CHAPTER 4
Stalin’s relations with the scientific and technical intelligentsia during the Second World War throw into bold relief several major features of his style of governing as warlord.1 His policy may be defined along four main lines: first, intensifying their mobilization, employing a mixture of both blunt instruments and rational selectivity; second, an increase in the level of centralization of power together with a devolution of authority along functional lines; third, a re-affirmation of the primacy of collective action and practical tasks alongside a recognition of the value of innovation and scientific theory; fourth, application of severe repressive measures – with notable exceptions – and an increase in incentives. This chapter seeks, first, to illustrate the interplay of these paradoxical and even contradictory elements as a contribution to addressing the larger question of how the Soviet Union managed to survive crushing initial defeats and massive losses of resources and population, and to achieve a significant victory on the battlefield. Second, it offers some conclusions on the evolving relationship created by wartime conditions between Stalin and the scientific and technical intelligentsia.
Lenin had early recognized the signal importance of science and technology in defending advancing revolutionary ideals. He was drawing on three traditions: the nature of Marxism as a scientific method of analysis of social and economic relations; the pre-revolutionary professional intelligentsia including scientists and engineers committed to the transformative power of scientific discoveries and practical inventions; and finally, the enthronement of ‘technique’ in imperial Russia, inherited from Peter the Great as an instrument of bolstering autocratic power at home and abroad, and sustained by his successors erratically and less energetically developed over the long term in state-supported institutions from the Academy of Sciences to special institutes and lastly the universities.
THE TECHNICIANS
Stalin’s views on the scientific and technical intelligentsia were both more complicated and more primitive than Lenin’s. Over the course of the twenties and thirties, two ideologies associated with representatives of this community fell under his suspicion. He dismissed those who advocated pure theory as distinct from practice; they could not contribute to solving the basic tasks of building socialism. At the same time, he rejected the ideas of the technocrats as constituting a dangerous opposition to the supremacy of the party embodied in his personal rule. In the debate over the guidelines for secondary education he sided with Kaganovich who endorsed practical over theoretical training and work (praktiki) against A.V. Lunacharsky, the first commissar of education, who defended a broader approach which recognized the importance of theoretical courses and who, like Lenin, warned against political intrusion in the scientific disciplines.2 A leading spokesman and main victim of the technocratic approach was the mining engineer Petr Palchinsky, who had been trained in pre-revolutionary Russia and served in the provisional government as president of the Special Council on Defence. An active member of the Russian Technological Society, he had become increasingly critical of Russian capitalists and embraced the Soviet regime along with other members of the society’s left-leaning Electrical Section. In the 1920s he promulgated his ideas of the technocrat-engineer as an economic and industrial planner, actively engaged in the direction and form of the country’s development. For this heresy he was shot in 1929, having been accused of being a leader of the so-called Industrial Party, and of planning to overthrow the state.3 Faced by the exigencies of war, Stalin was obliged to reconsider his disdain for theoretical science and his opposition to anything that smacked of technocracy in the scientific and technological intelligentsia by giving way, however grudgingly, to accepting the importance of theoretical work, especially in physics, and endorsing more willingly a directing role for the Academy of Sciences in solving problems related to defence.
Reaching beyond the commissariats, Stalin repaired the frayed ties between the government and the scientific and technical intelligentsia by granting its members a larger role than ever before in economic development, permitting them a degree of autonomy which, though not extensive by Western standards, was greater than any they had enjoyed since the twenties, as well as according them a distinguished place in his pantheon of war heroes.
Early in the conflict, Stalin – and, following his lead, the propaganda apparatus – celebrated the role of the scientific and technical intelligentsia in the war effort, lifting its prestige, which had suffered so grievously from the prewar purges, to new levels. In his annual reviews of the wartime state of the Union, Stalin accorded a more prominent and honoured place to the intelligentsia with the passage of every year.4 Towards the end of the war he ranked the importance of its members’ contribution to the war effort in third place behind the army and working class: ‘Our intelligentsia was able to take the road to innovation in the areas of technology and culture, successfully developing contemporary science, creatively applying it to the achievements in arms production for the Red Army. The Soviet intelligentsia by its creative labour made an inestimable contribution to the task of crushing the enemy.’5 During the conflict, Pravda published a long series of articles dealing with the contributions to the war effort of the intelligentsia in general and the scientific and technical cadres in particular.6
THE SCIENTISTS
Despite Stalin’s suspicions of the potential for opposition among the scientific and technical intelligentsia, he had allowed the Academy of Sciences to expand its membership and institutional structure in the prewar decades. As a result, it had already evolved into a powerful organizational base for deploying the intellectual resources of the country in support of the war effort. Woven into a network of institutions were the forty institutes and seventy-six independent laboratories, councils and other scientific establishments.7 Within their walls worked 123 academicians, 182 corresponding members and 4,700 scientific and technological assistants. In the prewar years many of its members were engaged in work of a military nature. Their co-operation with the Commissariat of War and the Naval Commissariat extended to about 200 projects.8 What was remarkable – indeed extraordinary – about the role of the academy in contributing to the defence sector was its emergence during the war as a semi-autonomous force in Soviet society. By taking the initiative in setting up and expanding new forms of organization, the academy virtually replaced the party in the direction of several sectors of the economy. To be sure, this was done with Stalin’s approval, but it was nonetheless an even more extreme case than that of the military revival in Stalin’s policy of derogation of decision-making within an overall concentration of his power and authority.
The day after the German attack, an unscheduled meeting of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences met, presumably on the initiative of its leadership. More than sixty scientists and scholars took part. Among them were Petr Kapitsa, the Old Bolshevik Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, the head of the academy’s Institute of Energetics Ivan Bardin, one of the first engineers ever elected to the academy and an advocate of the close relationship between theory and practice, Vladimir Komarov and Otto Shmidt. In an eloquent statement to the people, party and government they pledged to commit all their efforts, energy and knowledge to winning the war. In early July 1941, GOKO appointed Sergei Kaftanov to head the Committee for Higher Education and to serve as its liaison with the scientific community. He appointed a special Scientific-Technical Council composed of the eminent scientists Petr Kapitsa, Abram Ioffe, Nikolai Bruevich, Nikolai Semenov and Sergei Vavilov. It was subdivided into sections on chemistry, physics, geology and biology. The council identified three main directions for its activities: direct involvement in meeting the needs of the military; assistance to industry and solving problems of production; and mobilizing the country’s natural resources and finding domestic substitutes for material shortages. Embodying the vaunted ideal of Soviet science, the council took responsibility for organizing scientific research and addressing practical problems.
