Physical Attraction22 Mar 2018

We Can Always Shoot Them Later - Stalin, Soviet Science, and the Bomb (I)

"Leave the physicists be," said Stalin to his chief of police, Beria. "We can always shoot them later."

In this series of episodes, we'll take you inside the world of science in the USSR - with a particular focus on how they developed the atomic bomb. The gulags were not the only prisons in the Soviet Union; in fact, they constructed entire secret cities, called "Atomgrads", to house the scientists working on the bomb project.

Technical experts were detained in prisons called sharashka. It was a simple exchange: you got to stay somewhere warm, and live under slightly better conditions than in the gulags - and in exchange, you worked on weapons and other projects to help the Soviet state.

More broadly, the Communist state was a bundle of contradictions. They were focused on the power of science and technology to drag Russia into the 20th century, but also they were dogmatic and suspicious of any outside influence. Huge amounts were invested in technical education, but pseudoscience made it to the height of power and policy-making in the state.

What was life like for these scientists? How did Soviet science react to its contradictions?

We'll explore all this and more in this episode.

If you've enjoyed the show, please tell everyone you know to listen and spread it like a super-virulent biological weapon.

You can contact the show with any comments, questions, or concerns via www.physicspodcast.com or find us on Twitter @physicspod. Getting feedback from listeners is always wonderful, so please drop us a line.

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