Luzin affair (nonfiction)

The Luzin affair was a violent political campaign organized by the Soviet authorities against mathematician Nikolai Luzin.

On 21 November 1930, the declaration of the "initiative group" of the Moscow Mathematical Society which consisted of Luzin's former students Lazar Lyusternik and Lev Schnirelmann along with Alexander Gelfond and Lev Pontryagin claimed that “there appeared active counter-revolutionaries among mathematicians”. Some of these mathematicians were pointed out, including the advisor of Luzin, Dmitri Egorov. In September 1930, Egorov was arrested on the basis of his religious beliefs. He then left the position of director of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was replaced by Ernst Kolman. As a result, Luzin left the Moscow Mathematical Society and Moscow State University. Egorov died on 10 September 1931, after a hunger strike initiated in prison. In 1931, Kolman brought the first complaint against Luzin.

In 1936 the Great Purge began. Millions of people were arrested or executed, including leading members of the intelligentsia. In July–August of that year, Luzin was criticized in Pravda in a series of anonymous articles whose authorship later was attributed to Kolman. The attack on Luzin was supported by some of his students and was instigated by a letter of Pavel Aleksandrov. It was alleged that Luzin published “would-be scientific papers”, “felt no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements”, stood close to the ideology of the “black hundreds”, orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.” One of the complaints was that he published his major results in foreign journals.

Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov, and some other students of Luzin accused him of plagiarism and various forms of misconduct. (According to some researchers, Aleksandrov and Kolmogorov had been involved in a homosexual relationship in the 1930s, a fact the police used to pressure them into testifying against their former teacher.) Sergei Sobolev and Otto Schmidt incriminated Luzin with charges of disloyalty to Soviet power. The methods of political insinuations and slander had been used against the old Muscovite professorship already several years before the article in Pravda.

In 1936 Luzin was tried at a special hearing of the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which endorsed all accusations of Luzin as an "enemy under the mask of a Soviet citizen." Although the Commission convicted Luzin, he was neither expelled from the Academy nor arrested, but his department in the Steklov Institute was closed and he lost all his official positions. There has been some speculation about why his punishment was so much milder than that of most other people condemned at that time, but the reason for this does not seem to be known for certain. Historian of mathematics A.P. Yushkevich speculated that at the time, Stalin was more concerned with the forthcoming Moscow Trials of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and others, whereas the eventual fate of Luzin was of a little interest to him.

The 1936 decision of the Academy of Sciences was finally reversed on January 17, 2012.

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Dmitri Egorov (nonfiction)
• Alexander Gelfond (nonfiction)
• Andrey Kolmogorov (nonfiction)
• Nikolai Luzin (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Lev Pontryagin (nonfiction)
• Lev Schnirelmann (nonfiction)
• Sergei Sobolev (nonfiction)

External links:

• Nikolai Luzin: Luzin affair of 1936 @ Wikipedia
• The End of the Luzin Affair
• Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin
• Roots of Luzin’s Case - S. S. Kutateladze