1. It is already nearly five years that the self-acclaimed ‘world socialist system’ crashed and the USSR broke into pieces. One might think that the grandiose experiment over the lives of hundreds of millions of people that Bolsheviks (communists) had launched in 1917 ran its full course and the total impotence of the communist ideology and practices became obvious. Unfortunately, there is a lot of wisdom in the saying that history only teaches us that history teaches us nothing at all. The short span of human memory, organic shortcomings of the democratic form of government, and certain crude blunders of the ruling few in Russia resulted in shaping up of a realistic communist and fascist threat for the future of our country and of the whole world. A historian A Yanov compared today’s situation in Russia with that in Germany in the 1930s directly before fascists gained power. Alas, I do see basis to this analogy (with communists substituted for fascists). The danger is all the more frightening since Hitler had no nuclear weapons while Russia may again turn into an aggressive nuclear power.

In this situation, the momentous significance of the presidential election on June 16, 1996 is obvious to everyone. If communists win, there is foundation for the blackest predictions; many even among very decent people fail to understand this. This was the stimulus for my writing this text. The thing is, I firmly believe that a just and decent person, in my interpretation of these two qualities, cannot feel attracted to fascists. The fascist ideology, with its racism, antidemocratic stance, chauvinism etc. is self-proclaiming and generates nausea. Communists, however, proclaim in their mottoes the shining ideals of justice and equality of all people and peoples, denounce arbitrary rule and lawlessness. As a result, those who do not know or turn a blind eye to history’s lessons are quite capable of swallowing the bait of the communist propaganda with its shameless, brash and covert lies. This is why anyone who is not blind to the past and believes that communism must be resisted should made a contribution to this fight.

I do not doubt that very many people understand this and share the view that only democratic evolution can bring happy future to Russia. Hence, my effort may be superfluous. Nevertheless, my opinion may not be devoid of interest. The reason is that political writing is typically done by journalists and sociologists, or people of ‘lyrical’ inclinations, who were never favoured here (I refer to the popular in the USSR the image of the ‘lyricist vs physicist’ confrontation). In contrast, I am a physicist and partly astrophysicist, that is, I belong to a ‘favoured’ group. Moreover, even if this is accidental, political powers have not passed me by with their favors: I received 1st degree Stalin Prize (later repainted into State Prize), Lenin Prize, some orders, was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences (RAN now) in 1953 and full member (academician) in 1966. I could boast of a number of awards from this Academy and from a number of Academies abroad. In other words, I am not among those to whom the Soviet (communist) power either made active life difficult or whom it even put into prison. Thus this is not the case of vindication for me. Furthermore, I was a naive believer in communist ideals for many years, contrary to all facts and experiences. I will return to this aspect later. At the moment I only wish to explain that having understood at the sunset of my life the awful fallacy of the communist ideology and practices, I strive to help others not to commit old mistakes, not to be blind and deaf to the facts of not such a distant past.

2. Several years ago I watched a videotape about Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb in the USA. One detail caught my eye especially and stayed in memory. All ‘nice guys’ were liberals (some of them, if I am not mistaken, were communists) but they understood absolutely nothing about the practical side of communism in Russia or about the Stalinist dictatorship. On the contrary, the unpleasant guys, some of them in secret services, proved to be considerably more sagacious. This is very typical. Quite a few well known and respectable writers and scientists in the West supported the USSR, condoned, up to the second half of the 1940s, and some even longer, everything that its rulers, with Stalin at the helm, were doing to the population. Suffice it to mention Romain Rolland and Frederic Joliot-Curie in France. In 1937, at the very peak of terror, Lion Feuchtwanger visited the USSR but had left having understood nothing. How about the number of personalities in the West who became KGB informers on ideological grounds? We can mention K Fuchs who leaked atomic bomb data, and S Efron who ultimately brought himself and his wife Marina Tsvetaeva (Russian poetess) to a sad end. Infinite is the list of all misled souls.

A fairly popular opinion is that communists’ successes and the support accorded them by liberals in the West stemmed from lack of information. This is definitely not true. The butchery carried out by Stalin’s pack were sufficiently documented by as early as the end of the 1930s. Public trials and absurd confessions of the former leading Bolsheviks, their executions, the assassination of Trotsky and other heroics of the KGB outside the borders of the USSR, the murder of nearly the entire top echelons of the Red Army(this is a lot more than an ‘awl in a sack’ that, as the Russian saying goes, will out. But those who refused to see chose to close their eyes to it, blinded by the nearly religious faith in communism and, at least to the same degree, by the opposition of the USSR to the fascist Germany.

Archives have been opened in Russia in the last years and we were able to find out much of what remained hidden. Among these materials are, for example, the Ribbentrop-Molotov German-Soviet Pact, Lenin’s previously top-secret bloodthirsty ‘instructions’ (such as those on murdering of orthodox priests), and the scale of the terror. Numerous new evidence of lawlessness and repression were published, to complement that already contained in Solzhenitsin’s GULAG Archipelago . The latest estimates indicate that more than 21 million people were shot or had died in prisons and concentration camps. This is roughly the total population of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland) (!). We have also learnt that the spiritual and organizational leader of all repression was Stalin in person, this truly bloodthirsty bandit who showed mercy to no one. For example, it is his signature that was found under the ‘decision’ to shoot thousands of captive Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. It appears that by now only blind and deaf may refuse to conclude that Hitler and Stalin are virtually brothers in blood, that the fascist and communist rules are totalitarianism of the same mint.

