In the summer 2022 issue of the Mathematical Intelligencer [4], Alexey Glutsyuk reviewed Roger Cooke’s English translation, The Case of Academician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, of the like-named book in Russian [3] edited by Sergei Demidov and Boris Levshin. As is well known, mathematician Nikolai Luzin (Figures 1 and 2) was accused in the early 1930s by Ernst Kolman, then the president of the Moscow Mathematical Society, of being an active counterrevolutionary. A number of Luzin’s former students supported Kolman’s claim. In 1936, Luzin was again the target of attack, this time in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Among the various accusations made at that time, one particularly resonates with the current trend in Russia of hindering international interactions between scientists.

Figure 1.
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Portrait of Nikolai Luzin in the photo gallery on the ninth floor of the Steklov Institute in Moscow (photograph by the author, 2016).

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Figure 2.
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Part of the photo gallery on the ninth floor of the Steklov Institute in Moscow, where the portraits of the mathematician academician associates of the institute are displayed (photograph by the author, 2016). Identified here by column number (x) from the left to right and by row number (y) from top to bottom, i.e., by x/y, are Arnold 1/3, Bogolubov 2/3, Vinogradov 4/1, Dorodnitsyn 6/1, Zeldovich 6/2, Kantorovich 7/1, Keldysh 7/2, A. N. Krylov 7/3, Kolmogorov 8/2, Kochin 9/1, Lavrentiev 9/2, and Luzin 10/3.

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In a letter of July 6, 1936, to Vyacheslav Molotov in protest of Luzin’s treatment (reproduced in Demidov and Levshin's book [2, 3] as well as in [1, pp. 331–333]), Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa (Figure 3) countered a number of the accusations leveled against Luzin in Pravda, among them the charge, the “sin,” that Luzin had consciously published papers of poor quality in Russian journals, while sending his high-quality papers to foreign journals. As Kapitsa explained to Molotov, if poor papers had indeed appeared in Soviet journals, then it should have been the responsibility of the journal editors to prevent their appearance. It was in the interests of both Luzin and the reputation of all Soviet scientists, Kapitsa argued, to publish their best articles in international journals. This was one of the first (if not the first) letters of protest that Kapitsa wrote to Soviet leaders on behalf of repressed scientists. Many more would follow.

Figure 3.
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Pyotr Kapitsa in Cambridge (photograph by and courtesy of the late David Shoenberg).

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Kapitsa himself had been denied permission in 1934 to return to his laboratory in Cambridge, England, following his usual visit home to see his parents. Prior to his letter on behalf of Luzin, his correspondence already contained complaints about his detention as well as about the circumstances and conditions of science in the Soviet Union. The campaign against Luzin upset him. He became aware of the Pravda articles while vacationing in the countryside and immediately penned his protest. He may actually have contributed to the outcome of Luzin’s case; Luzin was not arrested, nor was he even expelled from the Academy of Sciences [5]. In a letter of July 18, 1936, to his Cambridge mentor Ernest Rutherford, that is, soon after his letter to Molotov, Kapitsa shared some of his experiences in the Luzin case. In particular, he was critical of Luzin’s apparently selfish attitude toward some of his former pupils [1, pp. 291–294], but that did not change Kapitsa’s view of the merits of publication in international journals.