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First Meeting with Lenin
Koba’s role during the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was a local rather than a national one. Apart from organizing the ‘fighting squads’ (later to be a subject of considerable controversy within the party) and the editing of the newspaper Kavkaski Rabochi Listok (Caucasian Workers’ News-sheet), which enjoyed temporary legality, he continued to conduct a vigorous onslaught against the Mensheviks. When he attended the party conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905, as a delegate of the Caucasian Bolsheviks (a group of uncertain credentials, since most of the local leaders were Mensheviks), Koba emerged for the first time from the provincial arena of Caucasian politics into the atmosphere of a truly national gathering. Here, too, he first met Lenin. In the following year he attended the Stockholm Congress and in 1907 the London Party Congress as a Caucasian delegate, where he encountered Trotsky.
Soon after his return from the London Congress he was elected to membership of the Baku Committee, and it was in the oil wells of Baku that Stalin, on his testimony, first learned to lead great masses of workers. He was arrested in November, 1908, and deported to Vologda province. A few months later, however, he escaped and appeared again in the south, under the name of Melikyants. His period of freedom was brief, for he was re-arrested in March, 1910, and sent back to Vologda to complete his sentence of 1908. Released in June, 1911, he settled in Petersburg at the home of his future father-in-law, Alliluyev, although he had been forbidden to live in most large towns. In consequence, he was again arrested. Reaction was now at its height and the party fortunes at their lowest ebb. A small conference of Bolshevik stalwarts in Prague in January, 1912, coopted Stalin as a member of the central executive committee of the party; and on his escape a few weeks later he helped to found the new party journal Pravda in Petersburg.
A Turning-point
Lenin’s ‘Wonderful Georgian’
It was in the winter of 1912-13 that Stalin made his only extended visit abroad, spending some months with Lenin in Cracow and some time in Vienna. This was a turning-point in his career. Ten years earlier Lenin, in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ had first stated the case, on which he never ceased to insist, for a centrally directed party of professional revolutionaries, organized and disciplined in thought and deed, as the essential instrument of social revolution. Stalin had all the marks of Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionary: he was intrepid, orderly and orthodox. It was a further asset that though born a Georgian and a member of one of the ‘subject races’ Stalin had had no truck with separatist or ‘federalist’ ideas within the party and was an out-and-out ‘centralist’. Not for nothing therefore did Lenin at this time refer to Stalin in a letter to Maxim Gorky as ‘a wonderful Georgian’ who was writing an essay on the national question. The essay, eventually published under the title ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in a party journal, was an attack on the ‘national’ heresies of the Austrian Marxists Bauer and Renner and a statement of accepted Bolshevik doctrine, steering a cautious middle course between those who regarded any kind of nationalism as incompatible with international socialism and those who regarded nationalism as an essential element in it. It was the first of his writings to be signed by the name under which he was to become famous.
Back in Russia, Stalin underwent in February, 1913, his sixth and last imprisonment and exile. The revolution of February, 1917, released him, and he was probably the first member of the central committee of the party to reach Petersburg. In this capacity he temporarily took over the editorship of Pravda. This was the occasion of a short-lived deviation to which Stalin afterwards frankly confessed. In common with the other leading Bolsheviks then in the capital – excluding Molotov and Shlyapnikov – Stalin believed that the right tactics for the Bolsheviks were to support the provisional Government and rally to the defence of the fatherland; and this line, which would have assimilated the policy of the Bolsheviks to that of the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, was taken editorially in Pravda. Lenin, chafing inactively in Switzerland, denounced in his ‘Letters from Afar’ the weak-kneed Bolsheviks of the capital. When later he reached Petrograd in the sealed train and propounded his famous ‘April theses’ of no cooperation with the provisional Government or with any policy that would keep Russia in the war, he quickly rallied his faltering party, and geared it for the second revolution. Thereafter Stalin remained a faithful and undeviating disciple.
1917 Revolution
Enhanced Status in the Party
The difficulty for the biographer of this as of the earlier period of Stalin’s life is to disentangle the authentic contemporary evidence from the mass of more recent and largely apocryphal accretions. It seems that he first became a figure familiar to party cadres at the time of his election to a new central committee of nine members in April, 1917, and after the difficult July days, when Lenin and Zinoviev were compelled to retreat to Finland and Kamenev, Trotsky and others were arrested, Stalin emerged to lead the party. On their return to the political scene, he retired again into the shadows. While there is but little information relating to any participation by him in the work of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the actual rising, he nevertheless undoubtedly performed an important function in the editorial office of Pravda. He supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the controversy over the preparation and timing of the October revolution and against Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk; and though his interventions recorded in the minutes of the central committee were on both occasions brief and inconspicuous, his fidelity to Lenin in these troubled times must have won the gratitude of the leader and greatly enhanced his status in the party. He was appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in October, 1917, and in this capacity one of his first measures was to proclaim Finland’s independence from Russia, at a conference in Helsinki. In spite of the opposition of elements within the party, who regarded this as an unwarranted concession to bourgeois nationalism, the decree was officially signed by Lenin and Stalin in December. He also played an active part in the drafting of the 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and he was still more closely concerned four years later in framing the federal constitution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
Breach with Trotsky
The civil war provided fresh scope for Stalin’s unflagging energy and undoubted administrative talents. That the civil war provided the occasion of Stalin’s first open breach with Trotsky; that Stalin and Voroshilov intrigued busily against Trotsky, criticizing both his disposition of his armies and his use of former Tsarist officers; that recriminations flared up to a dangerous point over the defence of Tsaritsin (renamed Stalingrad some years later) against Denikin; that Lenin tried to smooth over these animosities and to retain the services of two invaluable though quarrelsome lieutenants – so much is clear. But the historian of the future may well find it a superhuman task to extract the grain of truth from the chaff of subsequent controversy and the haystack of misrepresentation beneath which Trotsky’s achievements have been hidden. For the rest Stalin’s name figures little in the literature of the period. At any time up to 1922 the general impression which he made on his colleagues was apparently one of undistinguished competence; though admitted to the first rank of Bolshevik leaders he seemed the least remarkable of them, the most lacking in personality. But his capacity for hard and regular work more than balanced the more spectacular talents of his rivals, and indeed it could not have escaped the notice of a few that Stalin’s influence in the state and his hold on the party machine had grown enormously. At the end of the civil war he filled three significant posts: membership of the Politburo, Commissar of Nationalities, and Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin).
