Stalin’s Great Science

The Times and Adventures of the Soviet Physicist Lev Landau

Abstract

Exceptionally high levels of scientific and technological advances, as well as of violence and political repression, characterized the period of Soviet history under Stalin’s dictatorship. The case of theoretical physicist Lev Landau (1908-1968) provides an opportunity to study the entanglement between these two distinctive features of the Soviet polity. Landau’s attachment to both the scientific and the political revolutions was representative of the radical student culture of the 1920s. The political persecution and exceptional privileges he experienced during his lifetime reflected the dangers and unpredictability of that violent and turbulent era and the uniquely high status of science in Soviet culture. Specifically Soviet existential experiences contributed to Landau’s major accomplishments in quantum physics: they found expression, in particular, in the collectivist theory of quantum matter he developed together with several other Soviet physicists.