Buried Glory: Portraits of Soviet Scientists
Fermi, Feynman, Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer are household names, while Sakharov may ring a bell because of his human rights campaign—but who has heard of Tamm, Zeldovich, Semenov, or Landau? Nobel winners all, their discoveries place them among the world scientific elite, but they worked behind the Iron Curtain, so few except their scientific colleagues know of them or their accomplishments. Hargittai (Judging Edward Teller), professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Eotvos University, delivers biographies of 14 brilliant researchers who had the misfortune to work under the likes of Stalin and Khrushchev. All are chemists or physicists, because Stalin's fascination with the charlatan geneticist Lysenko destroyed Soviet biology (literally: many biologists who did not fall in line with his theories were shot). These are competent, fact-filled accounts of education, careers, honors, and discoveries, mixed with often-harrowing descriptions of how each scientist either prospered or rebelled in the strange Orwellian world of the U.S.S.R. Ironically, these figures represent the golden age of Russian science, which vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Nov.)