In May 2025, two scientists were not elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences for signing a letter against Russia's invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
To this news reacted movie producer Alexander Rodnyansky, whose post we reprint with small cuts (the original - online edition ECHO).
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I remembered another episode in this regard. From 1980.
On the wave of persecution of the outstanding theoretical physicist, creator of the hydrogen bomb, human rights activist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who was deprived of all state awards and titles of three times Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Stalin and Lenin prizes, the USSR Academy of Sciences decided to exclude him from its ranks.
They convened a general meeting. On which arrived a curator from the Central Committee of the CPSU.
A quorum was gathered under the fear of personnel reprisals.
Then Nikolai Nikolayevich Semyonov, an academician and the only Soviet Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, took the floor.
- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov did wrong to the Soviet people," Semyonov began to say.
- But here's the problem: “Academician” is a lifetime title, and it has never happened that academicians were expelled... There is no precedent....
And then another academician, Nobel laureate in physics Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa became animated.
- What do you mean no! - he objected loudly. - There is a precedent!
At these words, the curator from the CPSU Central Committee breathed a sigh of relief.
Then Kapitsa added:
- In Germany, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Albert Einstein was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Sciences!
And shamed by the shameful analogy academicians, contrary to the order “from above”, Andrei Sakharov was not expelled from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
Alexander Rodnyansky, May 30, 2025.
The collage on the cover uses a photo by Andrei Sakharov (photo source - Krim.Realii)
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