In October 1985, when I first began research on the case of Academician Luzin, rumors had surfaced in the Soviet Union that new official regulations would require scientific articles containing no classified information to be published in Soviet journals before they could be cleared for publication abroad. The rumors were true. The effect of these new regulations clearly resembled the campaign against the mathematician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, which had taken place fifty years before. Luzin was the victim of the first Soviet mass media campaign against such publication. The case against him appears to be an insignificant moment in the witch-hunting mania of the 1930s, since the propaganda was apparently aimed only at one full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and his alleged misconduct.

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic “empire of knowledge.” It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.