The council created a number of specialized committees headed by leading scientists in almost all commissariats and government agencies including Gosplan. Scientists were appointed to high government posts as commissars and deputy commissars of war-related branches of industry. The armed forces created their own scientific commissions and appointed scientists to high military rank.9 The proliferation of activist as well as consultative bodies and the network of contacts woven by the scientific community greatly enhanced their authority and their ability to intervene in promoting the war effort as they saw fit.
The evacuation of the academy from its main centres in Moscow and Leningrad in 1941 was carried out in stages, under extremely difficult transport conditions, often under aerial bombardment. The dispersal of the institutes and staffs concentrated them in three centres. The largest centre in Kazan brought together the physical, chemical and technical institutes. In the Urals the mining, metallurgical and geological-geographical establishments were located near the major sources of raw materials for the defence industries. The biological units, located in Central Asia, addressed questions of cultivation and improvement of strains of plants and livestock and increase of agricultural production. The humanities institutes were also moved to Central Asia. The need to co-ordinate the activities of research groups dispersed in forty-five separate locations spurred the leadership to undertake a massive reorganization and rationalization of the academy’s work along five innovative lines.10
First, the general assembly of the academy, meeting in May 1942 at Sverdlovsk, elected six vice-presidents to manage the activities of the three regional centres. Second, to head the institutions of the academy in the Kirghiz, Kazakh and Uzbek republics, it appointed a number of fully empowered delegates. It was their responsibility to establish links with the local party and state organs to decide organizational questions connected with the expansion of the work of the academy. Third, a series of commissions were set up that cut across the traditional lines of the research institutes by recruiting personnel from different branches of the academy. A special commission was created in beleaguered Leningrad which continued to operate throughout the siege. A series of defence commissions forged links with military organizations to meet the needs of the army. A Special Commission for Scientific and Technical Questions relating to the Fleet was initiated and headed by the distinguished academician Ioffe with the young Ivan Kurchatov – who later became one of the fathers of the atomic bomb – as his deputy.
As early as July 1941 a special commission of the Geological-Geographical Section of the academy went to work on military questions in the full range ‘from geology to technology concerned with the implementation of ideas from the factory and the front and finally participating in the direct application of the proposals’, in the words of the president of the section, the academician Aleksandr Fersman.11 Geography was a much neglected discipline in the Soviet Union before the war. Military geography in particular suffered from its low status. The military academies devoted little attention to the subject, including the making and interpretation of maps in the western borderlands, a consequence of the prevailing doctrine that the next war would be fought on the territory of the enemy. Geographers were preoccupied with the economic aspects rather than topographical descriptions. It was only after the central leadership began to explore the possibilities of evacuating vital industries to the east that Soviet geographers began to assume an important role in military-related operations.
A major part of the Institute of Geography of the academy was evacuated to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan by the late autumn of 1941 and attached to the Kazakh branch of the Academy of Sciences. The handful of scientists who remained in Moscow following the evacuation worked in close co-operation with the Soviet military through the medium of the newly formed Commission for Geological-Geographical Services to the Red Army, under Fersman’s leadership. It co-ordinated their activities with the Commission on Aerial Photography and Engineering Geology. Together they responded to orders from a range of military departments to produce hundreds of maps. The major part of the geographers in the academy in Kazakhstan integrated their work with the institutes of soil and botany and also forged links with local academics.12 They played a major role in the Commission for the Mobilization of the Resources of the Urals which stands out as the most ambitious and active of the special commissions sponsored by the academy during the war.
The Commission for the Mobilization of the Resources of the Urals was initiated and organized by the president of the academy, Komarov.13 Taking an unprecedented set of initiatives, the commission analyzed the condition of the most important branches of the regional economy and drafted a plan for mobilizing human and material resources to meet the country’s defence needs and compensate for the huge losses in the productive capacity of the occupied territories in the western provinces. Within a few months, it became clear to the leadership of the academy that the connections between the Urals and Western Siberia required an expansion of the commission, which was achieved in April 1942 with the creation of the Commission for the Mobilization of the Resources of the Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. The party and government once again officially acknowledged and welcomed the initiative. Specialists in the commission excelled in locating new sources of strategic raw materials. Not limited to opening new mines, but also to improving extractive techniques, and removing transport bottlenecks, their proposals were accepted by the respective commissariats and substantially increased production of coal, bauxite, wolfram, copper and oil in the Urals and Western Siberia.14 Many of their proposals went far beyond the normal recommendations of research scientists. They were making economic policy.15
Special expeditions were particularly important in discovering resources for the development of a whole new industrial base in Kazakhstan. The commission’s exemplary success sparked a new initiative in June 1942 with the creation of the Commission for the Mobilization of the Resources of the Middle Volga and Kama Regions. Its eight sections were all headed by an academician. Still a third major commission was responsible for the discovery of a vast new source of oil in the so-called ‘New Baku’ in the Middle Volga region, winning the appreciation of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Tatar Republic for the future development of the region. A Commission for the Expansion of Food Supplies contributed to the more efficient exploitation of the ample but under-exploited plant and animal resources of the Kazan region. And in early 1942 the academy introduced another innovation by dispatching flying squads of scientists and technicians to industrial flash points. Their function was to ‘fight fires’ by solving in record time problems which surfaced in the relocation of industry and its efficient functioning. In sum, throughout the east, commissions of the academy virtually usurped the normal functions of the party and the economics commissariats in developing natural resources and solving major industrial problems. Thanks largely to the efforts of the academy the share of war industry in the eastern regions climbed from 18.5 per cent in June 1941 to 76 per cent in June 1942.16 In the long run, the war forced a trend – already modestly under way – of greater economic integration of the regions, and substantially reduced the great disparities in the rate of industrialization between the Slavic centre and the Muslim republics on the periphery.