3. Why had it taken so long to digest these truths?

Three causes emerge. First, as I have already emphasized, fascist mottoes produce negative response as a matter of course. Contrary to this, communism’s appeals to social justice, internationalism etc are very seductive. Second, Hitler & Co broadcast their troglodyte plans openly. True, even fascists tried to hide their ugliest deeds such as the ‘operations’ of gas ovens in Oswiecim (Auschwitz). On the whole, though, their true face and ideology were exposed for all to see. As for the communists, they played their hypocritical game skillfully and consistently from beginning to end. Examples are endless. Suffice it to mention the brutal murder of czar’s entire family, including young teenage girls and the terminally ill boy. Lenin had sanctioned this crime. I have read somewhere recently that responding to incessant queries about the fate of czar’s family that kept coming from A A Ioffe, the Russian representative in Germany, Lenin gave roughly the following instruction: Tell him that the family have not been shot; this will make it easier for him to lie. In fact, this is a relative ‘detail’; hypocrisy and lies infused everything that the Bolsheviks ever did. Consider the above-mentioned Katyn. I remember well how a specially formed commission, which included a known KGB agent Orthodox metropolitan Nikolai, published the conclusion that the crime was committed by the Germans. The truth was acknowledged only very recently, just 50 (!) years later.

The third reason for the popularity of communism in the West was that the alternative form of rule – a democracy – is by a long shot not an ideal system. Furthermore, capitalism is disgusting in many of its facets, and familiar lines from the Soviet poet-laureate Vladimir Mayakovsky are quite true to life:

A doughnut to one

and the hole from its middle to another

This is what the democratic republic

is all about.

This is quite correct but the tragedy was that in the socialist society (a ‘developed socialist society’ of the 1970s on top of that) that communists in the USSR and in its satellite states pretended to have constructed, it was only on paper that the social equality existed. In actual fact, the absence of human rights, the reign of lies, despotism, arbitrariness, and often terror ruled the land. I heard that Mayakovsky ultimately understood it, which was one of the reasons for his suicide in 1930. In addition to Mayakovsky, we can recall other outstanding poets whose physical ordeals in Bolsheviks’ hands have no question mark on them. Nikolai Gumilev was shot, Osip Mandelshtam died in a concentration camp, Marina Tsvetaeva was humiliated, lost all roots and ultimately hanged herself, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak were persecuted, Iosif Brodsky was arrested and then exiled abroad. Recalling all this is frightening and painful, especially if one keeps hearing eulogies of dirty liers or incorrigible fools about ‘communism’s humanism’.

4. We used to read tons about ‘the rot setting in’ in capitalism, about its forthcoming doomsday, about economic advantages of ‘socialist system’ and its inevitable victory. Let us acknowledge that in the past communists did accept the ‘criterion of putting to practice’, which is an inherently clear statement that any theoretical construct must be judged, and its fate evaluated, only by comparing with reality. By the way, experimental testing (i.e. the same ‘criterion of putting to practice’) and its decisive role form the basis of all natural sciences. Theories are almost always in abundance while there is only one reality. Communist practices crashed in flames, getting no help from the vaunted clichés of ‘proletariat’s dictatorship’ and ‘democratic centralism’ which proved to be nothing less than dictatorship by a pack of leaders (Führers) and then by a single Führer and the ‘genius of all sciences’. The economic system of ‘socialism’ ended in complete failure: the country with the most abundant resources became a poor beggar. The victorious country that paid for the victory by millions of lives of its citizens, fell to a humiliating low of receiving humanitarian aid from the previously vanquished and destroyed Germany. The latter rose from the ashes owing to the democratic society that replaced fascism and thanks to the help provided by other democracies. Democracy proved capable of modifying and adjusting its rule, curing drawbacks of capitalism where possible, fighting racism (one example is the successful fight to exterminate racial discrimination in the USA) etc.

The conclusion that one has to draw from applying the practical criterion-what we call history’s verdict-is obvious. One of its versions was excellently formulated by Winston Churchill: democracy is a very bad sort of rule but nobody suggested anything better.

I also heard an opinion that Russia was specially unlucky in that Stalin has become its leader. True, such monsters are produced not so frequently, but not so rarely either (remember Hitler and Pol Pot). However, there is no ground to believing that the fate of the country in a broader perspective would be significantly different if Trotsky or someone else happened to be in power. The basis for this conclusion is the story of building ‘socialism’ in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and, finally, Cuba. In the last case there was not even a threat of direct occupation but the self-proclaimed ‘Freedom Island’ proved to be a ‘Prison Island’ from which its citizens flee in despair to the US. Another example is Yugoslavia. Bros Tito rejected Stalin’s pressure and was creating his sort of ‘socialism’ in his own manner. The tragic fate of his country is for all of us to see. Unfortunately, as I had an occasion to write before, so many people refuse to see the obvious.

5. So much has been written about communism, its essence and its fate that I could not hope, nor attempt, to add anything new. I will only remind the reader of a few points. Also, in this context, I cannot help mentioning Lev Tolstoi’s revelation. I was brought up in the Soviet period, my interests did not concentrate on great literature, so that I regarded Tolstoi as a great writer and knew nothing of him as a great thinker. Moreover, I always was and still remain an incorrigible atheist, hence Tolstoi’s religious pursuits leave me indifferent. However, in an excellent article by the recently deceased I D Konstantinovsky (in a Moscow magazine Ogonek ) and in his book As a Candle from a CandleŠ An Experimental Biography of an Idea (Moskovsky Rabochii 1990). I learnt of Tolstoi’s unfamiliar facet. It may be of interest to very many people.

