Stalin and the Bomb

by David Holloway

Physics, as was seen in the last chapter, represented a sphere of relative intellectual autonomy in a society dominated by a regime with totalitarian pretensions. This intellectual autonomy was sustained by a set of social relationships – of authority, status, and reward – that were different from those in the society at large. The authority of the Party did not hold sway here, in spite of the efforts of party philosophers; as Frenkel’ had said, “neither Lenin nor Engels is an authority for physicists.” This was a statement not about the attitude of physicists to the regime – those attitudes varied – but about their attitude to the integrity of physics as an intellectual enterprise. The defense of physics implied that there were limits to the Party’s authority, that physicists had the right to decide which physical theories were valid and which problems were interesting, and also to look to the international physics community for recognition. The decision to expand nuclear research after 1932 shows the Soviet physics community acting in this way.