During the war, the academy accelerated its efforts to establish permanent institutional centres outside the European parts of the country. On the eve of the conflict, important steps had already been taken to strengthen and encourage the scientific community in the non-Slavic republics of the borderlands. Branches of the Academy of Sciences were opened in Uzbekistan in 1939 and in Turkmenistan in 1940, although the scientists in the latter republic accompanied their petition with a memo of self-criticism focusing on the gap between science and the practical needs of socialist construction. In January 1941 a Georgian Academy of Sciences was established, the first of the full-fledged republican academies, and then in 1943 an Armenian academy.17 The president, Komarov, used the opening of a branch of the academy in the Kirghiz Republic in 1943 as an opportunity to refute Nazi propaganda on the discord among nationalities of the USSR. Branches in the Central Asian republics benefited from the evacuation of scientists from Moscow and Leningrad who helped to organize research and local war production.18
In the sphere of weapons technology, the Academy of Sciences demonstrated that its guiding principle of combining theory and practice yielded important results. Most of its contributions came in response to direct requests from the military organizations. In 1942 alone the Commissariat of Defence sought assistance in solving problems in 175 subjects, of which only twenty-two could not be addressed. Throughout the war, commissariats assigned theoretical problems ranging from ballistics and optics to aerodynamics to the academy, where teams of researchers attacked them. For instance, the academy team on aerodynamics was able to devise solutions to overcoming wind resistance that aircraft designers could then apply to increase speeds of Soviet fighter aircraft by 100 kilometres an hour. A group headed by Mstislav Keldysh, who later became an academician and the president of the Academy of Sciences, applied mathematical formulae to solve the problem of extreme vibration at high speeds. Their contributions were critical in designing the new models of Soviet aircraft, especially the Ilyushin Il-2 ground-attack aircraft (best known in the West as the Stormovik). The geographers and astronomers prepared precise operational maps and meteorological charts for assistance in air defence, greatly appreciated by the Soviet Air Forces. The compilation of a ‘Large Astronomical Calendar’ for 1943, 1944 and 1945, reportedly superior to the English equivalent in scope and precision, was carried out at great sacrifice by the Astronomical Institute in Leningrad. Their work was immensely important in planning the defence of Moscow in 1941 and offensive operations in 1943 and thereafter was given full recognition by military authorities. Their work was also praised by the naval commands. Employing sophisticated mechanical and mathematical models, other groups perfected the rocket artillery, improved armour-piercing shells, hardened artillery barrels and perfected the heavy machine gun.
The workers of the academy were deeply engaged in the defence of Leningrad. They helped develop techniques for dealing with the effects of incendiary bombs and the construction of reinforced concrete defensive structures. The Optical Institute under the academician Sergei Vavilov designed superior models of range-finder, stereoscopic telescopes and a whole variety of optical instruments for military purposes. The Physical-Chemical Institute developed an effective early warning system in defence against aerial attack. It invented anti-icing devices that helped keep open the ice road to the besieged city over frozen Lake Ladoga. The Military-Sanitary Institute had close ties with special units of the army and the Fleet Commissariat of Health. Half the work of the commission in the areas of surgery, epidemiology, hygiene and aviation medicine was carried out by members of the academy. The commission introduced new techniques for improving sanitary conditions in the hospitals, where its work was largely responsible for reducing deaths; an estimated 70 per cent of patients were restored to service, as compared to 40–50 per cent in the First World War.19 The academician Nikolai Burdenko, the chief physician of the Red Army and a veteran of two previous wars, was an innovator in neurosurgery and the use of drugs in treating the wounded. Fearless, he carried out thousands of the most difficult operations at the front. As the result of his method of employing a sulphamide preparation, battlefield deaths from wounds were reduced from 65 to 25 per cent.20 Severely wounded, Burdenko nevertheless designed plans for the USSR Academy of Medical Science and became its president shortly before his death. But Burdenko like all scientists was obliged to submit to Stalin’s political agenda. As the head of the official commission to investigate the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, he turned in a report that falsely accused the Nazis of the crime, which in fact had been carried out by the NKVD.21
In industry, academicians perfected a whole range of technological improvements in steel production, fractionating of oil to obtain toluene for TNT and other processes. These included the invention by two academicians of the defectoscope, which detected flaws in artillery shells, saving time and increasing levels of production. The academician Nikolai Gudtsov’s contribution to the improvement of the operation of motorized vehicles, especially tanks, earned him the Order of Lenin and the Red Star.22
Recording the achievements of the academy is not to ignore serious shortcomings in planning that continued to arise, such as the technical imbalances that led to a ‘contradiction between operational concepts and equipment on the one hand and command and control practices and facilities on the other hand’. But these problems were caused by decisions of the political leadership, Stalin first and foremost, which created what Jacques Sapir has called a specific ‘technological culture’.23
The Academy of Sciences responded to the new opportunities with loyalty, dedication and enthusiasm.24 But it also made claims for the unique place of science in Soviet society. The two most cherished aims of the academy were to preserve its international ties and its internal autonomy. In responding to Stalin’s praise, the academy took pains to point out that world science was a ‘single, indivisible whole’. Its wartime conferences celebrated Newton and Copernicus as well as Timiriazev.25 The academy took great pride in its unique privilege of electing its members after a thorough investigation of credentials and achievements. Komarov, the president of the academy, declared in 1943 after the election of thirty-six new academicians and fifty-eight corresponding members that ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the fact that at a time of war, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was afforded the opportunity to organize these elections and in this way substantially increase its membership.’26 However, the academy remained cautious in selecting candidates for membership.