Long before revolution Tolstoi was acutely aware that violence could not create a just and flourishing society. For him, attempts to grab power and then build a ‘socialist society’ by any sort of ‘equidistribution’, forced production quotas, drawing ‘lists’ for food rationing etc were a social utopia. Tolstoi asked: ”Why do you think that the people who will form a new government, the people who become directors of factories and land Š will not find a way to get hold, just as now, of a lion’s share and leave to the simple and the meek only the bare essentialsŠ People who are governed in life only by the worries of their own well-being will always find a thousand ways of corrupting the social arrangements”. Elsewhere Tolstoi wrote: ”If what Marx predicts does materialize, all that would happen would be for the despotism to shift: where capitalists were lords, administrators of workers will be lords”.

Lenin’s predictions were different: ”The entire society will be one office and one factory, with equal labour and equal pay”. Isn’t it obvious that Tolstoi was right while comrade Lenin and his pack were ignorant of human nature and had no success in trying to warp it by bloodletting.

6. For reasons that I hope will become clear soon, I wish to reveal some details of my own life.

My father was an engineer of the old generation, never a party member. We had no one among our relatives or close friends who would go for political activity or at least would be capable of comprehending the real situation in the country. I was not personally acquainted with a single person who suffered from Stalin’s repression. I was surrounded by communist banners, by prayers sung to the ‘Great Stalin’ and by the information on the truly appalling feats and gambles of the fascist side. We should not forget that the Soviet power had unquestionable achievements as well. Suffice it to mention here the elimination of illiteracy and unemployment, the absence – in the prewar decades – of racial discrimination (and specifically of state-supported anti-Semitism), the possibility to get education. Consequently, I am not going to repent, even today, that in 1937, at 21 years of age, I enrolled in the young communist league (komsomol). There was not a shadow of career-making in it: non-party-members were allowed into post-graduate courses of the physics department, and that was as far as my plans stretched. Neither am I ashamed of joining (or rather becoming a candidate to) the communist party in 1942. It happened in Kazan on the Volga to which the predominant part of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was evacuated; that was the period when the German armies were closing in on the Volga. I never tried to avoid mobilization, tried to volunteer twice, and had no ‘shield’ from being drawn. However, there must have existed some sort of obscure instruction: do not accept into the army, without special reason, young scientists without previous military training. Frankly speaking, this was a wise decision, proved very beneficial after the war, when the destroyed industry was being reconstructed and new technologies were emerging. An aside: I had never occupied any party positions of any distinction whatsoever.

In 1942 I defended the DSc degree in Physics and Mathematics, worked in the Lebedev Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (FIAN) but, although I had plenty of energy to teach, could not find a position in the Moscow institutes. Consequently, when I was invited to become a part-time professor of the radiophysics department of the University of Nizhnii Novgorod (then Gorkii) (GGU), I accepted.¹

There I met Nina Ivanovna Yermakova and we got married in 1946. I mention this fact here only because Nina was not a mere ordinary Soviet citizen: she was in exile. Her father was a communist, an outstanding engineer; in 1938 he was arrested and sent to serve his 15-years sentence in the far North. However, it proved possible to collect a large number of supporting signatures of his colleagues (in those times this was an exceptional, very non-trivial feat) and I P Yermakov was returned to a Moscow prison for ‘additional inquest’. At this moment the Second World War erupted on the borders of the USSR, the Butyrka prison was relocated to Saratov, and Nina Yermakova’s father died there of hunger, allegedly in the same prison cell as the well known biologist Nikolai I Vavilov. Nina was at that moment a student of the Moscow University’s Mechanics and Mathematics faculty, and was acquainted with other students whose parents were prosecuted (‘repressed’). At that moment our glorious ‘services’ decided to concoct a ‘process’ on a group of youngsters who were chosen for the roles of ‘insurgents’ who, allegedly of vindictiveness, planned to kill the great leader and teacher himself. Alas, Nina lived in a flat on the Arbat street through which this leader sometimes ‘drove in five cars’ (I am using B Slutsky’s imagery). Well, the young terrorists were said to prepare the assassination by shooting from the window of that Arbat room. However, the script-writers from the NKVD-KGB did not bother to check their facts. The rooms in the Arbat flat in which the Yermakovs lived was peopled by ‘reliable inhabitants’ while Nina and her mother were left in a room whose window faced the inner yard. KGB thus had to change the accusation of terror to an ‘innocuous’ one of ‘counter-revolutionary discussions’ and of participation in a ‘bad’ group of terrorists (articles 58-10, 11 of the Penal Code of the time). The absence of windows to the Arbat roadway and the refusal to ‘confess’ the guilt, despite ten days in severe-regime single cell with ban on sleep, led to a ‘sentence’, by Special Trial Unit, that in those times was regarded as unbelievably mild: three years of hard labour, minus the nine months already spent in jail (from July 1944). The war has ended at this very moment and amnesty was announced; for inmates with less than three-year terms it covered article 58 as well (there were so few ‘counter-revolutionaries’ with only three years’ sentence that their case, I believe, was simply overlooked when amnesty was being defined). The amnesty was half-hearted: people were let out of labour camps but banned from settling in large cities. This is how Nina found herself in the village of Bor, on the Volga’s banks the other side of Nizhnii Novgorod; a lucky combination of circumstances allowed her to enroll in the Polytechnic Institute. A curious stroke to the picture: after marriage, I would write an application to the KGB once each year (I was not allowed to do it more often) requesting that my wife be permitted to move to Moscow. These applications were seconded by the directors of FIAN S I Vavilov and D V Skobeltsyn, well known physicists and public figures. I had no success and only learnt that these two directors also had exiled relatives and equally failed to wangle official permissions for them to stay in the capital. ²

