Russian Thorns

One of the brightest blooms in what Joseph Stalin calls "our Soviet garden" is robustly proliferating Soviet Science. But this bloom bears thorns.

The Soviet high command treats its scientists well so long as they stay at home, work hard, behave themselves. It has little trouble with the 30,000 or so enthusiastic inventors who are busy inventing everything from electric fish nets to depilatories for sheep. But science in the U. S. S. R. has lacked a certain prestige since the death of Ivan Petrovich ("Conditioned Reflex") Pavlov, who used to grumble sometimes about "illiterate Communists" but who was, after all, the country's only Nobel Laureate in science. The Government would like to have certain Russian-born luminaries laboring abroad come back and work for the glory of Russia, and if they ever set foot on Russian soil, it is prepared to detain them. That was what happened to moon-faced Peter Kapitza, who had important atomic magnetization experiments under way in Britain when he imprudently went to Russia to attend a meeting (TIME, Nov. 25, 1935). Professor Kapitza was not allowed to return to England, despite the pained outcries of British bigwigs.

Last month, according to the New York Times, Russia's geneticists kicked up such an intramural row over whether racial equality is or is not a scientific fact (Communism firmly says it is), that the Soviet Government called off the Seventh Inter national Congress on Genetics, which was to have taken place this August in Moscow. The Kremlin loudly accused the Times of lying, declared the Congress had only been postponed to give visitors more time to prepare their papers.

Snug in Chicago last week was one of Stalin's most irksome scientific thorns, a canny, loose-jowled Russian whom the Soviet Government has despaired of trying to entice home for a "visit." Vladimir Nikolaevich Ipatieff is considered by his employers, Universal Oil Products Co., to be "the foremost living expert in catalytic reactions in connection with petroleum refining." Born in Moscow in 1867, he won a doctorate at St. Petersburg, taught at the Artillery Academy there. During the War the Tsar put him in charge of all Russian war chemistry. Wholly uninterested in politics, he was not molested after the Bolshevik ascendancy and remained in Russia until 1931, when he went to the U. S. as a visiting professor at Northwestern University. For Universal Oil Products he developed by polymerization (making big molecules from smaller ones) a fuel with extremely high antiknock rating. With his wife, a longtime sufferer from arteriosclerosis, he lives in a luxurious suite in a Chicago hotel.

Ambassador to the U. S. Troyanovsky, a onetime chemistry pupil of Ipatieff's, has repeatedly tried to persuade his 70-year-old teacher to return to Russia. Last autumn the Russian Academy of Sciences, to which Ipatieff was elected in 1915, sent him a message: ''Come immediately.'' Dr. Ipatieff pointed out that he was under longtime contract to his U. S. employers. The U. S. S. R. then suggested that he arrange to spend three months a year in his native land. Reflecting on the detention of Peter Kapitza, Ipatieff declared:

"I am not going back because I prefer American working conditions. I am getting on in years and when the weather is bad and I am feeling ill, I appreciate the privilege of staying away from my laboratory without resorting to a lot of unpleasant red tape to get official permission."

When it became apparent in Moscow that further blandishments would be futile, Ipatieff was expelled from the Academy and denounced as a traitor under articles Nos. 130 and 133 of the new Soviet Constitution. Last week the old scientist was grieved by news that his son, a Moscow chemistry teacher, had ridiculed his reasons for not returning, had "scathingly denounced" him. Dr. Ipatieff looked up the word "scathingly" in a Russian-English dictionary, sighed: "Ah, it is too bad, too bad."

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