One glaring example of its self-policing was the case of Lev Landau. One of the truly great theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, Landau had been arrested in 1938 for publishing a leaflet comparing Hitler and Stalin. He spent several months in prison where, allegedly, he continued to work out in his head the main ideas for his world-renowned ten-volume Course in Theoretical Physics, which would appear in the 1950s. After he was released in April 1939 thanks to the intervention of Kapitsa, he returned to head the Theoretical Section of the Institute for Physical Problems, where he continued to produce original work in solid-state physics. Just days before the German invasion he submitted a paper on liquid helium that won him the Nobel Prize in 1962. But the shadow of his arrest hung over him. In 1943 when the institute proposed him for membership in the academy, the academic secretary, Bruevich, wrote to the head of the Science Section, referring to Landau as ‘capable’ but ‘undesirable as a candidate for political considerations.’27 His election was delayed until 1946. Although he was reluctant to work on the atomic bomb project, he made substantial contributions to its fruition and to thermonuclear dynamics, a paradox, too, explained by those who knew him as being due to his inability to do shoddy work. Despite the suspicions of the NKVD, he was awarded Stalin Prizes in 1949 and 1953 and the title Hero of Socialist Labour in 1954.28
Among the older generation of scientists there were a few who were convinced that the best guarantee for the autonomy of science would be their freely given dedication to the needs of the state. The strongest voices in favour of universal values issued from Vladimir Vernadsky and Kapitsa. Like many scientists who had made their reputation before the revolution, Vernadsky elected to remain in the Soviet Union, although he was suspicious of the early Bolshevik commitment to promoting science.29 In an essay written in 1942 but not published until thirty years later, Vernadsky envisioned a postwar utopian world in which scientific free thought would flourish. He advocated closer co-operation with the United States to create a world community of scientists.30 No one, meanwhile, was more bold and daring than Kapitsa, who called into question the entire organization of research and development in Soviet science. Undoubtedly, his views were strongly influenced by his anglophile inclinations. He had emigrated to England and spent ten years (1924–34) as an associate of the distinguished British scientist Ernest Rutherford at his laboratory in Cambridge. On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, Kapitsa had been prevented from returning to Britain at the express order of Stalin. But the decision was also taken to offer Kapitsa extraordinary professional and personal privileges, including the creation of his own Institute for Physical Problems in the academy, the purchase of his entire laboratory at Cambridge, and living quarters that were lavish by Soviet standards.31
Although Kapitsa’s prewar work was primarily in the field of theoretical physics, he applied himself to solving one of the most difficult productive problems facing the country’s industrial development during the war. The rapid expansion of the metallurgical and chemical plants and the manufacture of tanks and other military supplies vastly increased the demand for liquid oxygen. Kapitsa organized the most powerful turbine installation in the world, which produced 2,000 kilograms of liquid oxygen in one hour, increasing more than six times the previous level in a considerably smaller space.32 In 1943 Kapitsa was awarded the Order of Lenin and twenty of his associates in the institute were decorated with lesser awards for their work in inventing an inexpensive method of producing liquid oxygen and the production of acetic acid. Unstated in the award were his numerous other inventions in weapons technology and several medical techniques.
Kapitsa used his privileged position and favour with Stalin to raise questions about other issues which appeared to challenge conventional practices and hierarchical rules. Even before the war, he ventured into dangerous waters by undertaking the defence of scientists like the arrested Landau. In a letter to Beria on the eve of the war, he requested that Landau be released from prison under his ‘personal guarantee’, assuring the dreaded head of the NKVD of his readiness to guarantee that Landau would not undertake any counter-revolutionary activity inside or outside Kapitsa’s institute. A few months later he wrote to Stalin expressing regrets that a young scientist in his institute Arkady Migdal had been denied a Stalin ‘Studentship’ (fellowship) after having won a place in an open competitive examination. The excuse of the committee was that Migdal had once been arrested by mistake in the mid-thirties but had not informed it at the time of his application. Kapitsa found this unfair and requested Stalin’s intervention. A week later the committee received an ‘appropriate instruction’, in the words of Stalin’s secretary, and Migdal’s fellowship was restored.33
Kapitsa also attempted, with the approval of the Soviet leadership, to recruit Western scientists to follow his example and emigrate to the Soviet Union. But both Niels Bohr, who had fled the Nazis to Sweden, and Jules Langevin, who had escaped imprisonment in Paris for Switzerland, politely declined.34 Kapitsa also reflected on the possibility of bringing the brilliant Hungarian scientist Leó Szilárd – also in exile, first in Great Britain and later at Los Alamos in the USA – to the Soviet Union. But he complained to Malenkov that ‘it would be difficult to imagine a worse system of encouraging inventiveness than we have in the Soviet Union’.35
Kapitsa also defended the dignity of scientists when confronted by bureaucratic interference with their work, even by the highest officials. He reproached Malenkov for the lack of respect with which officials in his department treated him. ‘It seems to me,’ he concluded, ‘that officials of the Central Committee should treat scientists with respect, i.e. sincerely and not condescendingly and patronizingly as they usually do. Such treatment makes my gorge rise.’36
Kapitsa wrote several highly critical letters to Stalin during the war. He deplored the fact that ‘although we have built a great deal and mastered many techniques in the 27 years since the Revolution, how little of major significance of our own have we introduced into technology! Personally I can think of only one major achievement – synthetic rubber’. This was in contrast to the achievement of capitalist countries, where twenty fundamental new developments in technology were recorded in the same period. Kapitsa complained to Stalin that the implementation of his innovative methods for producing liquid and gaseous oxygen on a large scale in order to speed up the treatment of metals and chemical products had been delayed by bureaucratic inertia. New forms of industrial organization were required, he argued.37
Kapitsa took advantage of his privileged position and the restored prestige of the scientific technological community to reopen the perennial debate over theory versus practice that had run like a thread through the long history of the academy, but which had disappeared into the thicker warp and woof of Stalinism in the thirties when the praktiki appeared to have emerged victorious over the professional specialists and theorists. The debate had implications for all fields of Soviet culture and intellectual life. It was ultimately a political question involving the extent to which the party could claim and exercise control over other autonomous realms of thought. Kapitsa may be said to represent the theory side, though he was not rigid about the distinction. In defending the autonomy and internationalization of science, science ‘as one indivisible whole’, Kapitsa was critical of what he called the ‘vulgarization’ of the debate over the relationship between science and technology. He argued that it was incorrect to assume that every scientific problem ought to have an immediate practical application. The superiority of Soviet military equipment over the enemy, which Stalin himself acknowledged, was due in Kapitsa’s view to the superiority of Soviet science. In almost every area of weapons technology the key breakthroughs had been made by scientists, not engineers. Kapitsa did not deny the value of scientists acquiring certain engineering skills (such as his own) in order to work out the practical applications of their discoveries. War naturally accelerated this process. But war was a special condition and could not serve as a model for scientists.38
At the other end of the spectrum of debate, Trofim Lysenko, an anti-Darwinist agronomist and biologist who embraced Lamarck’s view on inherited characteristics, asserted that the only criterion for judging the value of science was practical results. Lysenko was still far from achieving the unassailable position he secured for himself after the war. But even some of his fiercest critics admitted that during the war he made an important contribution to averting widespread famine. He promoted with great energy the traditional peasant practice of increasing the yield of potatoes by cutting off the productive sprout (eye) of the tuber, preserving it throughout the winter and spring, while using the rest as food, and planting it with results that gained him great popularity among the public. He also travelled extensively in Siberia during the unusually cold autumn of 1941 broadcasting the idea that immature wheat could survive under snow and be harvested in the spring as if it had matured successfully. To be sure, he used his success to denigrate theory and extol practical methods which had long been observed by the pre-revolutionary peasantry.39 On the defensive in scientific circles in response to attacks on his theoretical weakness, he did not confront Kapitsa directly. It was clear that his main backing came from party circles, but the support was not unequivocal.40 Most of the remaining participants in the debate shied away from identifying with either extreme, distancing themselves from Kapitsa’s dangerously sharp distinction between science and technology. Instead, they defended the value of theoretical research.
