Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 4 – There are few
subjects more obscured by secrecy and myth than the Soviet Union’s production
of its own atomic bomb not only for the usual reasons of national security but
because of the roles Soviet spies, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria,
and Jews and Soviet political prisoners played in this effort.
That makes a lengthy article entitled
“The Atomic Bomb was a Soviet Invention” by Russian military journalist Andrey
Yevdokimov in the last two issues of the influential Voyennno-Promyshlenny
Kuryer especially intriguing (vpk-news.ru/articles/54893
and vpk-news.ru/articles/55031).
The journalist begins by bluntly
stating that “the atomic bomb was invented in 1940 by staffers of the Kharkov
Physical-Technical Institute in the laboratory of the outstanding scholar
Aleksandr Leypunsky” and then focusing on the intriguing career of that scholar
from the 1920s to his death in 1972.
Even Leypunsky’s family members knew
little about what he did in this sphere, Yevdokimov says; but he eventually
learned that not only Aleksandr Leypunsky but his brothers and sister were
involved in work on atomic weapons. But
about the scholar’s work in the Ministry of Internal Affairs almost no one now alive
knows much, the journalist continues.
And yet that work may be among his
most important. “In 1945, Leypunsky for about three months was in Germany”
where he wore the uniform of an NKVD colonel, oversaw the shipping to the USSR
of German nuclear facilities, and helped to identify German scholars who could
be brought to the Soviet Union to work on nuclear weapons.
Leypunsky was born in Grodno Oblast
in 1903 into a large Jewish family, in whicih three of the five children became
prominent physicists. In addition to his
natural brothers and sisters, he was surrounded by four adopted children, one
of whom emigrated to the US and with whom Leypunsky maintained contact until
1935 after which that became too dangerous.
Leypunsky made a name for himself as
a nuclear physicist early on. In 1931, only a few months after the atom was
split at Cavendish, he and his colleagues in Kharkov achieved the same feat. Stalin
decorated him for that; and in 2002, a monument in memory of this event was set
up in Kharkov.
But he fell afoul of the authorities
and was arrested twice, the first in the mid-1920s for unknown reasons and the
second time in May 1938 as a German and English spy, a charge that seemed
plausible at the time given his contacts with scholars among those two
nationalities, Yevdokimov says.
It is an open question, the
journalist continues, as to who recruited whom, the Germans and the English Leypunsky
or Leypunsky Germans and Englishmen. The record suggests that the latter was
far more likely although during the war his Kharkov laboratory was protected by
a German who had been his colleague earlier.
Some Soviet and Russian historians
accept the official version that Levpunsky was a spy and was freed only because
of the mass liberation after the death of Beria. But others argue the opposite,
pointing to the fact that he played a major role in recruiting Petr Kapitsa and
encouraging him to return to the Soviet Union.
If that is the case, Yevdokimov
says, “Leypunsky was a real agent of [Soviet] foreing intelligence. So that his
liberation could have been the result of interference by the intelligence
organs. He was arrested by one NKVD structure but needed by another. Now such
disagreements are called a war of the Kremlin towers.”
However that may be, by 1940, Leypunsky
was working on atomic issues and at the end of that year was one of a team of
Soviet scholars who in advance of the Americans came up with the design an
atomic bomb in which ordinary explosives would be used to create a critical
mass of uranium and set off a nuclear explosion.
Leypunsky was not listed among the
inventors, however. They were respectively Friedrich Lange, Victor Maslow, and
Vladimir Shpinel. “The ethnic composition of the group of inventors is curious:
a German, a Russian and a Jew. The fate of two of them was tragic.” Levpunsky’s
was less so, but he too was Jewish.
By the time of the German invasion,
he was working in Ufa and helped to develop the system of secure telephones
known as “Vodoker” and described in detail in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel First
Circle. But by early 1942, Leypunsky had been called away to Moscow for
other work supposedly because the organs were suspicious of him.
The chekists had reason enough for
that, Yevdokimov says. Leypunsky had more than one “mark of Cain.” He was
Jewish, he had relatives abroad, he had been tried and sentenced, and he had
been expelled from the communist party. That would have been enough in those
times to have him shot.
But that didn’t happen, likely
because in March 1942, Beria sent Stalin a report about the possibility of
actually building an atomic weapon, and the Kremlin leader ordered work on that
to proceed at full speed. Academician Kurchatov said he wanted Leypunsky; and
as a result, all his “marks of Cain” meant nothing.
He went to work in Moscow, then in
1945, he went to Germany; and by 1946, Leypunsky had been restored to party
membership and appointed to senior positions in the interior ministry from
which he helped supervise the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects under the direction
of Beria.
In 1949, he gave up these official
positions and went to work as a scholar at Obninsk where he remained until his
death in 1972.
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