Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

At the meeting at the USSR Ministry of Health, presided over by Minister Petrovsky, the infamous director of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, Georgii Morozov, “delivered a carefully worded medical report on Medvedev’s condition.” 465Astaurov, Kapitsa, and Sakharov argued with Morozov. After Sakharov spoke, the physicist and Academician Anatolii Aleksandrov, who represented President Keldysh and later, in 1975–1986, succeeded Keldysh as president of the academy, said that Sakharov’s appeals to Western scientists showed that Sakharov himself “was in need of psychiatric attention.” Later, in 1973, during the anti-Sakharov campaign, Aleksandrov did not sign a letter written on behalf of the academy against Sakharov. “Keldysh had signed, but his successor as president of the Academy, Aleksandrov, avoided doing so. When they called his home, the person who answered said, “Anatoly Petrovich [Aleksandrov] is drunk and can’t come to the phone,” wrote Sakharov in his Memoirs . 466Sakharov asked the deputy minister of health: “How could you sign the order to put Zh. Medvedev into a mental institution?” The vice minister’s answer was: “What do you want from me? I cannot do anything, since every year I am forced to sign scores of blank [without names] commitment papers on the order of the KGB!” 467

As a result of the defense by Astaurov, Sakharov, and Kapitsa, as well as of the protests of numerous Soviet writers and filmmakers, on June 17, 1970, Medvedev was released from the hospital. 468He later emigrated to England.

For Academician Kapitsa, one of the best physicists of the twentieth century (awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978), the defense of Zhores Medvedev was a continuation of his behavior during the late 1930s–1940s, when he tried to help several arrested colleagues. In the 1930s, his letters to Soviet leaders saved the lives of two outstanding physicists, Vladimir Fok (1898–1974) and Lev Landau (1908–1968), who had been arrested. 469Academician Fok was arrested twice, in 1935 and 1937. 470In 1937, NKVD commissar Yezhov interrogated Fok himself, but Fok was released after Kapitsa wrote to Stalin. After that Academician Fok, in his turn, also wrote letters to Soviet leaders defending the arrested physicists D. I. Yeropkin and Landau. Landau (arrested in 1938) spent a year in prison. He was released after Kapitsa wrote letters to Stalin, Beria, and Molotov; Niels Bohr also wrote a letter of support. 471Landau was elected academician in 1946, and in 1962 he became a Nobel laureate.

Other physicists arrested in 1937 in connection with Landau’s “case” were not so fortunate. Vadim Gorsky (1906–1937), Lev Shubnikov (1901–1937), and Lev Rozenkevich (1905–1937) were condemned to death and shot in alphabetical order on November 8, 9, and 10, 1937, after a short NKVD investigation and a trial by the OSO. 472Two arrested foreign scientists who worked at the same Physical-Technical Institute in Kharkov, the Austrian Communist Alexander Weissberg and the German Friedrich Houtermans, were handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo shortly after the Soviet-German Pact of August 1939. 473

Another physicist arrested in 1938, corresponding member of the academy (elected academician later, in 1956) Ivan Obreimov, tried in vain to defend his three pupils. In 1940, he wrote a letter about them from a labor camp near the town of Kotlas to a deputy of the Soviet Supreme Council and director of the Academy Physics Institute, Academician Sergei Vavilov (Nikolai Vavilov’s brother). In 1941, Obreimov was released from a labor camp after Kapitsa’s letter to Molotov. 474In 1944, Obreimov wrote another appeal regarding Gorsky to NKGB commissar Merkulov. In answering this letter, the head of the NKGB Archival Department Gertsovsky (whose name appeared earlier in connection with Mairanovsky and Nikolai Vavilov), produced the usual lie. In June 1944, he wrote that Gorsky had died on November 25, 1941, “of pneumonia in a punishment NKVD labor camp.” 475In fact, Gorsky had already been dead for years. He was shot on November 8, 1937.

It is not known why the NKVD/MGB/KGB always lied about the death date of its victims. Only from the late 1950s to early 1960s, during the period of official mass “rehabilitation” of the NKVD/MGB/KGB victims, and in the 1990s, when the KGB/FSB started to give investigation files from their archives to the relatives of victims, did it became clear that a common NKVD/MGB formula “the arrested was condemned to 10 years of imprisonment without a right of writing letters” in fact meant that the victim had already been shot to death.

During the 1970s–1980s, Academician Andrei Sakharov was almost unique in his moral stance against the crimes of an amoral regime. Sakharov began his fight after he already had a high position at the academy. Lower-level scientists who raised their voice against state crimes immediately lost their jobs and were excluded from the scientific community. A good example of this is the fate of the physicist and corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences Yurii Orlov, who was expelled from his scientific job after he joined the dissident movement in the 1970s. 476He was arrested in 1978 when he headed the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. Orlov was given the maximum sentence for political crimes, seven years in labor camps and five years of exile. Just as in Stalin’s time, the Armenian Academy Presidium expelled Orlov from its ranks in a secret session. 477Orlov returned to scientific work only after he had been released from imprisonment and emigrated to the United States.

That hot spring and summer of 1978, everyone in Moscow who listened to the BBC or Radio Free Europe or knew about the events from friends was terrified. For the first time after Stalin’s death, there were so many political trials in the country—against Orlov in Moscow; against Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava, members of the Georgian Helsinki Group in Tbilisi; against writer Aleksandr Ginzburg in Kaluga (not far from Moscow, where Ginzburg lived in exile after his first sentence in 1967); and finally, against the Jewish activist and refusenik Anatoly Shcharansky, again in Moscow.

Orlov’s trial was held on May 15–18 in the Moscow suburb of Lyublino. Temporary barriers were erected around the courthouse, and scores of KGB men guarded the entrance of the courthouse. A group of Orlov’s friends and supporters was always standing outside the building during the trial, directly in front of the KGB cordon. These people attended despite the danger of losing their professional jobs, risking possible searches after the trial, and so forth. The KGB photographers openly came up to every newcomer and took photos. Here I met Academician Sakharov for the first time.

The next day, after the end of Orlov’s trial, I received a telephone call. Without introducing himself, a man’s voice told me that he got my telephone number from our mutual friend, a scientist in Novosibirsk, the main center of scientific research in Siberia. The man who called asked me for an urgent meeting. He arrived soon. He did not give me his name and refused to come into my apartment. He handed me an envelope and said: “Do not ask me about anything, please. This is the only thing we can do for Irina [Yurii Orlov’s wife]. We know that you can give this to her.” There were banknotes in the envelope.

He turned around and rushed downstairs without waiting for the elevator to come. The fear of being connected with any kind of dissident was deep in every professional scientist. But I recall that event with a warm feeling. In the political environment of 1978, people who collected money for the wife of a political prisoner were definitely courageous.

Later, at the end of July, Lyusya Kovaleva, wife of the biologist and human rights activist Sergei Kovalev, brought me to the apartment of Academician Sakharov. It was not easy to get there. Two KGB men in plain clothes were standing across the hallway and watched everyone who came up to the door of this “special” apartment.