How physics in the USSR was saved from ideology

by Mikhail Shifman

Ideology played an important –– in humanities, dominant –– role in Soviet science. Already in the 1930s genetics was criticized as the carrier of the bourgeois and idealistic ideology incompatible with Marxism. This was bottom-up activism. In 1948 at a meeting of the USSR Agricultural Academy, Lysenko dealt the mortal blow. After Lysenko’s speech, genetics as a science was virtually banned for ~15 years, geneticists were fired and the most prominent were sent to Gulag.   

It is much less known in the West that the same fate was prepared for physics. At the end of 1948, preparations began for the All-Union Conference of Heads of Departments of Physics, scheduled for March 21, 1949, with the aim of an ideological pogrom in physics on the basis of the idealism of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity, which allegedly defied Marxist philosophic principles. The campaign was instigated by second-rate physicists, near-science administrators, “philosophers,” Communist party apparatchiks, and other zealots.  A collection of articles "Against Idealism in Modern Physics" was published in the central press, in which Soviet physicists developing the ideas of Albert Einstein and quantum physics were severely criticized. A stream of supporting articles followed in newspapers and magazines. The heat was approaching a critical value.

What saved physics in the Soviet Union from the fate of genetics?

They tell the following story: Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right hand who oversaw the work on the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb, asked the scientific director of the atomic project Igor Kurchatov (the Soviet analog of Oppenheimer):

“Is it true that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity should be banned because of their idealistic, bourgeois  and anti-Marxist nature?”

Kurchatov replied “If they are banned, then the bomb will have to be abandoned.”

In response, Beria said that the most important thing is THE bomb, and everything else is nonsense.

The All-Union Conference of Heads of Departments of Physics, scheduled for March 21, 1949, was immediately canceled and the stream of anti-quantum mechanics/Einstein relativity publications dried out.

Is there a similar solution in the US???