A lecture he gave in London in 1931 changed the writing of the history of science; five years later, the Jewish physicist was arrested and executed.
By Prof. Alex Gordon
Boris Hessen, a Soviet physicist, philosopher, and historian of science, was born into a Jewish family on August 28, 1893, in the city of Elizavetagrad, where his father, later a merchant of the second guild, was a bank manager and deputy chairman of the city stock exchange committee. Boris attended gymnasium together with the future Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Igor Tamm. He studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh (1913–1914) and at Petrograd University (1914–1917). In parallel with his studies at the Faculty of Physics and Exact Sciences of Petrograd University, Boris studied at the Department of Economics of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute.
Revolution, Civil War and Scientific Career
In 1917, Hessen went to Elizavetagrad to his father, where he participated in the revolutionary events. In August 1917, he became one of the founders and secretary of the Elizavetagrad Menshevik organization. In September 1917, he was elected a member and secretary of the Elizavetagrad Council of Workers' Deputies, and together with Tamm, became a member of the Elizavetagrad Revolutionary Committee. Hessen participated in the transfer of the bank, a branch of which was managed by his father, from private hands to the state. He left the Menshevik party when he discovered that its leaders condemned the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, Hessen went underground following the rise to power in Ukraine of the military ruler Pavel Skoropadsky. In 1919, he became a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In April 1919, Hessen returned to Elizavetagrad, where he worked as deputy director of the Department of Popular Education and a member of the board of the Department of Labor.
During the Civil War, Hessen fought with the Red Army in Ukraine, participating in the suppression of the uprising of Ataman Grigoriev. In May 1919, he worked in the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary War Council (1919–1921) and at the Sverdlovsk Communist University (1921–1924).
After the Civil War, Hessen continued to study physics at the Institute for Red Professors, an institution that trained senior ideologists and social science teachers for the Communist Party. He graduated from the institute in 1928, and then began working there.
In 1931, Hessen was appointed professor of physics at Moscow University. From the founding of the Faculty of Physics at Moscow State University (May 1, 1933) until December 15, 1934, he was dean of this faculty. He led a seminar on the theory of relativity and a seminar on the methodology of physics. On February 1, 1933, Hessen was elected an associate member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the Department of Social Sciences (Philosophy).
In February 1935, Hessen was awarded the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences without a dissertation. From 1935, he held the positions of Director of the Research Institute of Physics of Moscow University and Deputy Director of the New Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the editorial board of the journal "Successes in Physical Sciences" and the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia".
Science in the Eye of the Ideological Storm
In 1930–1931, philosophical discussions were held in the Soviet Union, accompanied by political accusations, during which Hessen's philosophical views on modern physics were examined, to the point that it seemed like persecution, after which Hesse hardly published any articles (before that, he had presented a series of works that provided a philosophical basis for modern physical theories). A decision was made according to which Hessen was accused of "identifying with the new works of bourgeois scientists with Marxism" and of stating that the principles of "the theory of relativity are largely consistent with dialectical materialism." He was accused of a mechanistic interpretation of the problem of chance and of the "incorrect definition" of matter.
Hessen was forced to officially admit his mistakes. He continued to face criticism for his enthusiasm for bourgeois sciences, among which was mentioned the theory of relativity, and he was accused of "mathematical idealism" and "a non-Marxist approach to the laws of thermodynamics". As a result, Hessen not only stopped publishing new articles on physical topics, but also did not finish the works he had already started, such as "Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics" and "The Statistical Method in Physics and the New Rationale for the Theory of Richard von Mises".
The lecture that changed the history of science
The only exception to Hessen's enforced silence during this period was his lecture on Newton and the book published based on it. Hessen's lecture, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's 'Principia'", was read in 1931 at the Second International Conference on the History of Science and Technology in London.
Boris Hessen's lecture had a profound impact on scientists in the West. In Europe, where the history of science was traditionally seen as the development of "pure thought" and brilliant brilliance, his Marxist approach was jarring. Listeners were amazed at how he linked Newton's abstract mathematical equations to very practical questions—logistics, ballistics, mine pumping, and the nascent capitalism.
It was 1931, the height of the Great Depression in the West. Against this backdrop, Hessen's lecture, which offered a clear, systematic, and material model of social and scientific development, seemed to many intellectuals an attractive alternative to the crisis of capitalism.
Traditional historians of science accused Hessen of “vulgar Marxism.” In their opinion, he simplified the process of cognition, turning Newton’s genius into a simplistic service to the economic needs of the bourgeoisie.
Hessen's lecture initiated a long academic debate. Internalists argued that science develops solely according to its own internal laws of logic. Externalists (advocates of Hessen's sociology of science) argued that science is shaped by external socio-economic and cultural factors.
Abraham Joffe, one of the leaders and organizers of Soviet physics, known as the "father of Soviet physics," said that Hessen was the only philosopher who understood modern physics.
The Purge, Execution, and Posthumous Exoneration
In his department of history and philosophy of natural sciences, Hessen hired people who had previously been persecuted for their participation in the Trotskyist opposition. Because of this, on March 3, 1936, the Moscow Regional Committee of the Communist Party adopted a resolution that Hesse had demonstrated "a decrease in communist vigilance." As a result, on August 22, 1936, Hessen was arrested on trumped-up charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary organization and preparation of terrorist acts. Hessen was accused of "personal ties with those arrested in the case of the Trotskyist Terror Center and of conducting counter-revolutionary activity."
On December 20, 1936, Hessen was convicted in a closed session of the Military Commission of the Supreme Court, where he pleaded guilty. He was shot dead that day. He was expelled from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after his death. Hessen was buried in Moscow at the Donskoy Cemetery in a mass grave.
On April 21, 1956, Boris Hessen was posthumously exonerated of all guilt by the Military Commission of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences reinstated him in its ranks on March 5, 1957. The NKVD officers who had prepared the case against Hessen were put on trial: the Moscow NKVD chief Stanislav Rednes, who had signed the arrest warrant for Hessen, was executed, as were three police interrogators who had tortured him. The Soviet machine of repression, soaked in the blood of millions and intoxicated by mass murder, also destroyed its executioners.
The scientific article
- Boris Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" (1931)
- Historical study of Hessen and the impact of his lecture, Studia Historiae Scientiarum (2022)
More on the subject on the science website
- The clash between the theory of relativity and materialist dialectics
- Richard Willstätter's Chemical Discoveries and Jewish Barriers
- The Murdered History of Mark Bloch
- The rise and fall of a great physicist: Semyon Shubin
- Murder of a physicist who destroyed an entire scientific field: Matvey Bronstein