To exhaust this topic, I will add that my wife was able to return to Moscow only in 1953, as a result of a new amnesty that followed Stalin’s death. Another nice feature. When my wife received the official ‘rehabilitation’, this operation needed a visit by a KGB officer accompanied by witnesses who were to compose a protocol to the effect that the windows of the room where Nina used to live did indeed give into the yard. Truly, there is but one step from tragic to ridiculous too.

But let us return to Stalin’s times. Clouds were gathering over my head. I was a party member who had lost his class sensitivities to such an extent that had married an exiled person, being himself a Jew to boot (this became an important factor by that time) and, finally, a ‘cosmopolitan’ and a ‘sycophant’. I doubt if the younger generations remember this last rabid label but in the second half of the 1940s it was all over the pages of newspapers and agendas of meetings. So: bad apples were discovered, literary critics more than anybody else, and quite a few others who ‘began to kowtow to everything foreign’, to ‘lick the boots of foreign science’ and at the same time ‘belittle national values and national interests’. A great many, I do not know how many, were subjected to the so-called ‘trials of honour’, and some were repressed. On October 4, 1947 (my birthday, by the way) an article was printed in Literaturnaya Gazeta , with a title ‘Against Sycophantism’; it was signed by the director of the Agricultural Academy B Nemchinov. The article was an attack mostly against certain ‘enemies of truly scientific’ Michurin-Lysenko biology (A R Zhebrak was the main culprit) but I was also branded a ‘bootlick’. Some time later I managed to find out how my name and my ‘sins’ got into this article but this is not the right place for this story. I cannot help mentioning that eleven most prominent Soviet physicists sent an official protest to the paper, characterizing the accusations against me as ‘insulting slander’. The communist party cell of FIAN treated the article in Litgazeta similarly and passed a special resolution to clear my name. As was normal for the times, no retractions were printed in the paper. The ideological ‘crusade against sycophants’ was getting stronger by the day. Before I could bat an eyelid, the Superior Attestation Commission rejected the application for Professorship degree for me, submitted by the Gorkii University. My name started its odyssey as a negative specimen through various executive orders and articles, and I was dropped from the Learned Council of FIAN ‘for the purpose of strengthening it’. I describe it all not for revenge (this would be ludicrous) but to partly conjure up the colours of the time and, most of all, to formulate my firm conviction: in view of the combination of circumstances, I was a sure candidate for arrest. If anything saved me, it was Š the hydrogen bomb.

In 1947 the gigantic effort of producing the Soviet atomic bomb, headed since 11 February 1943 by Igor V Kurchatov, was in full swing. There was still a long way to go to the test blast (it had taken place on August 29, 1949). Nevertheless, the possibility of developing the hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear weapons) was already a matter for thought. Has it happened due to local initiative or has it been stimulated by intelligence data – I do not know (A D Sakharov in his ‘Memoirs’ ³ writes in chapter 6 that intelligence information was the likeliest stimulus. ⁴ Preliminary calculations carried out by Yakov B Zeldovich and his group at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR led to fairly pessimistic conclusions. As was customary in such situations, Kurchatov decided to throw the same problem to a parallel group of physicists at FIAN, headed by Igor E Tamm. It was most probably quite difficult to get permission for this since Tamm’s reputation with the authorities was not too good (he was a Menshevik before 1917, and in the 1930s his brother was shot; I wrote about this in an article devoted to Tamm’s 100th anniversary in RAN Vestnik 1995 no 6, p 520. I believe that Kurchatov was able to involve Tamm only because the problem had not seemed too pressing; rather, it appeared fairly hopeless. For the same reasons, Tamm was able to incorporate me into his group, despite my shortcomings outlined above. Sakharov was included in the group, as he writes himself, because he was supported by FIAN director S I Vavilov who wished to get him somewhere to live in Moscow. Truly there is but a single step from the great to the laughable.

I won’t describe the details of our work since Sakharov has done it in his excellently written Memoirs . It is only important to mention that in 1948 Sakharov came up with what he called ‘the first idea’ and then I suggested ‘the second idea’, and these made the creation of the H-bomb possible. Even in 1989, when Sakharov had a chance to amend his book, the ideas no 1 and no 2 were still strictly classified: 40 years after emergence! This absurdity, so typical for our recent past, was overcome (if this expression is permissible) only after Sakharov’s death (see Priroda no 8, pp 10 and 20, 1990). Expanding on the gist of the two ideas is unnecessary here. In 1950 Tamm and Sakharov were sent to the ‘object’ (which at that time was deeply classified but nowadays is known as Arzamas-16) in order to direct the actual development of the hydrogen bomb. However, I was not allowed to participate in this work and had stayed behind, in Moscow, heading a small ‘support group’ guarded by secret service; I still had only a restricted access to classified research, even though my classification was ‘Top Secret. Special File’. I was obviously tremendously lucky: had some sort of ensured protection and at the same time was able to do research ‘for soul’s sake’ (had enough time left for it) and to travel to the exiled wife. In fact, menacing complications resumed in 1952; I lost access even to some of my own research reports (on controlled nuclear fusion). Sakharov writes in his memoirs that at the beginning of 1953 ‘cargo trains were ready for the deportation of the Jews, and the propagandist texts were already printed to justify the measure’. Unfortunately, I have no other reliable information on the matter. I do not know what fate awaited me: to stay behind in a ‘sharazhka’ (prison research unit) as a still ‘useful Jew’, or depart with a doomed train. Fortunately, Stalin failed to implement his last insane schemes.

