
and informants’ reports. The
document was found in the archives of
the Communist Party; it is revealing.
In the transcripts, Landau describes
himself as a “scientist slave.” Given his
rebellious nature, that is not surprising;
besides, his experiences of the 1930s had
turned him against Stalin. But the docu-
ments reveal a deeper political transfor-
mation. On one occasion a friend re-
marked that if Lenin were suddenly to
revive, he would be horrified by what
he saw. “Lenin employed the same
kinds of repression,” Landau retorted.
Later, he said: “Our regime, as I have
learned since 1937, is definitely a fascist
regime, and it could not change by itself
in any simple way. . . . I believe that
while this regime exists, it is ridiculous
to hope for its development into some
decent thing . . . . The question about a
peaceful liquidation of our regime is a
question about the future of human-
kind . . . . Without fascism there is no
war.” Finally, he concluded, “It is quite
clear that Lenin was the first fascist.”
It is important to realize how extra-
ordinary these views were. Almost all
Landau’s colleagues were profoundly
pro-Soviet
—
including Igor Evgenyevich
Tamm, who won the first Soviet Nobel
Prize for Physics, and Andrei
Sakharov, who won
the first Soviet Nobel Prize for Peace.
Those who did recognize Stalin’s sins
saw him as a criminal who had be-
trayed Lenin’s cause; still, Lenin re-
mained a hero.
So far as I know, there were only two
physicists who expressed their distaste
for working on Stalin’s bomb. One was
Landau, and the other was Mikhail
Leontovich, who in 1951 became the
head of theoretical research in the Sovi-
et fusion program. Landau served on
the bomb project because it shielded
him from the authorities. He tried to
limit his participation and at one time
cursed the physicist Yakov Zeldovich
(as “that bitch”) for attempting to ex-
pand it. After Stalin died, Landau com-
mented to a friend and pupil, Isaac M.
Khalatnikov: “That’s it. He’s gone. I’m
no longer afraid of him, and I won’t
work on [nuclear weapons] anymore.”
And he quit the bomb project.
An obvious question remains. Given
that Landau was reluctant to work on
the bomb, how is it that his contribu-
tions were so substantial? Khalatnikov,
who became the director of the Landau
Institute for Theoretical Physics, creat-
ed in 1965, offered me an answer:
Landau was simply unable to do a
shoddy piece of work.
Thus, Landau was exceptional in
being able to understand the true
nature of the Soviet system and for
being courageous enough to ex-
press himself. Among the Soviet
bomb physicists, his position
was curiously poignant, be-
cause he realized with full clari-
ty for whose hands he was creating
the mighty weapon.
In 1962 Landau suffered a car acci-
dent. He survived, but with severe brain
injuries that, tragically, changed his per-
sonality and robbed him of his scientific
genius. Landau seemed to be well aware
that he had changed. He died on April
1, 1968; his student Alexander I. Ahkie-
zer recalls that on receiving the news,
he assumed it was just another of Dau’s
April Fools’ jokes.
After just two weeks of studying the
KGB files, I found myself unable to
continue. The multitude of broken lives
recorded in them overwhelmed me
emotionally. After the fall of the Soviet
Union in 1991, the KGB was restruc-
tured, and so far as I know, no historian
has had regular access to the archives
since then. Unquestionably, the files still
conceal many amazing stories
—
perhaps
even a few more about this extraordi-
nary physicist.
The Top-Secret Life of Lev Landau
Scientific American
August 1997 77
The Author
GENNADY GORELIK is a research
fellow at the Center for Philosophy and
History of Science at Boston University.
He received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the
Institute for the History of Science and
Technology of the Russian Academy of
Sciences. With the aid of a Guggenheim
Fellowship and a grant from the Mac-
Arthur Foundation, he is writing a biog-
raphy of Andrei Sakharov.
Further Reading
Landau, the Physicist and the Man: Recollections of L. D. Landau.
Edited by I. M.
Khalatnikov. Pergamon Press, 1989.
Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: Life and Letters of a Russian Physicist.
Edited
by J. W. Boag, P. E. Rubinin and D. Shoenberg. North-Holland, 1990.
Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties.
Gen-
nady E. Gorelik and Viktor Ya. Frenkel. Birkhauser, Basel and Boston, 1994.
Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy,
1939–1956. David Hol-
loway. Yale University Press, 1994.
‘Meine Antisowjetische Taetigkeit...’: Russische Physiker unter Stalin.
Gennady
Gorelik. Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1995.
TOP-SECRET NOTE by Landau asks
Igor Evgenyevich Tamm to send data on
particle velocities, needed for calculations
on the first Soviet hydrogen bomb.
SA
C
OUR
TESY OF GENNAD
Y GORELIK
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |