Buried Glory
Portraits of Soviet Scientists
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- $52.99
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- $52.99
Publisher Description
Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery is the final resting place of some of Russia's most celebrated figures, from Khrushchev and Yeltsin to Anton Chekhov, Sergei Eisenstein, Nikolai Gogol, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Using this famed cemetery as symbolic starting point, Buried Glory profiles a dozen eminent Soviet scientists-nine of whom are buried at Novodevichy-men who illustrate both the glorious heights of Soviet research as well as the eclipse of science since the collapse of the USSR.
Drawing on extensive archival research and his own personal memories, renowned chemist Istvan Hargittai bring these figures back to life, placing their remarkable scientific achievements against the tense political backdrop of the Cold War. Among the eminent scientists profiled here are Petr L. Kapitza, one of the most brilliant representatives of the great generation of Soviet physicists, a Nobel-Prize winner who risked his career-and his life-standing up for fellow scientists against Stalin. Yulii B. Khariton, who ran the highly secretive Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory, Arzamas-16, despite being Jewish and despite the fact that his father Boris had been sent to the labor camps. And Andrei D. Sakharov, the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb" and a brilliant fighter for human rights, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Along the way, Hargittai shines a light on the harrowing conditions under which these brilliant researchers excelled. Indeed, in the post-war period, Stalin's anti-Semitism and ongoing anti-science measures devastated biology, damaged chemistry, and nearly destroyed physics. The latter was saved only because Stalin realized that without physics and physicists there could be no nuclear weapons.
The extraordinary scientific talent nurtured by the Soviet regime belongs almost entirely to the past. Buried Glory is both a fitting tribute to these great scientists and a fascinating account of scientific work behind the Iron Curtain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fermi, Feynman, Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer are household names, while Sakharov may ring a bell because of his human rights campaign but who has heard of Tamm, Zeldovich, Semenov, or Landau? Nobel winners all, their discoveries place them among the world scientific elite, but they worked behind the Iron Curtain, so few except their scientific colleagues know of them or their accomplishments. Hargittai (Judging Edward Teller), professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Eotvos University, delivers biographies of 14 brilliant researchers who had the misfortune to work under the likes of Stalin and Khrushchev. All are chemists or physicists, because Stalin's fascination with the charlatan geneticist Lysenko destroyed Soviet biology (literally: many biologists who did not fall in line with his theories were shot). These are competent, fact-filled accounts of education, careers, honors, and discoveries, mixed with often-harrowing descriptions of how each scientist either prospered or rebelled in the strange Orwellian world of the U.S.S.R. Ironically, these figures represent the golden age of Russian science, which vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
