The scientific community was in a poor state by the time of Stalin’s death – it had been “beaten” too often and was threatened by “weeds,” to use Kapitsa’s language – but it had enjoyed more autonomy than other parts of Soviet society under Stalin’s rule. This was especially true of physics. The physics community was an island of intellectual autonomy in the totalitarian state. The scientific community – and especially the physics community – was, for all its failings, the closest thing to civil society in the Stalinist regime.
