The life and fate of a Soviet physicist

On 10 November 1937 during the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin’s secret police executed Lev Shubnikov on trumped-up charges of treason. Although he was only 36 at the time, Shubnikov had already made pioneering discoveries in magnetism and low-temperature physics. As a wanton waste of scientific talent, his killing ranks with those of Archimedes in 212 BC and Antoine Lavoisier in 1794.

Stalin’s carelessness with the lives of physicists soon changed. By 1942, the Soviet leader had been tipped off about the Manhattan Project. To forestall a US nuclear monopoly, the Soviet Union had to develop its own weapon. And to attain that goal, Stalin provided physicists with resources, comfort, and a modicum of academic freedom. By 1949, he had his atomic bomb.

Igor Kurchatov, Vitaly Ginzburg, Andrei Sakharov, and the other physicists who developed the Soviet Union’s fission and fusion bombs lived in the closed town of Arzamas-16 under congenial conditions. They could hardly have been unaware of Shubnikov’s fate, or those of Stalin’s other, countless victims. Perhaps the physicists consoled themselves that their work would protect their country and their compatriots. That the cold war never became a world war is arguably the result of the dreadful balance of power that Kurchatov and colleagues helped to create and maintain.

Sakharov famously and courageously became a dissident in the 1960s, but how did he feel during the 1940s and 1950s when he was, in effect, arming a tyrant with weapons that could obliterate entire cities? The moral dilemmas that physicists faced under Stalin would be hard for me to imagine, but for a remarkable novel: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

The photo shows Grossman in 1945 in the German city of Schwerin. For almost the entire duration of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, Grossman was a war reporter for Red Star, the Soviet army’s newspaper. Drawing from his experience at the front and elsewhere, he wrote Life and Fate in 1959.

The novel, which runs to 896 pages in its English translation, provides a broad and detailed view of Soviet society during the battle for Stalingrad. Its main character, Victor Shtrum, is not a reporter like its author or a soldier, but a nuclear physicist based on Lev Landau.

I could summarize the novel’s plot and how Shtrum fares in it, but I won’t, lest I spoil your experience of one of the most moving, engaging, and enlightening novels I’ve ever read.