Russia’s persecutions
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010235
The July 1997 issue of Physics Today included an obituary for historian of science Viktor Frenkel . The obituary was being finalized during my very first week on the magazine’s editorial staff. I read it and the five others in the issue with especial attention. Obituaries editor was to be my new job.
Frenkel was born in 1930 in Leningrad. He survived the German army’s siege of his hometown, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944 and remains the deadliest siege in human history. When he graduated with his physics degree from Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1953, he faced another trial: Joseph Stalin’s persecution of Jewish artists, writers, doctors, and scientists. He was unemployed for a year until he found work at a factory that made radio tubes.
Back in 1997 I knew little about post-war anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. But as I edited more obituaries, I learned of more of its victims. Like Frenkel, Vladimir Gribov was born in Leningrad in 1930. He would later become a leading field theorist, but anti-Semitism delayed his appointment to his first research position by two years.
Andrei Zhdanov (shown here with Stalin) died in 1948 of a heart attack. Accusations that the doctors treating him had deliberately given him the wrong drugs triggered the arrest and torture of hundreds of doctors, mostly Jewish. Their crime: participating in the Doctors’ Plot , a fictitious Zionist conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders.
Grigory Pikus earned his physics master’s degree in 1951. After graduation, he had to work for three years in a Siberian electronics factory. Like Gribov, he became a leading theorist, but of semiconductors not elementary particles.
Given anti-Semitism’s murderous historical precedents, forcing someone to interrupt his career by a few years is a mild manifestation. The three young physicists were luckier than 13 Jewish writers who were arrested in 1948 and 1949 on bogus charges of espionage and treason. On the night of 12 August 1952, after three years of brutal incarceration and a secret trial, they were executed by firing squad.
Although the persecution of Russian Jews relented somewhat under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, it did not disappear. Born nine years after Frenkel and Gribov, Michael Marinov was able to complete his physics education and progress through the ranks of Soviet academia. Then, in 1979, it all changed. To quote the obituary that Mikhail Shifman and Arkady Vainshtein wrote for Physics Today:
In pursuit of his lifelong dream of living in Israel, Marinov applied for exit visas from the Soviet Union for himself and his family. In those days, such applications were considered high treason in the USSR. Denied permission for the visas, Marinov became a refusenik, with all the ensuing political consequences. The only “crime” committed by refuseniks was that they had applied for and been denied exit visas for Israel. And yet the Soviet state treated them essentially as criminals—fired from jobs and blacklisted, with no access to work (except low-paid manual labor), constantly intimidated by the KGB, and on the verge of arrest. In fact, the most active refuseniks, those who tried to organize and fight to reclaim their rights, were imprisoned.
The Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. The largest surviving fragment, Russia, calls itself a democracy, but lacks a free press and an impartial legal system. Corruption is pervasive and largely unchecked. There is, however, one feature of democracies that Russia has in the extreme: The willingness of politicians to foment and exploit xenophobia and other popular prejudices.
Russia’s official campaign against homosexuality is the tendency’s latest example. On 11 June 2013, following the path laid by 13 regional assemblies, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, passed a law that fines people or business for providing information about homosexuality to people under 18 years of age. Such “propaganda” includes advocacy for gay rights.
The law, unfortunately, appears to have popular support. But that does not make it right. Nor will popular support insulate Russia from the law’s likely repercussions. Earlier this week, Hollywood actor Wentworth Miller declined an invitation to attend the St Petersburg International Film Festival. “I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly,” he wrote to the festival’s director.
In 1947, before Stalin’s postwar campaign of anti-Semitism began, Jews made up 18% of Soviet scientific workers. By 1970, the fraction had fallen to 7%. Now, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, gay scientists and their allies will be more inclined to leave the country. Gay scientists from outside Russia and their allies will be less inclined to visit. Even if the effect is modest, Russian science will suffer.
You might think that I’m a Russophobe. I’m not. I’ve long revered the country’s many contributions to civilization. Dmitri Shostakovich is my favorite composer. Anton Chekhov is my favorite writer. Indeed, it’s because of my admiration for Russian culture that I am so dismayed.