After the first hydrogen bomb was successfully tested on August 12, 1953, my awards were a class lower than those of Tamm and Sakharov but were quite high nevertheless. However, the most important thing was that after the arrest and execution of Lavrentii Beriya and his henchmen KGB’s hands became shorter and the climate in the country mellowed in many respects. This article is not the place to describe it all. I should only remark that until the famous Khrushchev’s revelation of 1956 I, like so many others, remained ignorant of the true role played by Stalin in unleashing the now exposed outrageous atrocities. I am very ashamed of this blindness of mine. The falling-off of scales was so painful that I became very careless and soon attracted KGB’s attention. Some of our acquaintances began to avoid my and my wife’s company; we found out later that they were invited ‘where one does not dare to refuse invitation’ and demanded to inform about me. The menacing hand with the sward has weakened, however, and people, at least of my station in life, were not thrown into jails or lunatic asylums for mere loose talk among fellow Soviet citizens. The only field in which the damage was done was the travel to scientific conferences abroad. Using secrecy rules as a pretext, I was not allowed abroad and lost a great deal from missing conferences to which I was regularly invited. That the secrecy was a pretext was beyond doubt since people who knew incomparably more about classified matters had much greater freedom of travel (fortunately, Tamm had). Still, I did visit some places in the 1960s, and a couple of times even together with my wife (that was a rare privilege in the Soviet times). But even this phase closed as a result of the clandestine reports of ‘well-wishers’ and later because I was, let us say, too close to Sakharov. I do not mean any personal closeness but the fact that since 1971 I headed the Tamm Department of Theoretical Physics of FIAN and Sakharov was on the staff of this department from 1969 till his death. I never signed any ‘letter’ directed against him, I tried to help him, and visited him twice in Gorkii during his exile. ⁵ I am not trying to boast, I simply explain why I did not enjoy any favors from the authorities.

In 1989 I was elected people’s deputy from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR to the Supreme Soviet and tried to be conscientious about my duties; I was a fairly active member of the Parliamentary Commission Against Privileges. Now that I write this, it is a sad joke to remember that B N Yeltsin was just about the originator of this struggle. In politics I was, not without qualifications, on the side of Gorbachev and Yakovlev, and I do not regret this. ⁶ I will complete the autobiographical part of this article by saying that I resigned from the Communist Party at the beginning of 1991, and completely stopped any political activity ever since the dismissal of the Parliament at the end of 1991.

8. Soviet science and technology had outstanding achievements: suffice it to mention the launching of satellites and the space research, the highest level achieved in physics, mathematics and in some other sciences. An evidence of this level is the fact that, having ultimately gained the freedom of travel and at the same time suffering from low wages, a number of our specialists (some members of the Russian Academy of Sciences among them) were able to find excellent employment in the West, some as full professors. Note that this happened against the background of obvious insufficiency, for instance in the USA, of vacant positions for the young American scientists. An opinion was formed in this connection that science under ‘socialism’ was in full bloom. This judgment is at least very one-sided. Physics, mathematics and some other fields were in good state. But biology, which was doing quite well after the 1917 revolution, was virtually quartered, especially at the sadly immortalized session of the Agricultural Academy in 1948. The thing was that Stalin, and Khrushchev after him, chose to imagine themselves to be experts in biology as well, had supported the ignorant and aggressive brute Lysenko, and suppressed, sometimes physically, all his opponents. Cybernetics (computer sciences) and cosmology suffered a similar fate, even if in less dramatic circumstances. As for social sciences (economics, history, literature and language studies etc), there wasn’t even a shade of freedom of opinion there, everything was dictated by the Marx-Engels dogmas and by the latest instructions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

In fact, physics has matured for a ‘Lysenko treatment’ as well: the all-USSR Conference was in preparation, to take place on the 21 March 1949, but got canceled at the very last moment. No documents about this survived or have not been uncovered yet. The most plausible version is this.⁷

The atomic bomb has not been test-exploded yet, and Kurchatov has replied to Beriya’s question that ‘no, the bomb cannot be produced without relativity theory and quantum mechanics’. Beriya responded, very disturbed, that the bomb is all-important and the rest is rubbish (‘the rest’ meant sniping at modern physics for its allegedly idealistic orientation). Presumably, Beriya immediately reported to Stalin about the situation, and Stalin ordered to cancel the conference being organized by the Central Party Committee: no one else would dare.

