Lenin’s Laureate: Zhores Alferov’s Life in Communist Science (review)

Lenin’s Laureate is one of two books on “communist science” by the prolific Paul Josephson published in 2010. Here, he uses the biography of a Nobel Prize–winning physicist to examine the long and often painful trajectory of scientific practice in the Soviet Union. Earlier scholars have adopted similar stylistic conceits; in fact, many of Josephson’s insights about Soviet science are not dissimilar to the ones found in Loren Graham’s biography of mining engineer Peter Palchinsky, The Ghost of an Executed Engineer (1993). Josephson focuses here on Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, the Soviet physicist who was instrumental in creating the heterojunction (or hetero-transistor), for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. In Josephson’s words, the book aims to explore “the rise of big science and technology in the twentieth century through the experiences of a leading scientist and against the backdrop of Soviet history from the Revolution to the USSR’s collapse in 1991” (p. 4).

In the context of Western literature on Soviet science, Josephson’s book is both atypical and typical. Its anomalous nature derives in part from the choice of Alferov. Commonly, historians of Soviet science—especially those doing biography—have gravitated to one of three types of scientists: dissidents, victims, or ideologues; hence the many treatments of such larger-than-life personalities as Andrei Sakharov, Nikolai Vavilov, or Trofim Ly-senko. Alferov is none of these. He, in fact, represents a segment of Soviet intelligentsia who, while harboring some reservations about the socialist regime, also actively supported and defended it, and enjoyed its benefits. Alferov’s life is thus an ideal distillation of the many hundreds of thousands who toiled to maintain and develop the massive Soviet scientific sector without coming into conflict with it. In that sense, Josephson has done a great service to highlight the vicissitudes of Alferov’s journey through the socialist system, for it recovers normative aspects of Soviet science that have escaped the attention of many.

The book is also a typical addition to the canon of the history of Soviet science in that it reproduces entrenched received wisdom about the follies of that science. Josephson notes in the introduction that Alferov’s “life story reveals the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet science and technology, the vagaries of doing research in relative isolation from the West, and yet the deep respect for science among Soviet citizens and leaders that created an environment for path-breaking discovery” (p. 6). He does this by summarizing key episodes in the history of Soviet science—usually the traumas and not the successes—whose details will be familiar to anyone who has read Loren Graham, Kendall Bailes, or even Josephson’s own earlier works. These traumas include: the generational change of scientists during the Great Break, the subordination of science to industrial growth in the 1930s, the effects of the Great Terror, the nationalist turn after World War II, the “anti-cosmopolitanism” campaign of the 1940s, and the insulation of physics from Stalinist attacks during the height of the Lysenko affair.

The greatest value of Josephson’s book is in its details. His biography of Alferov (and his family) is expertly reconstructed. Based to some extent on Alferov’s 2005 autobiography (Nauka i obshchestvo, Science and Society) as well as interviews done by Josephson himself, the sections on Alferov are full of telling details about the daily life and rituals of elite intelligentsia during Soviet times. We hear stories of his student life as he was recruited to work on “hero projects” (a regional hydropower station), the way in which contemporary Soviet writing (such as novels) deeply influenced his attitude toward the success of Soviet industrialization, and his observation during a stint working at the University of Illinois in 1970 that although American scientific instruments were of a higher quality, he liked “to work with [his] hands” in fabricating his own instruments back home.

Alferov did...