Kaftanov, the president of the Committee for Higher Education, took up this theme in celebrating the award of 250 Stalin Prizes to engineers. He acknowledged their contribution to the design of new weaponry but stressed the importance of the ‘creative work of Soviet scientists who had enriched by virtue of their new achievements the treasury of world science’. He returned to this theme two years later when he wrote: ‘Side by side with the practical questions of the day on the agenda of the institutes of higher learning . . . work of large scientific theoretical significance should be pursued, and scientific technical problems should be worked out for the future development of the national economy.’ He went on to criticize the commissariats for insufficient financing of scientific research in the higher schools.41 Even more powerful voices were raised against the vulgar practices of Lysenko. On the initiative of Voznesensky, soon to become a member of the Politburo, an article appeared in the American journal Science in 1945 by the well-known Soviet geneticist Anton Zhebrak, which openly criticized Lysenko. Voznesensky and others recognized the damage inflicted by Lysenko on both Soviet agriculture and the international reputation of Soviet science.42 These voices were muted, fell silent or were silenced in the postwar atmosphere of ideological conformity.
Most Soviet scientists preferred to justify their work by stressing the vital role that they were playing in the war effort; they attributed that success to the unique organization of Soviet science. Baptizing the conflict ‘a war of physics’, the academician Ioffe had praise for the formation of the Scientific-Technical Committee in the USA but maintained that Soviet science, with its four specialized institutes of physics under the unifying administrative umbrella of the academy, was the model for mobilizing resources.43 At least as far as this debate was concerned, the scientific intelligentsia expressed a broadly based consensus over the desirability of a new relationship between itself and the government. It accepted implicitly the centralization of political power and the administrative centralization of science under the control of scientists. Although members of the scientific-technical community voluntarily accepted the social command, they reserved the right to debate and define the limits of its obligation. They made no claims for absolute independence; even Kapitsa accepted the need of a social conscience. The young Andrei Sakharov, later a famous dissident, shared these views, accepting the idea that the best way to guarantee peace and stability in the postwar world was for scientists to help assure the security of the state and, at the same time, to carry on practising ‘superb physics’.44 Beyond this, the scientific community sought an active role in drafting the social contract that bound them to the Bolshevik party and Soviet state. Stalin did not challenge this view during the war; nor did he endorse it. The assumption among scientists appeared to be widespread that what was not forbidden was acceptable. It proved to be a faulty assumption.
Although repressive measures sharply declined during the war, a number of members of the academy as well as lesser lights in the scientific community were accused of espionage because of their German names or else their pre-revolutionary associations. The distinguished geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who had been arrested in 1940, remained in prison despite the fact that his brother, Sergei, was a member of the prestigious Scientific Council. As an opponent of Lysenko, now at the height of his power, he died behind bars in 1943 and was not rehabilitated until after Stalin’s death. Others who had been in prison were only allowed to pursue research related to defence in closed institutes run by the NKVD (sharashkas), as made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel The First Circle.45 Among them were two figures who were associated with the spectacular postwar achievements in rocketry, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko.46 The end of the war did not signal the end to Stalin’s repressive measures against leading figures in the defence industries. The most glaring example was the replacement and arrest of Aleksei Shakhurin, the people’s commissar of aviation, after Stalin had rejected his proposal to put the German Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter into production in favour of a Russian design.47 The extent of Beria’s role in these and other arrests is not always clear.48 On occasion Stalin reined in Beria, but his motives were often obscure. Shortly after the war, Beria attempted to undermine Kapitsa’s position in the institute, and asked for permission to arrest him. Stalin replied: ‘I will remove him for you, but don’t you touch him.’49
Shortly after Beria had been appointed commissar of internal affairs in 1938, he proposed the creation of several specialized technical bureaus, which were reorganized and renamed the Fourth Special Department of the NKVD at the outbreak of war. As part of his internal empire-building, Beria had grasped the significance of using camp inmates with scientific or technical training in order to help strengthen the defence industries, especially in the construction of aircraft, aircraft engines, naval vessels, the production of artillery and artillery shells, and the use of and defence against chemical warfare. From 1939 to 1944, the Fourth Special Department compiled an impressive record of achievements in all these sectors. Major innovations in the design of dive bombers, fighters and the first Soviet jet engine were credited to imprisoned engineers. Out of the Gulag came improvements in the design of tank turrets, gun mountings on railway wagons and artillery systems, the latter contributing to the defence of Leningrad in 1941. A new model of anti-tank gun from the same source was widely employed on all fronts in 1942, and in the following two years larger-calibre tank cannon were successively introduced. A new design for submarines was being tested in 1944. A better gas mask provided with a new type of absorbent entered the manufacturing phase during the war. Experiments with new types of radio communication were in the early stage of development, while night fighters were equipped with better instruments.50
Prisoners under the direction of the Fourth Special Department made important contributions to the operations of factories engaged in war work. Once again, the hand of Beria can be seen clearly in the construction and equipping of a dozen major plants nominally attached to the Commissariat of Defence. The Fourth Special Department took pride in the record of its specialist prisoners in introducing higher norms in the production of steel, coal and other vital products. Beria took special credit for organizing the resources of the Fourth Department in supplying radio communications for NKVD troops defending mountain passes in the Caucasus. For outstanding services, the commissariat recommended the release with full restoration of rights of 156 incarcerated specialists, twenty-three of whom received medals. Three men received Stalin Prizes for their work on special projects; six others were similarly decorated for their individual contributions.51 Others were not so fortunate. But no one, to be sure, took note of the supreme irony of decorating men accused of sabotage and wrecking for having contributed within a few years to the design and manufacture of precision weapons and equipment that helped win the war.