This event points to the obvious: physics, mathematics and some other sciences were supported only since they were required to develop bombs, rockets and other weapons systems, for the industrial effort etc. To achieve such aims, nothing was spared. I recall how our salaries were raised several-fold after Americans exploded atomic bombs in Japan; imagine the golden rainfall enjoyed by the leaders of important projects after their successful completion. However, man lives not upon bread alone, and on the whole our life was quite bitter. The ideological repression, ⁸ censorship, the ban on using copiers unless in a special room behind iron bars, impossibility of free travel abroad and free exchange of information with our colleagues in the West. And of course, brutal repression. A brilliantly talented physicist Matvei Bronshtein was shot, outstanding physics theorist S Shubin died in a labour camp, no one knows where. An incomparable physics experimentalist L Shubnikov, and several other physicists from Kharkov with him, were shot. The great Lev Landau spent a year in jail and miraculously avoided death. In fact, the recently published Tragic Fates: Scientists of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in GULAG (Moscow: Nauka, 1995) lists 105 full and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, incarcerated in different periods (the list in definitely not exhaustive).

I should remark that even at this first stage of democracy in Russia, censorship has been removed, we talk freely, can travel abroad, and our science could flourish were it not for financial difficulties. The world science today is a typical democracy with all its advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes scientists get a doughnut and sometimes the hole in it, there is no equality and no justice, and there cannot be. Some people get Nobel or other prizes (doughnut) while some (just as deserving) do not (hole). Some are elected to various academies, others (equally deserving) are not. Some occupy excellent positions, others fail to find good employment. Some publish their results easily, others struggle, etc. This all stems from human nature and is typical of democracy. A lot can be improved and indeed needs improving, and this ability to improve is also a typical trait of democracy. However, it is impossible to reach the ideal state (complete justice), and quite often it is not clear what the ideal is. Still, there is a great difference between sometimes getting the hole of a doughnut and for an innocent person to be thrown into jail or be exiled.

9. It is high time, however, for me to return to the main topic of the article. I have already stressed that we now possess important fruits of democracy: freedom of speech, free elections etc. Plus, of course, shelves full of food and merchandise in shops. I remember too well not only empty shelves but also rationing cards, and the abundance of food and stuff never ceases to surprise me. Alas, here I have to stop the pro’s and start the con’s. The goods are there, indeed, but a considerable part of the population cannot afford to buy them. The average salary of those on the stuff of the Academy of Sciences is 300, 000 roubles per month. Doctors, teachers and all other ‘state budget’ people draw wages that are patently inadequate for decent life. Pensioners and invalids fare much worse. In January 1996 the total number of citizens with income below the official minimum was 37.3 million people, which is a quarter of the entire population of the country. Add to this the crazy and unbelievably unscrupulous delays of many month in paying wages and pensions. This takes place against the background of growing social inequality. ‘Nouveau Russians’ and a certain, not quite decipherable to me, layer of very rich attend night clubs and restaurants, drive expensive foreign cars, have super-luxurious (by our standards, anyway) country villas, spend holidays at spas abroad, or even buy real estate in the West. How could they get hold of the money? What part of the rich (I fear that a very high proportion) are crooks? The situation is aggravated by inane wasting of resources by the authorities: enormous expenditure on repairing the ‘White House’ and on equipment for it and for the Federal Assembly, the cost of upkeep of the former and current lords of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) (see Argumenty i Fakty no 7, 1966, p. 2), of countless, mostly meaningless, trips of various highly placed officials with their retinues, let alone Duma members and powerful administrators. I was never able to see published figures of all these ‘expenditure articles’. In contrast, as far as I could find out, in UK there are only about twenty state-owned cars for all ministers and civil servants. Papers reveal again and again how ministers in the USA and other countries resign after being caught using taxpayer’s money for private purposes (such as going to a sanitarium with a family). In fact, numerous examples could be found that show how ”people’s servants” are monitored by their electors and dare not misuse public money or resort to parliamentary immunity to escape criminal investigation.

I cannot help mentioning, when describing the current situation in Russia, the rampant crime wave and the corruption that is eating away at the administration and law-enforcement branches. Finally, we all know about blunders in Chechnya and the aberrations in the army.

Is it any surprise then that the ‘ruling party’ has received mere 10% at the elections of 17 December 1995, while LDPR (Zhirinovsky’s ultra-right Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia) and other organizations of this type (referred to as ‘left’ in Russia, for some reason, although friends and analogues of Mr Zhirinovsky are labelled right everywhere else) collected together about 15% of the votes and communists of all colours received 25%. Clearly, these negative sides of our lives now cannot be outweighed by the freedom of speech and the availability of foreign travel (provided money is available) for most of those who do not have enough to eat, and not only for them.

I am not an expert in economics, finances and the methods of governmental control and thus have no right nor desire to offer advice in these fields. In fact, I am not of those who claim ‘to know how everything should be done’. It appears admissible, though, and in the context of this article to some extent necessary, to make several remarks and express an opinion on select issues.

What is the purpose of reforms carried out in Russia and of the entire historical process of passing from the ‘well-developed (or advanced) socialism’ to something different? The aim is to build up in Russia a stable, affluent society of a Western type, that is, characterized by market economy and strong democracy. Sometimes people speak of ‘advanced capitalism’ but for myself, as for quite a few people who lived that long under the Soviet system, the word ‘capitalism’ is fraught with very negative connotations. It is associated with grim factory blocks and workers that are jaded with poverty and hard labour. Marx may have imagined a picture like this but nowadays it has very little in common with reality.

The most important aspect that permits one to regard this aim as realistic is the fact that it has already been achieved in a number of countries and thus is not an utopia, like communism. Of course, each country has its specifics, and Russia has its specifics raised to power two, if I may say so. Nobody in his or her senses suggests blind copying.

