Murder of a physicist who destroyed an entire scientific field

Matvey Bronstein was one of the first scientists to study quantum theory. Being a genius who connected the dots in many areas of physics and who also knew many languages ​​did not help him when he was executed in 1938 by the Soviet authorities.

"Russia is the homeland of elephants" – this absurd statement was common in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. It was a mocking response to the distortions of history made by Soviet propaganda for political purposes on the issue of primacy in scientific discoveries. In the anti-Semitic campaign, "The Struggle Against Bowing to the West," Soviet ideologists presented the socialist system as the most advanced system, much more developed and successful than that of the West. They claimed the superiority of the Soviet Union over the West in science and culture. They even praised the scientists who lived in Tsarist Russia. They praised the Soviet people and the Russian people for their achievements that did not exist and were not created in technology and culture. They created legends and fictions about the discoveries of the Russian people.

The preference for Russians over foreigners, including Soviet Jews, was expressed in the ugly persecution of talented Jews engaged in literature, art, and science. The authorities called them “rootless cosmopolitans,” “passportless vagabonds,” and “admirers of Western science and culture.” Soviet ideologues claimed that Jewish intellectuals treated everything Soviet and socialist with disdain. Among the victims of this campaign were my father, a professor of French and German literature at Kiev University, and my mother’s sister, a professor at the Kiev Academy of Music, who was then the head of the department of the history of Russian music and dean of the singing faculty at that institution.

Soviet writer Yuri Nagibin summarized this phenomenon in his book Darkness at the end of the tunnel (1991): "Stalin's apocalypse was strangely drawn to nationalism. This feature was fully revealed in the struggle against the "rootless cosmopolitans", who were accused of admiring the "obscene" West. In defense of Russian superiority in all spheres of human activity, Soviet propaganda reached complete insanity. The atom was first split by Ivashka Khmirev in the 12th century when he was chopping wood. The USSR is the homeland of elephants. These were not jokes, […] but quite serious claims of the Soviet propaganda of those years." In this campaign, the victims of the cosmopolitan affair were repressed but survived physically. But a different fate awaited Jewish intellectuals in the late 1930s.

Extracurricular studies because of his Jewishness

Matvey Bronstein was born on December 2, 1906 in Vinnytsia, into a Jewish family of doctors, who had three children: Matvey's twin brother, Isidor, and their sister Michalina, who was four years older than them. Matvey did not attend high school. In Vinnytsia he was still too young to attend high school, and in Kiev he was prevented from attending high school for three reasons: 1) numerus clausus , in Latin a closed number, meaning a limited number of Jews allowed to study (in Kiev this number was even lower than in the periphery), 2) the family's small income, 3) Matvey's too young age. So it was decided in the family that Matvey and his twin brother Isidor would study at home and take external exams at the gymnasium. In 1924, Matvey began studying in the Physics Amateur Circle at Kiev University. In 1925, two of his articles on quantum theory and the interaction of X-rays with matter were published in the famous German journal Zeitschrift für Physik . In 1926, three more of his articles were published there.

 In 1926, the young physicist moved to Leningrad, where he studied physics and astronomy. In 1930, Bronstein graduated from the Physics Department of Leningrad University and began working at the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In the spring of 1935, he submitted his doctoral dissertation in physical and mathematical sciences on the quantization of gravitational waves and was appointed professor at the Leningrad University and Polytechnic Institute. He conducted research in quantum theory, astrophysics, semiconductor theory, cosmology, and quantum gravity. While still a student, Bronstein published several papers in theoretical physics – one of which, containing a solution to an important Schwarzschild problem on the surface temperature of stars, was published in 1929 in the Zeitschrift für Physik and was called the Hopf-Bronstein connection.

Fixed Soviet explanation for diversion to Red

The real reason for the redshift instead of the one prevalent in the USSR In one of his last articles, Bronstein refuted the incorrect Soviet explanation for the redshift of galaxies discovered by Edwin Hubble. Redshift describes a situation in which the frequency of light measured by an observer is lower than the frequency of the light when emitted by the source. This phenomenon occurs when the light source moves away from the observer, due to the Doppler effect. The redshift phenomenon is best known in the case where the spectrum emitted by distant galaxies is shifted entirely to the red, with the degree of redshift being a function of distance: the more distant the galaxy, the greater the redshift. Instead of attributing the phenomenon to the expansion of the universe, which began with the Big Bang, Soviet ideologists claimed that it was caused by photon decay.

 In 1931, Bronstein met Lydia Chukovsky, the daughter of the famous children's writer Korney Chukovsky. In 1934, the two were married. On the advice of the famous Jewish children's poet Samuel Marshak, Bronstein began writing science fiction books for children. The first two books – Solar material And X-rays – Published in the magazine Koster (fire) in 1934 and 1936, respectively. The third book, Inventors of the radio, was also published in the same magazine.

Bronstein's father-in-law Korney Chukovsky described his son-in-law as follows: "During my long life I have known many famous people [...], and therefore I have often experienced a sense of admiration for a great personality. I felt the same emotion every time I had the opportunity to meet the young physicist Matvey Bronstein. It was enough to spend half an hour in his company to feel that he was an extraordinary person. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and his knowledge seemed enormous. He knew English, ancient Greek, French and Russian literature. There was something of Pushkin's Mozart in him (referring to Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri – A.G.) – A boiling, cheerful and charming mind. […] As a children's writer, I can attest that Bronstein's books, Solar material, X-rays– and others, seem excellent to me. They are not just popular science articles – they are very elegant, artistic, almost poetic descriptions of the greatness of human genius. " Chukovsky, himself a man of encyclopedic knowledge, enthused: "If our entire civilization were to disappear – Bronstein alone, by his personal efforts, could recreate the encyclopedia from A to Z."

On the night of August 1, 1937, secret police officers arrived with an arrest warrant at Bronstein's apartment in Leningrad, where he was not present. He was arrested on August 6, 1937 in Kiev, at his parents' house, and transferred to Leningrad. He was included in the list of executions in the Leningrad region of February 3, 1938, which was approved by Stalin's signature. According to his wife Lydia, the arrest was caused by Bronstein's refusal to correct the book Inventors of the radio, which dealt with the almost simultaneous invention of the radio by Alexander Popov and Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi. He did not recognize the primacy of Popov's invention of the radio and refused to recognize the scientific superiority of Russia demanded by the authorities. He called this kind of patriotism "fascism."

 On February 18, 1938, Bornstein was sentenced to death by the Soviet military tribunal for "active participation in a terrorist, fascist, counter-revolutionary organization" and was shot dead the same day. Requests for clemency addressed to Stalin by leading Soviet physicists, members of the Academy of Sciences Sergei Vavilov, Abraham Ioffe, Leonid Mandelstam, Igor Tamm (Nobel Prize laureate in Physics), Vladimir Fock, as well as Marshak, remained unanswered. He was 31 years old at the time of his death.

Matvey Bronstein's reputation was restored after his death on May 9, 1957. Years later, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, member of the Academy of the USSR Zhores Alperov, wrote in a letter to the daughter of Matvey Bronstein's widow: "Among the losses suffered by the institute (the Joppa Institute of Physics and Technology where Bronstein worked. – A. G.) and science, the murder of Matvey Bronstein is one of the most tragic and painful. We have lost not only a scientist, writer and an extraordinary person, we have lost the future of an entire scientific field."

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