The mobilization of prisoners in the Gulag for war production involved hundreds of thousands of workers in all branches of the defence industry. It is difficult to determine how many of these were technical intelligentsia, but certain official figures are suggestive. According to the famous report of Viktor Nasedkin, the chief of the Gulag Administration, to Beria in August 1944, 40,000 specialists and qualified workers from the camps, including ‘engineers, technical specialists, metalworkers, railway workers and miners’, were identified and assigned to factories under the administration of the NKVD. In order to train additional qualified personnel, the camp administration organized a large-scale programme of technical training which in three years turned out 300,000 qualified workers.52 However, evidence from dozens of memoirs gives the impression of an enormous waste of talent due to the arbitrary and cruel camp practices directed against prisoners with high levels of technical and scientific education and training.
Stalin’s paradoxical view of the scientific and technical intelligentsia was nowhere more evident than in his attitude toward the relation between theory and practice with respect to the development of new kinds of weapons, from the laboratory to the drawing board and on to the finished product. His approach to the construction of the atomic bomb and the development of missiles illustrates the point. In the field of theoretical physics, Soviet scientists were pioneers in investigating the problem of nuclear fission. But their research was largely ignored until Stalin learned from Truman at Potsdam that the Americans had perfected a new and devastating weapon which could revolutionize warfare. The Soviet leader immediately instructed Beria to launch a priority programme to develop an atomic bomb.
The groundwork had been laid much earlier.53 The significance of uranium as a potential source of great energy if harnessed was first pointed out in Russia before the revolution by the multi-talented Vladimir Vernadsky. With the help of two future academicians who played an important part in the Second World War, Vitaly Khlopin and Fersman, he was instrumental in establishing the Radium Institute in Petrograd in 1922. Inspired by important discoveries in the West on the release of energy by splitting the atomic nucleus, Soviet scientists embarked on a number of projects to develop the field of nuclear physics. The academician Ioffe led the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute, a nursery of future leaders in theoretical work and practical applications including the development of an atomic bomb. Among them the physicist Kurchatov stood out. Put in charge of the nuclear project in 1943, he became the leading figure in the postwar development of the atomic and nuclear bombs. Others included Gregory Flerov, the co-discoverer of nuclear fission, Iakov Frenkel’, Iuli Khariton – who had also studied at Cambridge on Kapitsa’s recommendation and who together with Iakov Zeldovich carried out important work on fission chain reactions – and many others. Although they sought to justify their work in terms of practical outcomes, according to David Holloway their main interest in the 1930s was in ‘doing interesting physics’ and being part of a worldwide scientific community. Most of them were sceptical about ‘the possibility of utilizing atomic energy’.54 As the result of an unlikely and accidental incident of cultural exchange, the situation changed dramatically. Vernadsky was apprised of the real possibility of exploiting atomic energy for military purposes by a report of an American journalist sent to him by his son George, a historian at Yale. In characteristic energetic fashion, Vernadsky rallied his old collaborators Khlopin and Fersman to help him draft memoranda to the Soviet government to establish the research facility which became the Uranium Commission in 1940. It was staffed by a stellar group of scientists including Khlopin (chair), Vernadsky, Ioffe, Fersman, Kurchatov, Khariton and Kapitsa, bringing together representatives of industry and geology as well as physicists. Their plans still did not include any reference to an atomic bomb. The wheels ground slowly. Vernadsky complained of the ‘routine and ignorance of Soviet bureaucrats’. The group lobbied hard to reverse the government’s suspension of exploring uranium deposits in Central Asia.55
With the outbreak of war, scientists dispersed, meeting immediate defence needs. The Uranium Commission closed down. In the early years, Stalin made inquiries about the possibility of building a bomb as information began to trickle in from his agents in Britain that research on the topic was being strongly pushed. When Kurchatov was appointed head of the small nuclear project in 1943, he was still not certain that a bomb could be constructed, until Molotov supplied him with the intelligence material from Britain. The memoranda Kurchatov then drafted persuaded GOKO (which meant Stalin) to issue a secret instruction authorizing him to set up a research laboratory (code-named No. 2). Kurchatov was frustrated by the slow progress and hampered by an inadequate supply of uranium and lack of active support from Molotov, so he turned to Beria for assistance. Ironically, Beria did not believe the intelligence reports gathered by his own agents on the progress of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Stalin returned from Potsdam determined to compete with the Americans by developing a Soviet atom bomb. In the presence of Marshal Zhukov, he remarked to Molotov: ‘We’ll have to talk to Kurchatov about speeding up our work.’56 Preoccupied with implementing the Soviet entrance into the war with Japan, Stalin still delayed taking decisive action until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had made it irrefutably clear that the Americans had succeeded in changing the balance of forces in the world. It was now necessary to restore it.
After Stalin held conversations with Kurchatov and Vannikov, the people’s commissar of munitions, GOKO issued an order to set up a special committee under Beria to pursue an atomic bomb project. The postwar development of atomic and nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union lies outside the limits of this study. However, the main features of its history retained all the elements of the paradox of power that characterized Stalin’s wartime policies. On the one hand, he placed no limit on the human and material resources necessary to achieve the desired end. On the other hand, he continued to express suspicions about the loyalties of the experts responsible for carrying out his orders.57 In the postwar atmosphere of repression, the attack on ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the rise of Lysenko put at risk many of the leading physicists with Jewish names or foreign contacts.58 The main textbooks of theoretical physics, including the famous ten-volume work by Landau, came under severe criticism for kowtowing to the West. Only by the slightest of margins did nuclear physics as a discipline survive the attacks on ideological grounds that devastated biology and genetics. Sheltered in the atomic bomb project under Beria’s protection, the scientists worked in secret, to be fully recognized and lavishly rewarded shortly after Stalin’s death.
Rocket science in the Soviet Union during the war, like atomic physics, was entangled in the fraught relationship between theoretical and practical lines of development with links to pre-revolutionary traditions. The interest in developing missiles stemmed from the pioneering theorist of space travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. An autodidact, he investigated the major problems of constructing missiles, including the relationship between mass and velocity, although his work was not recognized until late in his life. Tukhachevsky was one of the few in the top echelons of the Red Army who recognized the potential use of rockets in delivering explosive projectiles at great distances. As we have seen above, the work of the Reactive Research Institute created under his supervision was responsible for the invention of rocket artillery. Tsiolkovsky also inspired two men who would be responsible for major advances in Soviet rocket and missile development in the postwar years. Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko had been two promising researchers at the institute until 1938, when they were caught in a large-scale purge that wiped out the leadership. (The head of the institute was shot, together with his deputy.) Their major contributions came only after they had endured arrest and long terms of imprisonment.
