The Top - Secret Life of

The theories of Lev Davidovich Landau built the backbone of 20th-century condensed-matter physics. They described superfluidity, tenets of superconductivity, and diverse corners of astrophysics, particle physics and many other disciplines. To this day, Landau levels, Landau diamagnetism, Landau spectrum, Landau-Ginzburg theory and other Landau discoveries remain essential tools. His texts taught generations of scientists: the library at Harvard University contains four times as many titles by this Soviet physicist as by the renowned American physicist Richard Feynman. For his achievements, Landau won the Nobel Prize in 1962. His admirers saw him as an ivory tower theorist—bold, impudent and charming but detached from the humdrum of everyday existence. They ignored two political aspects of his life: his year in Joseph Stalin’s prisons in the late 1930s and his contributions to the dictator’s nuclear bomb a decade later. Only now do we know Landau had a political persona that made him permanently suspect to the KGB, the Soviet secret police. This revelation was partly accidental. In 1989 Maia Besserab, the niece of Landau’s wife, published the fourth edition of her biography of the scientist. Glasnost (or “openness”) had arrived, and the author claimed she could finally announce the full story behind his 1938 arrest. A disgruntled former student by the name of Leonid Pyatigorsky, Besserab stated, had denounced Landau as a German spy. This during Stalin’s Great Terror, when many millions were executed on fanciful charges. Unfortunately for the biographer, Pyatigorsky was still alive. It was indeed true that Landau had expelled him from the theoretical group at the Kharkov institute in Ukraine. “Dau,” as the great man was called by his adoring students, could be very hard on them: a sign outside his office door warned, “Beware! He bites!” But Pyatigorsky nonetheless continued to revere Landau, and shocked by the accusation, he brought Besserab to court in the summer of 1990.