Talk:Pyotr Kapitsa
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According to this Russian page, after Kapitsa was prevented to return to England with his wife and children, they moved back to Moscow to live with him. The Russian page is apparently a translation of an encyclopedic article in English published first by the H.W. Wilson Company in 1987. The Russian article also states that he had already visited Russia several times during his time in England and that Soviet officials had tried to convince him to remain in Russia. While he had expressed interest in such proposals, he had requested guarantees , such as the freedom to travel freely to the west, that were deemed unacceptable. In The legacy of Stalin and Stalinism: A historiographical survey of the literature, 1930-1990, Canadian Journal of History, Apr. 1994, T. R.Ravindranathan tersely writes that "Kapitsa decided to stay in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1934 despite the fact that he already had a new laboratory, house, wife, and family in Cambridge". The Russian page also states that in 1941 Kapitsa drew "public attention" (whatever that may have meant in Stalin's Russia) to the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. In 1945 Kapitsa was a member of the Soviet "Special Committee" to solve the nuclear problem (p.24 of [1]). He was dismissed from the Soviet nuclear program after he sent a letter to Stalin where he sharply criticised Beria (p. 56 of [2] ), “comrade Beria’s basic weakness is that the conductor ought not only to wave the baton, but also to understand the score. In this respect Beria is weak” (p.19). Other material that may beef up the picture is Kapitsa's letter (Oct. 25, 1943, quoted in ref. [2]) to Bohr (who was preparing to escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark) inviting him to the Soviet Union. L'omo del batocio 12:32, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
