Quick solutions meant solutions, including scientific solutions, that contributed immediately to the defense of the beleaguered country. In the late summer of 1941, Kurchatov and Alexandrov set up a laboratory together in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea, organized a test site for demagnetizing ships to protect them against magnetic mines and trained Navy crews in the lifesaving technology until September, when the Germans began bombing Streletskaya Bay. Alexandrov went north then to work with the Northern Fleet; Kurchatov stayed on in Sevastopol demagnetizing submarines.
Boris Pasternak compacted the mood that terrible autumn into a shudder of dread:
In October there was panic in Moscow. The Germans had advanced to within a hundred kilometers of the city and it seemed they might succeed in seizing it. A young Red Army cipher clerk stationed in training nearby, Igor Gouzenko, had been given a pass into Moscow on October 16 and witnessed the debacle. “The street was crowded with people carrying bundles, sacks and suitcases,” Gouzenko recalled after the war. “They were scurrying in all directions. No one seemed to know where they were fleeing. Everyone was just fleeing. Most astounding of all was the strange silence hanging over the scene. Only the stamp of hurrying feet created an undertone of frantic rhythm.” Andrei Sakharov, who was then a young university student, remembered that “as office after office set fire to their files, clouds of soot swirled through streets clogged with trucks, carts, and people on foot carrying household possessions, baggage, and young children… I went with a few others to the [university] Party committee office, where we found the Party secretary at his desk; when we asked whether there was anything useful we could do, he stared at us wildly and blurted out: ‘It's every man for himself!’”
At the Scientific Research Institute where Igor Gouzenko's sister had been working, a notice had been posted on the door on the authority of the chairman of the Moscow Soviet: “The situation at the front is critical. All citizens of the City of Moscow, whose presence is not needed, are hereby ordered to leave the city. The enemy is at the gates.”
Gouzenko thought the notice qualified as “the most panicky document of World War II.” Warranted or not, Moscow emptied out; by the end of October, more than two million people had been evacuated officially and many more had simply fled. Stalin stayed. The counterattack outside Moscow, the first major Soviet offensive, began early in December and saved the city. “West of Moscow,” observes Alexander Werth, “… miles and miles of road were littered with abandoned guns, lorries and tanks, deeply embedded in the snow. The comic ‘Winter Fritz,’ wrapped up in women's shawls and feather boas stolen from the local population, and with icicles hanging from his red nose, made his first appearance in Russian folklore.” But the siege of Leningrad had begun, and that winter nearly half the population of the city, a million people, died of starvation.
Georgi Flerov had been drafted into the Soviet Air Force at the beginning of the war and assigned to the Air Force Academy in Ioshkar-Ola to train as an engineer. He was a stubborn man; he suspected that other nations, including the fascist enemy, were working on a uranium bomb; he believed passionately that his country should develop such a weapon first. He said as much in a letter to the State Defense Committee in November, but the letter went unanswered.
That month German bombs and artillery barrages finally drove the Soviet Navy from the Sevastopol harbor. Kurchatov left ruined Sevastopol then, evacuating first by boat to Poti, south of Sukhumi on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, then beginning the long journey by train to Kazan, seven hundred kilometers east of Moscow, to resume work at the temporary Fiz-tekh installation there. On his way, the Soviet physicist spent a night on a below-zero station platform and caught cold. Suzanne Rosenberg, a daughter of Canadian Communists who had returned to the Soviet Union to support the Revolution, describes a similar railroad ordeal evacuating Moscow during the October panic:
So crammed with evacuees was the train that we spent the first twenty-four hours standing on the wind- swept platform between the carriages. Later we took brief turns sitting down on the benches inside. Our journey lasted nineteen days: normally it took forty-six or fifty hours. We learned to sleep standing up, like horses, to do without water and with little food for whole days. The German Messerschmitts were on our trail. Hearing their approach we would jump off the train, tumbling over one another, and scurry off in all directions. If there were woods we made a dash for their cover. If not, we fled into the open fields and stretched out in the frozen grass, faces buried in the icy ground.
In December Flerov won leave to present a seminar on the uranium problem to the Academy of Sciences, which, like Fiztekh, had been evacuated to nearby Kazan. He missed Kurchatov, who was still in transit, but wrote him a long letter in a school notebook that repeated the gist of his report. One of the participants remembers:
Flerov's report was well-argued. As usual, he was vivid and enthusiastic. We listened to him attentively. Ioffe and Kapitza were present… The seminar left the impression that everything was very serious and fundamental, that work on the uranium project should be renewed. But the war was going on. And I don't know what the outcome would have been if we'd had to decide whether to start work immediately or to delay beginning for another year or two.
Flerov was proposing work on a fast-neutron chain reaction: a bomb. He argued that an atomic bomb was possible and that 2.5 kilograms of pure U235 would yield 100,000 tons of TNT equivalent. “He suggested developing a ‘cannon’ design,” reports Khariton, “that is, quickly driving together two hemispheres made of U235. He also expressed the important idea of the use of ‘compression of the active material.’” The record is silent on how Flerov proposed to achieve such compression in a uranium gun, which assembles but does not compress. Flerov's 2.5 kilograms was at best a rough approximation, far below the minimum quantity of U235 necessary to sustain a chain reaction,[5] but it compares with the 1 kg that Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch in England had first roughly estimated and was probably derived similarly from the known cross section of uranium for neutron capture, the geometric cross section, 10–23 cm2. By the time Kurchatov arrived behind the Urals, at the end of December 1941, his cold had turned to pneumonia. He took to his bed. His wife Marina Dmitrievna joined him in Kazan and nursed him. Abram Ioffe nursed him. During his illness he chose not to shave. When he recovered, early in 1942, he emerged into Russian winter with a full-blown beard, “which,” says Golovin, “he declared no scissors would touch till after victory.” It was unusual in those days for a young Russian to wear a beard. Kurchatov would make his famous.
Khariton says Kurchatov cherished Flerov's report, saving it in his desk to the end of his life. Admiring Flerov's enthusiasm was not the same as trusting his judgment, however. “Kurchatov knew,” comments Golovin, “that Flerov did not and indeed could not have proofs; he only had a passion for experimentation and would not back down from his ideas… Cares of the day distracted Kurchatov. He was recalled to fleet duty and left for Murmansk.”
“Scientific work which is not completed and produces no results during the war,” Peter Kapitza explained in a lecture in 1943, “may even be harmful if it diverts our forces from work which is more urgently required.” With ships to demagnetize, tank armor to harden and radar to invent, the Soviet scientific establishment concluded once again, that hard winter of 1941, that it would be imprudent to undertake expensive, problematic and long-term nuclear- fission research in the midst of war.
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