Volume 32, Number 19 · December 5, 1985
Return of the Native
By David Joravsky
Kapitza, Rutherford, and the Kremlin
by Lawrence Badash
Yale University Press, 129 pp., $20.00
Ispytuiushchie gody; Iz pisem P.L. Kapitsy k materi 1921–23 gg. ("Years of trial: From P.L. Kapitza's Letters to his Mother, 1921–1923")
edited by P.E. Rubinin
Priroda (Nature), No. 1 pp.
Dvadtsat' dva otcheta akademika P.L. Kapitsy ("Twenty-three Reports of Academician P.L. Kapitza")
edited by P.E. Rubinin
Khimiia i zhizn' (Chemistry and Life), Nos. 3, 4, 5 pp.
Peter Kapitza, who died last year at eighty-nine, was probably the most celebrated Soviet scientist before Sakharov, and for analogous reasons. He stood embattled at the intersection of physics and politics, an independent man of astonishing courage. But unlike Sakharov he was not savagely punished; indeed, he was honored at home as well as abroad, confounding simplistic distinctions between 'our' side and 'theirs.' At the outset of his career he overturned the assumption that anyone with the power to choose would choose the West over the East, would pick an opulent metropolis of free science rather than the poor, unfree, provincial science of Communist Russia. After thirteen years of spectacular success at Cambridge he went home, and managed there to maintain his independence, his scientific creativity, and a very high position.
Review, 6449 words
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