Stalin suspended his prejudice against theoretical work when he recognized the close connection of theory to the development of rockets as well as the atomic bomb. As would be the case with nuclear fission so with rocketry: Stalin belatedly woke up to the close connection between theoretical work and weapons development, but only after foreign countries provided compelling examples. Within two months of the first launching by the Germans of the V-1 and V-2 rockets on London, Stalin ordered Soviet design bureaus to begin work on long-range missiles. Beria recommended to Stalin the release of thirty-five specialists from detention to staff a special Construction Bureau of the NKVD. Among them were Korolev and Glushko, both of whom had been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. Initially, Korolev was on the list sanctioned by Stalin to be shot. After his arrest, Glushko was beaten and tortured before being sent to an aircraft factory outside Moscow to work on improved designs for heavy weapons. Transferred from time to time, he ended up at a sharashka in Kazan with Korolev and other former colleagues who had been arrested. Under the supervision of the NKVD, he continued to work on propellants for rockets, which he perfected after the war. He was released after serving most of his term. Like Glushko, Korolev pursued his research in a sharashka, where he was appointed to head a group on rocket design. Working under conditions of hardship, he drafted and submitted a plan for organizing work on long-range missiles. While Stalin agreed to free him, he withheld the right to rehabilitation, still suspicious or reluctant to admit a mistake. Korolev was then appointed one of the first instructors on rocket engines at the Kazan Institute of Aviation Design, at the time unique among all Soviet institutes of higher education in teaching rocket design.
In April 1945 both Glushko and Korolev were included in a commission to collect information in Germany on the research and development of the German rocket programme. After the war, their careers soared. In September 1945 half a dozen of the former prisoners were awarded medals for their work in the Construction Bureau. After Stalin’s death, Glushko developed large liquid-propellant rocket engines. Korolev, meanwhile, became the central figure in the dramatic postwar development of Soviet rockets and satellites. He was responsible for designing Sputnik and has been credited for the world’s first intercontinental missile. Both men were repeatedly decorated, but Korolev’s name was not made public until his death in 1966.59
The wartime experience led to a new relationship between Stalin, the political elite in the party and state apparatus, and the scientific-technical intelligentsia. A military-industrial complex had come into existence during the thirties; the war added a third dimension, creating a military-industrial-scientific complex – not unlike that which emerged in the United States and Great Britain. The contribution of the nuclear physicists in the postwar period is well known and amply documented. But this development merely reinforced a process – a developmental spurt – launched during the war. Stalin recognized the value of the scientific and technical intelligentsia by granting them a degree of autonomy, only partially cut back after the war, co-opting them into areas of economic planning, vastly expanding their research and training facilities, and heaping rewards on outstanding achievements that rivalled those given to his marshals. But they had to accept the terms offered to them, whatever their private reservations about the party’s ideological pretentions and administrative restraints; Kapitsa and later Sakharov were exceptional in their outspoken criticisms. And the risks were great. Kapitsa earned the dangerous hostility of Beria.
But there were others with distinguished war records, even in biology, who helped to weaken Lysenko’s position after the war. Their defence of ‘pure’ science helped to expose the charlatanry of Lysenko, who rejected Darwinian theories of evolution, and his counterparts in physics, who rejected Einsteinian theories of relativity. But it took years to discredit his ideas.60 The achievements of the war years were not entirely extinguished by Stalin. After his death the natural scientists of the wartime generation recovered their voices, speaking out, as Loren Graham has stated, ‘on topics outside their own special realms, a clear indication of their growing influence and ambitions’.61 The All-Union Congress of Scientific-Technical Societies, established in 1933, was finally able to convene its first congress in 1959. Attempts to establish the validity of specialized professional roles were increasingly articulated by individual scientists and technicians.62 The academy won its fight to concentrate on pure research, as Kapitsa had advocated. Eventually, the technical institutes were removed from the academy in 1961 and 1963. Administrative reorganizations supplemented by an expansion of research and development helped improve links between industrial organizations. In 1965 Kapitsa, the Cassandra of Soviet science, warned that ‘the gulf in science between our country and the USA has not only stopped declining but has increased’.63 The new system had serious flaws inherited from Stalinist times. It continued to suffer from what Moshe Lewin has called mekhanizm tormozheniia.64 In the absence of Kapitsa’s ‘new forms of industrial development’, long delays between research and development sharply reduced the impact of innovative ideas. The combination of these internal structural faults and the reaction of the party to external challenges to the Soviet model of socialism from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland had a crippling effect on the ability of the scientists to transform Soviet society in the utopian spirit which continued to inspire so many of them.
THE ECONOMISTS
During the war, a group of economists concentrated in the Institute of World Economics and World Politics directed by Eugen Varga proposed an alternative explanation of the postwar development of capitalism to the Cold War model that Stalin embraced in 1948. It was paradoxical that Stalin had previously expressed great respect for Varga and had appointed him to his secretariat only to allow his enemies to criticize him, and then to abolish his institute, yet to retain his services as an economist specializing in the economies of capitalist countries. In 1927 Varga was appointed director of the newly created institute, where he remained in charge for the next twenty years. He had been a member of the short-lived communist government under Béla Kun in Hungary in 1919. Forced to flee the White counter-coup, he emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he became the chief economist in the Comintern, and supported Stalin in his conflicts with Trotsky and Bukharin. Varga shared with Rosa Luxemburg the concept of the chronic problem of markets and predicted a major crisis in capitalism. Bukharin at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1928 endorsed the idea that the strong role of the state would contribute to the stabilization of capitalism. This meant that the Soviet Union could continue to pursue the New Economic Policy. The depression the following year cut the ground from under Bukharin’s views and justified Stalin’s claim that ‘rotten stabilization’ would lead to renewal of imperialist wars. Stalin was able then to rationalize collectivization as the basis for industrialization.65 Ironically, Varga would return to Bukharin’s ideas during the Second World War.