Alas, our reforms were poorly prepared, and were carried out in haste and confusion. This may explain how very grave errors were committed. ‘A voucher to everyone’ operation seems ludicrous to me (I have sold mine for 20 US dollars), while many other acts of privatization appear to be simply criminal. A typical example can be taken from a recent interview with the former mayor of Sank Petersburg Aleksandr Sobchak (Izvestiya 20 February 1996). He said: ‘The Baltic Shipping Company’ was in fact sold out as a result of careless privatization. It was bought up for a song as a rented enterprise and then sold off by parts for debts. About fifteen people got rich, bought real estate abroad and emigrated while a huge shipping company, one of the largest in the world and dominating the Baltic sea, disappeared.’

Such follies, uncountable in number, bled the country and generated this phenomenon of ‘nouveau Russians’. Tens of billions of dollars fled from the country, and was anybody punished? At the same time, Russia struggles for credits from the West (these will have to be paid back) of considerably smaller size.

The President and the government looked indifferently on the creation of crooked banks of MMM type and of various ‘enterprises’ erected to rob gullible investors. Who of the organizers of this thievery has been prosecuted? The previous Duma discredited itself by saving its member Mavrodi (the MMM-Mavrodi) from trial by court by a revolting shield of parliamentary impunity. Now populist stimuli make authorities discuss possible compensation of the duped investors. At whose expense? I am of the opinion, by the way, that if compensation is undertaken, it is only the pensioners and the poor that must be given anything. As for those who simply wished to get rich ‘while the getting was good’ (I think that their number is not less than that of the former group), there is no reason to restore their investments at the expense of the rest of the population who had clear heads on their shoulders.

When we read about the life of the military in the army and the navy, the heart virtually misses a beat (the latest evidence known to me appeared in Izvestia on February 14, 1996 about the situation on the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier). No one threatens Russia, armed with its nuclear arsenal, and even regardless of it; it is absurd to keep an enormous army that the country cannot afford to feed and arm. The only argument I heard for maintaining this army is the unbelievable, unheard of anywhere in the world number of generals who insist on the respectable number of subjects. As a result, instead of urgent reductions in the army, the government extends the conscription term and sends students (!) to the army. Using the words coined by Napoleon’s minister of police Fouché,’this is worse than a crime-this is a mistake’.

I have already mentioned the delays (sometimes of many months) in payments of wages. Entering the election campaign on 15 February 1996, B Yeltsyn promised to do away with this disgusting despotism. However, what precluded him from declaring this earlier? Why only the threat of failing at the election crucible awoke the President from his lethargic sleep? (or was it his many courtiers who woke him up once they realized that the threat of losing power was quite real?)

This list of shortcomings would be very incomplete if I forgot to mention the absolutely insufficient fight against the cancerous corruption and crime. Papers often revealed that police and security services know nearly all criminal ‘authorities’ and ‘thieves-in-the-law’ virtually by names. Their meetings were broken into but Š the culprits were immediately released (?!). Numerous assassinations and murders remain unsolved. Courts let obvious criminals and fascists off the hook.

I will allow myself two more remarks. I still remember the destruction of the Christ The Savior cathedral in Moscow and definitely regard it as a barbaric act, quite in the spirit of other feats of Stalin and his ilk. However, why is it necessary now, amid raging financial crisis, to reconstruct the cathedral at the state’s expense? We hear, though, that some church money are also attracted but their fraction is hushed up and that is reason enough for knowing the true source of financing. This flirting with church and direct financial support contradict the separation of church from the state. If the government has money to spare, it must build hospitals and homes for the aged, not reconstruct the churches. By the way, our modern communists, whose fathers, led by Lenin, persecuted priests in the most brutal fashion, nowadays flatter the Orthodox church and even denounce atheism (I have heard this remark from Zyuganov), even though atheism is not al all against freedom of religious beliefs.

My second remark is aimed at KGB. In the Czech republic and in Germany, the archives of KGB analogues are open to public. Each citizen can find out who had been writing slanderous reports to KGB on him or anyone else. I do not speak of vengeance: simply, exposed informers must be prohibited from occupying positions in law-enforcement structures. By the way, our media several times informed the public that some of the highest-rank priests of the Russia’s Orthodox church closely cooperated with KGB. Do not the Christians have the right to know the truth about it? In short, I believe that the archives of the former KGB must be completely opened for all Russian citizens. This act would be the best guarantee that FSB (Federal Security Service) will never turn into something quite equivalent to KGB.

Why did I need to start the enumeration of the open sores of our society and to remind about the errors committed? Obviously, to ask a question: how can we cure these sores, how to live on, how to reach the goal of building in Russia a rich democratic society? Could it be that this requires yielding power to communists whose critical arrows partly aim at the same target and who have plenty of experience of destroying a society they dislike? My answer to this question is, categorically, in the negative.

