Soviet Union in the Context of the Nobel Prize

The following sections are included:

• Foreword
• Preface to the English Edition
• Contents

The death and last will of Alfred Nobel were widely covered by Russian newspapers. The interest of the press was quite understandable. The Nobel family had been invited to Russia by Great Prince Mikhail Pavlovich and had settled in St. Petersburg in 1842, creating links to industrial developments in their second homeland. These links were forcibly destroyed in the second half of 1918, after the business of the descendants of Ludvig Nobel, Alfred’s elder brother, was nationalized and repressed…

It follows from Tables 2.1–2.3 that the situation with Russian nominations and nominators in the first 15 years of Soviet power was not significantly different from that in the preceding period described in Chapter 1. The sole difference was that substantially fewer Russian scientists still kept in touch with the Nobel organizations…

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the story of the Nobel award to Bunin was an instructive lesson taught by Aleksandra Kollontai, Soviet representative in Sweden. Mingling in the midst of cultural life of Stockholm, she came to understand what enormous worldwide fame and prestige the Nobel Prizes had acquired for over three decades since their institution. She could see that the award of the Nobel Prize objectively contributed to the glory of the nation under whose flag a laureate received honours…

After the end of World War II, the Nobel organizations resumed annual awards in all categories of the Nobel Prize. However, connections with Soviet scientists seemed to have been totally lost although invitations were regularly sent to them from Stockholm. The Nobel Committees were seriously concerned about the situation and undertook unusual steps to recover contacts with Soviet colleagues through diplomatic channels that they traditionally avoided using…

The idea to institute international prizes for outstanding scientific achievements first emerged in the USSR in 1945 (doc. 2.5), when the country was gripped by the euphoria of victory over Nazism and the philosophy of confrontation with the West started to prevail in all aspects of political and public life. The realization of the idea was entrusted to Suvorov, deputy head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation, AUCP(b) Central Committee, as the key figure through whose agency the department controlled scientific developments in the country…

In order to better understand sources of ideological cataclysms that shook the country during the last five years of Stalin’s rule, it is necessary to turn back to the notorious “Klyueva–Roskin case”. This case started a series of noisy propagandistic campaigns against “servility to Western science and technology”, “antipatriots” etc. that involved an undeclared boycott of Nobel organizations…

The peak of the ideological clinch fell on the first three months of 1953 and coincided with the last weeks of Stalin’s life.

On the 13th of January, newspapers published an official communication under the heading “News by TASS” that shocked not only this country but also the entire world. It announced the arrest of a group of prominent representatives of the medical profession, the majority of whom were Jews. The editorial in “Pravda” entitled “Vicious spies and killers under the mask of academic physicians” and reprinted by the mass media of the country stated that most members of “the terrorist group”… were bought by the American intelligence service… recruited by its branchoffice — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called “Joint”. “Pravda” revealed that “the filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed”. The text of the communication was approved by Bureau of the Presidium of CPSU Central Committee*18 four days before its publication (i.e. on January 9)…

The awarding of the 1956 Nobel Prize to N. N. Semenov substantially changed the visible aspect of the relationship between the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Department of Science, CPSU Central Committee. There is practically no documented evidence of the Department’s meddling in the recommendation of Soviet scientists for the Nobel Prizes since the 1958 nomination campaign. The Academy of Sciences no longer asked the CPSU Central Committee for permission to nominate concrete candidates…

In 1983, in connection with a wide-ranging discussion among literary critics trying to ascertain the years in which Boris Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Lars Gyllensten stated that there were definitely seven such nominations — five annual, in the period between 1946 and 1950, and two more, after the interval of six years, in 1957 and 1958. At the present time the documents of the Nobel Committees are available for researchers up to 1955, which allows us to form an objective judgment about their nominations and nominees in the first five years after the end of the World War II…

Boris Pasternak was first nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. A year later the Nobel Committee received the first nomination for Mikhail Sholokhov; his candidacy being offered by the professor of Stockholm University, afterwards a member of the Swedish Academy Henry Olsson (see Table 4.2)…

The personalities of these four Soviet Nobel Prize winners, their fates connected with the two decades which finished the existence of the Soviet Union have little correlation with each other. A yesterday’s prisoner of the Stalin empire of terror, deprived of rights, and the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, whose opportunities for limitless absolute power objectively exceeded all thinkable prerogatives of His Majesty the Emperor; a poet, of Brezhnev’s dolce vita period, also without rights and without shelter, and a brilliant scientist and thinker, to whom eternally indebted are, among other people, the homespun national patriots, who hated him in his lifetime and got the enviable possibility to frighten the rest of the world by the image of the deadly weapon created by his genius…

Some statistics to start…

In all Nobel Prize categories (including the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) from 1901 to 2000, 695 people (Table 12.1) became laureates, four of whom were awarded twice. Moreover, the Nobel Peace Prize was also given to sixteen international bodies, the Red Cross being awarded three times and the UN refugees committee twice. Of the 695 people seventeen are Russian citizens, which constitutes less than 2.5%…

The following sections are included:

• List of Abbreviations
• Name Index