Nikolai Luzin - The Luzin Affair of 1936

The Luzin Affair of 1936

On 21 November 1930 the declaration of the “initiative group” of the Moscow Mathematical Society which consisted of former Luzin's students Lazar Lyusternik and Lev Shnirelman 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, Dmitri Egorov was arrested on the basis of his religious beliefs. After arrest, he left the position of the director of the Moscow Mathematical Society. The new director became 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, Ernst Kolman made the first complaint against Luzin.

In July–August 1936, Luzin was criticised in Pravda in a series of anonymous articles whose authorship later was attributed to Ernst Kolman. 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.” 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. One of the complaints was that he published his major results in foreign journals. This method of political insinuations and slander was used against the old Muscovite professorship many years before the article in Pravda.

The political offensive against Luzin was launched not only by Joseph Stalin's repressive ideological authorities, but also by a group of Luzin's students headed by Pavel Alexandrov, who may have been pressured to it by threats to reveal his homosexual relationship with Andrey Kolmogorov. Although the Commission convicted Luzin, he was neither expelled from the Academy nor arrested. 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 forthcoming Moscow Trials of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and others, and that the eventual fate of Luzin was of little interest to him. The 1936 decision of the Academy of Sciences was not cancelled after Stalin's death. The decision was reversed on January 17, 2012.