We Can Always Shoot Them Later - Stalin, Soviet Science, and the Bomb (I)

"Leave the physicists be," said Stalin to his chief of police,
Beria. "We can always shoot them later."

In this series of episodes, we'll take you inside the world of
science in the USSR - with a particular focus on how they
developed the atomic bomb. The gulags were not the only prisons
in the Soviet Union; in fact, they constructed entire secret
cities, called "Atomgrads", to house the scientists working on
the bomb project. 

Technical experts were detained in prisons called sharashka. It
was a simple exchange: you got to stay somewhere warm, and live
under slightly better conditions than in the gulags - and in
exchange, you worked on weapons and other projects to help the
Soviet state.

More broadly, the Communist state was a bundle of contradictions.
They were focused on the power of science and technology to drag
Russia into the 20th century, but also they were dogmatic and
suspicious of any outside influence. Huge amounts were invested
in technical education, but pseudoscience made it to the height
of power and policy-making in the state. 

What was life like for these scientists? How did Soviet science
react to its contradictions?

We'll explore all this and more in this episode.

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weapon. 

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