Cold War and scientific freedom

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https://newrepublic.com/article/153383/ ... ic-freedom


Good morning all,

Per ...

Note the term "'Pugwash' gatherings".

~ Bob

eastern Virginia, USA

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We now know, thanks to the opening of Soviet archives, that conditions were perhaps not quite as bad as they looked.

Disregarding the stench of anti-Americanism permanenting the article - what an ignorant and apologetic statement.
Lysenkoism resulted in thousands of people fired, many imprisoned, dozen of so executed, and that was just the beginning.
Not bad, not bad at all.

A tiny example:

Rebecca Levina (1899-1964), an aged economist and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was also arrested in 1948 in connection with the Allilueva case. Before that, in December 1947, her coworker, also an economist (and senior scientist) Isaak Goldstein (1892-1953) had been arrested together with his wife (without a prosecutor's sanction). Unfortunately for him, in the 1920s he had worked with Yevgeniya Allilueva at the Soviet Commercial Office in Berlin. Now he became a key person in the Allilueva case and fell into the hands of Abakumov and his professional torturers.

During the first interrogations, Levina insisted that she was innocent. The investigators, Colonels Georgii Sorokin and Mikhail Likhachev, used sleep deprivation and lengthy "standing" interrogations that usually ended when Levina fainted, fell down, and was then cruelly beaten. The investigators broke the old lady's front teeth.
They struck her body with a rubber baton on the buttocks, legs, back, and genitals. After this, Levina finally "confessed."

On May 29, 1948, all of the eleven or twelve members of the Allilueva case were sentenced by a special MGB council (the OSO) to ten to twenty-five years' imprisonment.

In 1953, Levina was transferred from Vladimir Prison to a mental prison hospital in Kazan widely known for its especially harsh regime (later, in the 1960s-1970s, many dissidents were put into this "hospital").

In the 1940, 1950s, convicts were sent to the KTPH for enforced treatment following the decision of a court (criminal cases) or the OSO (political cases). After "treatment" at Kazan Hospital, Levina was released, by that time completely insane.

from: The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story Of Soviet Science by Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, which is an endless litany of such horrors.

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More on "scientific freedom" in the Soviet Union:

My grandfather, the agronomist Georgii Luppo, was among those arrested. Despite torture, he did not sign false testimony until the OGPU investigators threatened to arrest his daughter (i.e., my mother) and give her to the OGPU soldiers.

Such cases are documented. When Stanislav Kossior, the deputy chair of the Sovnarkom and Politburo member, was arrested in 1938 and refused to sign a false testimony written by the NKVD interrogators, his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought to Lubyanka for an "investigation" and raped by the NKVD interrogators in the presence of her father. She committed suicide immediately after this "interrogation. "
My grandfather was never allowed to return to Moscow after he served his term in one of the northern labor camps. He died in 1941 of a heart attack after a new round of interrogations at the NKVD.
The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story Of Soviet Science by Dr. Vadim J. Birstein