In principle, our current Constitution and the presidential type of government make it possible to eliminate the shortcomings and speedily move in the predetermined direction. What party is capable of this? A tough question; I can only confess that in the elections to the Duma in 1993 I voted for the Grigory Yavlinsky’s ‘Yabloko’ (Apple) combine of parties although almost all those close to me preferred Yegor Gaidar ‘Russia’s Choice’. As these friends, I do regard Gaidar and his team as honest people and truly democratically minded. ⁹ Alas, Gaidar and his team made many errors while Yavlinsky at least had no chance of making them. I consider him to hold honestly to democratic principles and to be a highly professional economist. These are the reasons why I would like to see him at the helm. In the elections to the Duma in 1995 I also voted for Yabloko, although my vote in the single-mandate electoral region went to the representative of the DVR. I plan to vote for Yavlinsky at the presidential elections as well, unless it becomes unmistakably clear that he fails to pass on to the second round. In this case I may have to vote for Boris Yeltsin. If even Yeltsin does not make it to the second round, I will have a single option: to vote against both opponents (say, Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky). Indeed, if the number of second-round voters that vote ‘against everybody’ is found to be greater than that supporting any of the candidates, the results of elections will be announced null and void.

Should the Communists win in the presidential elections, the country will be rolling back, and fast. This conclusion follows, on one hand, from the knowledge of the Communist (Bolshevik) rule between 1971 and 1991. On the other hand, the available documents of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) point in the same direction. ¹⁰ The program of the KPRF (which is the most liberal among all currently active communist groups acting now in Russia) does not have a single word of reproach regarding the crimes of VKP(b)-KPSS, to Stalin’s terror, to the persecution of dissidents, including the use of psychiatric hospitals, in the post-Stalinist era. As one would expect, a seemingly inescapable call for repentance is nowhere to be discovered. I was truly shaken when I found in the text of the election platform of the KPRF (p 5) a quote from Lenin: ‘political parties must be judged not by their promises but the results of implementation of these promises’. Don’t we remember what communists promised in 1917, and many times later, and what they actually did? If communists win now, the story would repeat itself. Indeed, communists ‘forgot nothing and learnt nothing’. Formally, this statement could be challenged. I have not found in the publications of KPRF the demand for proletariat’s dictatorship, nor of loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, and these were a trademark of the documents of KPSS. I think, nevertheless, that this is not more than smoke screen needed to avoid frightening away the voters by reminding them of the past; moreover, these mottoes are not that important in the practical activities. These practical steps will involve nationalization, restriction of the freedom of speech and freedom of the press (I can advise looking at the statements of KPRF’s member of Duma Yu Ivanov, published in Izvestiya on February 15, 1996). Once communists fail-inevitably-to achieve economic success on a ‘socialist’ path, they will immediately start a witchhunt for the culprits (this will again generate ‘enemies of the people’), and law-enforcement branches will start on the familiar path of VChK, OGPU, NKVD and KGB. The overtures we see even now between KPRF and various nationalist-chauvinistic and brownshirt elements will grow stronger, the army will not be reduced, the foreign policy will get tougher by using demagoguery about NATO’s aggressiveness, and so forth. On the whole, Communists’ victory in the elections will be their revenge, a leap into the past (I quite agree with the prediction of O Moroz in Literaturnaya Gazeta of February 14, 1996) and a terrible threat for Russia and the entire world.

The responsibility of the Russian voter is overwhelming. Everyone to polling stations! I suggest you will vote exclusively for a democratic candidate or a candidate supported by the democratic parties.

Vitaly Ginzburg

(Translation by Vitaly Kisin)

Footnotes

¹ I worked at the radiophysics department of GGU and at the Radiophysics Institute (NIRFI) and then was in contact with them for many years. Quite a few physicists of high calibre emerged from these places, including the present governor of the Nizhnii Novgorod region B Nemtsov.

² See a story about this that I published in Science and Life 1992, no 1 and in my book On Physics and Astrophysics 1995 (Moscow: Bureau Quantum).

³ A Sakharov Memoirs 1990 (New-York: Chekhov).

⁴ A very recent article by Yu B Khariton, V B Adamsky and Yu N Smirnov (Soviet Physics Uspekhi 1966 166 185) describes for the first time and in considerable detail the history of developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb. The article shows clearly that in this case intelligence played no part. The history of the development of atomic and hydrogen bombs in the USSR can be found in D Holloway Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press).

⁵ For details, see my article ‘On the Sakharov phenomenon’ published in the magazine Svobodnaya Mysl (Free Thought) nos 14, 15 (1990) and in the already mentioned book On Physics and Astrophysics).

⁶ A N Yakovlev, formerly member of Politburo of KPSS and one of the initiators and leaders of the ‘perestroika’, is currently the Chairman of the Commission, set up by the President of the Russian Federation, on Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression. In this capacity, he had access to an enormous amount of reliable data, numbers and facts, that characterize the Communist (Bolshevik) rule in Russia and the USSR. He’s recently published a book ‘Like the the relic, like the holy oil’, based on this archive. On the whole, we know it all, but one discovers many important details, many new examples. The general statements and conclusions in this article and in Yakovlev’s book are in excellent agreement.

⁷ About this and the preparation of the above-mentioned conference, see A S Sonin Physical Idealism: A History of One Ideological Campaign (Moscow: Fizmatlit, 1994).

⁸ See, among others, the book by A S Sonin cited above. I would also like to recommend E Kolmen’s Our Lives Should Have Been Different (New York: Chalidze Publications, 1982). This is an autobiography of one of the brilliant and active ‘fighters for purity of the Marxist(Leninist ideology’, who only understood what was what by the end of his long life.

⁹ In addition to this, Yegor Gaidar is undoubtedly and very knowledgeable and well-educated person (see his book State and Evolution (Moscow: Eurasia, 1995).

¹⁰ IIIrd Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (relevant documents) (Moscow: Informpechat, 1995); For our Soviet Motherland, Election Platform of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Moscow, 1995).