In addition, the new Academy Statute of 1929 introduced a new powerful loyalty test to the regime: Paragraph 19, which declared that a member of the academy “could be deprived his Academic title for acts of sabotage against the USSR,” was included.150 The wise academician Vernadsky clearly saw what would happen next. In a secret letter to his son George dated July 16, 1929, Vernadsky wrote:
The [Communist] Party is a world of intrigues and arbitrariness. And on the Party’s orders a decent person acts indecently, justified by the [Party] discipline…. Every appointment of a Communist means that a Communist group and a Communist outside organ become extremely influential… A greedy and hungry Communist crowd finds a new way to make a profit: to take positions [in science]. Secret information on political and ideological disloyalty are sent [to the supervisors]… and a cleansing starts.
…Until now the Academy of Sciences was not touched by this process. Now it comes…151
At the end of June 1929, a special state commission chaired by a member of the Control Commission of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, Yurii Figatner (1889–1937), started work on “cleansing” the staff of the Academy of Sciences of its “class enemies.” The commission included a scientist, P. Nikiforov (director of the Seismology Institute), a representative of guards at the buildings of the academy, three workers from the main Leningrad factories, two other persons, and two OGPU representatives.152 The commission cleansed 781 employees from the academy, mostly specialists in humanitarian sciences, based on their noble or bourgeois origin. It became clear a couple of months later that for most of these people, losing their job was only the first step toward their arrest by the OGPU.
In October 1929, the chairman of the OGPU Special Commission on Cleansing, one of the most ruthless Chekists, Yakov Peters, and another member of the presidium of the same commission, Yakov Agranov, the intelligentsia specialist, arrived in Leningrad to help the Figatner Commission.153 On November 5, the Politburo established a new investigation commission consisting of Figatner, the Russian chief prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko, Peters, and Agranov.154 This commission found many documents, including the Acts of Abdications of Nicholas II and his brother Mikhail, stored at the Academy Library, which, according to the commission, should have been in the State Central Archive instead. The commission used the existence of these purely historical documents to fabricate a “monarchist plot.” Arrests of academy members and former academy employees started. In sum, 115 historians were arrested in Leningrad and Moscow, including four outstanding academicians, Sergei Platonov (1860–1933), Eugenii Tarle (1875–1955), Nikolai Likhachev, and Matvei Lyubavsky (1860–1936), as members of the nonexistent “All-People’s Union of Struggle for the Restoration of Free Russia.” The arrests were sanctioned by the Politburo.155 Of these academicians, Likhachev was not only an outstanding specialist in Russian history and art history but also a collector of artwork and books. He gave his collection of icons to the Russian Museum in Leningrad and his collection of manuscripts and antique books to the Academy of Sciences. The last collection became the basis of the Academy Institute of Books, Documents, and Writing.
The Academy of Sciences did not wait for the end of the OGPU investigation. In vain, then president Vladimir Karpinsky, eighty-two years old, tried to persuade his colleagues at the academy general meeting on February 2, 1931, that “there should be freedom of opinions [within the Academy] and of opportunities to express them publicly.”156 The frightened academicians and newly elected Party elite academicians voted unanimously to expel Platonov, Tarle, Likhachev, and Lyubavsky from the academy.
According to the OGPU Academicians case, since 1927 Academician Platonov allegedly headed a plot of monarchists who planned a foreign intervention to restore the monarchy in Russia. Supposedly, Platonov would have been appointed prime minister and Academician Tarle foreign minister in the new monarchist Russian government. During the investigation, Platonov was kept in a separate room.157 An OGPU interrogator, Andrei Mosevich, forced him to write false testimony.158 Also, Platonov was interrogated by the deputy head, Sergei Zhupakhin, and the head, Mikhail Stepanov, of OGPU’s Secret Department of the Leningrad Branch. The investigators had a highly professional scientific consultant—the just elected (among other Party functionaries) academician Mikhail N. Pokrovsky. He cooperated with the OGPU on the instruction of OGPU Chairman Menzhinsky.159
On February 10, 1931, the OGPU three-member court (troika) convicted thirty alleged plotters to five to ten years of hard labor in labor camps. This state security three-member court existed from 1918 until July 10, 1934, when it was replaced by the Special Board of the MGB (OSO) under the NKVD.160 On May 10, 1931, forty more arrested people were condemned to ten years of hard labor in the dreaded Solovki Camp, and six members of the “plot” were condemned to death and shot. Finally, on August 8, 1931, the OGPU Collegium convicted twenty scientists to five years’ labor in Pechora labor camps and fifteen other scientists, including Platonov, Tarle, Likhachev, and Lyubavsky, to five years of exile in different provincial towns. Platonov died in 1933 while he was in exile in Samara. Lyubavsky died in exile in Ufa, Bashkiria, in 1936. Tarle was much luckier: He was released in 1932 after the intervention of the Soviet minister of culture and Academician Anatolii Lunacharsky.161 He returned to Leningrad and continued his successful career. Like Tarle, Likhachev returned to Leningrad, where he died in 1936.
Party authorities were content with the OGPU results. The chairman of the Politburo’s Commission on Assistance to the Work of the Academy of Sciences (in fact, “assistance” meant Party control),162 Avel Yenukidze wrote: “We achieved our goal. Messieurs Academicians [Yenukidze ironically used the word “Messieurs” to show that academicians were not “comrades”] have understood that they cannot make fools of us. Now they will be released [from imprisonment] step by step, but we will not allow them to conduct anti-Soviet action any more.” What Yenukidze could not predict was that in a few years, in 1937–1940, he, Figatner, and all the OGPU/KGB functionaries who took part in the organization of the Academicians case (Peters, Agranov, Zhupakhin, and Stepanov), would be arrested by the NKVD to be shot or to die in imprisonment.
After 1930, expulsion from the academy became a routine procedure. In 1938, Karpinsky’s successor as president, the botanist Vladimir Komarov reviewed a list of twenty-one members selected for expulsion at the academy general meeting. After a number of rhetorical questions—“Does anybody want to say something?” “Does anybody want an explanation?” and “Is everything clear?”—Komarov stated: “Let me conclude that the General Meeting joins the opinion of the Presidium [of the academy] and confirms the expulsion of these persons.”163 The paragraph allowing the expulsion of an academy member because of his “unpatriotic” or “anti-Soviet” behavior was kept in all later versions of the statutes of the Soviet Academy.164 People like Dmitrii Pryanishnikov, Pyotr Kapitsa, and Andrei Sakharov, who publicly raised their voices in defense of their arrested colleagues, were rare among the majority of compliant scientists who followed Party orders in exchange for their elite position in Soviet society.