Under Varga’s leadership, members of the institute produced a stream of monographs on the history of crises in the capitalist world, among them Varga’s own contribution, Novye iavleniia v mirovom ekonomicheskom krizise (‘New Phenomena in the World Economic Crisis’), which came out in 1934. With colleagues he then began work on a projected six-volume institute publication which was two-thirds complete by the beginning of the war. The object was not simply to analyze but also to offer prognoses. The strong emphasis on the sharp contradictions among capitalist countries, inevitably leading to a clash with fascism and another imperialist war, seemed to be borne out by events in 1939. Another set of studies pursued the technological and economic advances of capitalism, a favourite topic of the disgraced Bukharin. Others ‘uncovered laws of capitalist development’ relating to the decline in the number of employed workers and also of highly qualified workers under the pressure of rationalization. The narrowing down of the labour aristocracy and the increase in low-paid workers had political implications which were not fully drawn at the time. Beginning in 1942, a team of institute economists was employed in preparing a series of works on capitalism during the Second World War.66
As a member of Stalin’s private secretariat, Varga survived the purges that carried off Kun and his closest associates.67 Dimitrov, who had worked with Varga in the Comintern, considered him a man ‘of proven worth’. As late as 1943, Stalin praised Varga’s report at the Academy of Sciences. According to Dimitrov, he found it ‘good, Marxist’. Dimitrov concluded: ‘Any criticisms of that report in the Central Committee secretariat are no longer valid.’68 During the war, Varga developed his main theory of postwar capitalism. In an article published in the institute journal he argued that one of the most important results of the war was the fact that in bourgeois countries the state acquired a decisive role in the military economy and that this ‘profoundly changed the very nature of the economy’. The totalizing character of the war, in his view, had forced the state to take full control of those sectors of the economy necessary for military production. Its intervention varied but everywhere led to a contradiction in social relations; the greater the state control and the role of bureaucracy, the less active and autonomous the workers’ movement and the more the workers were removed from productive labour.69
Varga then presented an expanded view in a report that was the subject of a debate. He indicated that the main problem for the United States after the war would be an excessive productive capacity and a struggle with unemployment. He predicted that delayed demand would be rapidly met; inflation would be temporary. In Europe, however, wartime damage would create a crisis of under-production and real inflation. Britain would occupy an intermediate position, experiencing greater demand than in the USA but with more productive capacity to meet it than in Europe. The outcome would depend on the willingness of the USA and to a lesser extent Britain to export capital for the purposes of reconstruction and to plan for the establishment of an international financial organization to serve these ends. Would the USA then accept the importation of European finished goods? Or would a cycle of over-production by the restored markets repeat some of the features of the prewar period? In the discussion, there was general agreement on the cyclical nature of capitalism, but also an optimistic view on state intervention to stabilize the currency, export capital and stimulate the international exchange of goods.70
Throughout 1945 the economists embellished Varga’s thesis. They generally provided an optimistic view that the greater stabilization of international capitalism, though not free from crisis, created new possibilities for the international order. In a burst of optimism, the economist I.M. Lemin proclaimed that the defeat of Nazi Germany had been the work of a coalition, with the Soviet Union taking the brunt of the conflict in achieving a ‘moral-political victory’; the term became a leitmotif for the group. He attributed the Soviet victory to its economic organization, technological-economic independence and unity of the people, with the Bolshevik party bringing up the rear on his list, and no mention of Stalin made at all. He also paid homage to the diplomatic preparation for the coalition, going back to the diplomacy of the period from 1933 to 1939 and its stand against the anti-national policy of isolationism, a transparent homage to the diplomats associated with Litvinov. He reiterated Stalin’s view on the longevity of the coalition. The ‘powerful moral authority’ of the Soviet Union facilitated the economic transformation of Eastern Europe through agrarian reform, a new politics and a resolution of the national question. He boldly asserted that the Soviet postwar aims were a ‘democratic order based on the peaceful coexistence of people and the organization of an effective international system of security’.71 It was an extraordinary statement, going beyond the cautious implications of the Varga thesis. But caution did not spare Varga from some rough handling, even though he too, like his friends Litvinov and Kapitsa, survived. Other economists in the institute tended to follow Varga’s lead of cautious optimism, being careful to hedge their prognoses.72
Economists made explicit the connection between economic development and the political reconstruction of Europe. Again, the emphasis was on the importance of co-operation, exemplified, for instance by an analysis of the Yalta Conference. The mistakes of the First World War had been avoided; the principle of collective responsibility had been established among the Big Three for maintaining the peace and resolving every political problem arising from the transition from war to peace. A decisive blow had been struck against isolationism and the tendency to create spheres of influence. The Declaration on Liberated Territories would serve as the basis for the democratic reconstruction of the liberated countries. The efforts of the reactionary émigré governments-in-exile to split the Big Three were refuted at the Crimean Conference; unity had prevailed, the analysis concluded.73 This was surely one of the most optimistic prognoses of the path not taken, an alternative to the Cold War. The economists celebrated plans for agrarian reform in Romania and Italy already drafted before the end of the war as one of the major indicators that this transition was taking place, although they acknowledged the resistance of reactionary forces.74
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Coming from plebeian origins and a modest education, but nourishing aspirations as an original interpreter of Marxist theory following in the footsteps of Lenin, Stalin viewed himself as a worker-intelligent. Yet he under-regarded the genuine intelligentsia, especially those with a ‘bourgeois’ class background. He tended to dismiss their claims for independent thinking based on specialized knowledge, whether in strategic thinking, economic planning or diplomacy. In general, he preferred to surround himself with subordinates similar in background to his own: men with a practical rather than a theoretical education and approach to solving problems, favouring a Kirov over a Bukharin in the party; a Zhukov over a Tukhachevsky in the army; a Molotov over a Litvinov in the foreign service; a Lysenko over a Vavilov in biology. There were exceptions, but even then, as with the physicists, he appointed his own men like Beria to monitor their activities. Or else he tolerated an economist like Varga, whose views he perceived as similar to his own, or Kapitsa, whose contribution to winning the war had immediate practical results. With the coming of the war, he exhibited an even greater degree of flexibility in judging the value of men who may not have met his own rigorous standards of trust and reliability so long as they were wholeheartedly committed to the war effort. As the next chapter will show this was also true of his treatment of the cultural intelligentsia. As a result, the paradoxical character of his rule diminished and an illusion of greater unity of purpose took hold. But the paradox would surface again after victory, when many who had served most loyally during the war were dismissed, demoted or purged, jeopardizing the winning of the peace.