In March, 1922, he was appointed Secretary-General of the party – a newly created post obviously suited to his rather pedestrian gifts. Though not regarded by anyone as a potential stepping-stone to supreme power, nevertheless this post, considered in conjunction with his other spheres of influence, rendered his personal position most formidable. Although Lenin still held the reins, Stalin’s influence was becoming comparable to that of Lenin. In May of the same year Lenin had a first stroke from which he recovered, temporarily and incompletely, to be finally stricken by a second in March, 1923. From this moment, though Lenin lingered on, totally incapacitated, till January, 1924, the succession was open. Had anyone seriously canvassed Stalin’s chances, a letter from Lenin to the central committee of the party – commonly, though unwarrantably, known as Lenin’s testament – might have seemed a decisive obstacle. Writing at the end of December, 1922, with a postscript of January 4, 1923, Lenin who evidently knew that his days were numbered, passed in review the principal party leaders. He noted that Stalin since he had become Secretary-General had ‘concentrated in his hands an immense power’, and expressed the fear that he might not always use it prudently. He described Stalin as ‘too rough,’ and proposed that he should be replaced by someone ‘more patient, more loyal, more polite, more attentive to the comrades, less capricious, &c.’ Fortunately for Stalin, the letter also treated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin with scant respect, so that there was a powerful interest in limiting its circulation – though it was familiar to all members of the central committee, and its authenticity has never been contested. But Stalin must be credited with extraordinary skill in surmounting so formidable an obstacle. When the twelfth party congress met in April, 1923, Lenin was known, though not yet publicly admitted, to be past recovery. The talk was of a group of three (‘troika’) to take over his authority; and the names of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin were freely mentioned. Stalin, with consummate tact, defended Zinoviev and Kamenev rather than himself from attacks made jointly on all three of them. Trotsky was gradually edged on one side. Attacks on him for undermining the unity of the party began in the autumn of that year.
The year 1924 was decisive for Stalin’s ascent to power. During this year he for the first time exhibited to the full that amazing political dexterity which made all his rivals look like bunglers and amateurs. In the first place he brought about what may not unfairly be called the ‘canonization’ of Lenin. From the moment of Lenin’s death, and almost entirely as the result of Stalin’s initiative, every word that Lenin had uttered or written came to be treated as sacrosanct – as Lenin himself had treated the works of Marx and Engels; and everyone who had differed from him was now suspect not merely as a heretic in the past, but as a potential heretic in the future. This weapon was aimed primarily at Trotsky, whose impetuous character and long record of past bickerings with Lenin made him highly vulnerable. But it could also serve against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had more than once been severely castigated by Lenin for their backslidings. Stalin had been too prudent or not conspicuous enough to come under the lash – except in the unofficial ‘testament’ now being gradually consigned to oblivion. This was a negative asset. But immense pains were taken, both at this time and afterwards, to build up a positive picture of Stalin as Lenin’s ablest coadjutor, most faithful disciple, and chosen political executor.
Control of Party Machine Power Strengthened
Secondly, Stalin, well aware of the prestige attaching in the party to the master of Marxist theory, set out to establish his credentials in that field. In the spring of 1924 he delivered at the Sverdlov University in Moscow a course of lectures on ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ – a competent exposition of the development and application by Lenin of Marxist doctrine. He went on to take the offensive against Trotsky. In the lectures themselves he had followed the usual view that the ultimate success of the Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution elsewhere in Europe. But the revolutionary failures of 1923 in Germany suggested that this consummation was remote; and the new international status of the Soviet Union, which had been recognized in 1924 by all the principal Powers except the United States, made the encouragement of world revolution an increasingly inconvenient policy. At the end of 1924 Stalin issued a revised edition of his lectures in which he proclaimed the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’. Trotsky could thus be branded as an internationalist, a champion of the outmoded slogan of ‘permanent revolution’.
Thirdly, Stalin strengthened his control of the party machine and discovered how to use it for the discomfiture of his enemies. As Secretary-General he was already master of all promotions and appointments to key positions in the party. Lenin’s memory was now honoured by the admission of a large number of new members; and this admission, managed by Stalin and his supporters, brought a mass of recruits to the new orthodoxy. Whatever opinions were held among the leaders the weight of numbers must begin to tell. Before long Trotsky was being shouted down at party meetings by enthusiastic young Stalinists.
Trotsky’s Expulsion
By January, 1925, the campaign against Trotsky had gathered sufficient momentum to permit of his deposition from his office as People’s Commissar for War. Before the end of the year Zinoviev and Kamenev, taking fright at Stalin’s growing power, were seeking a rapprochement with Trotsky. But the move came too late to save them. In 1926 Stalin secured a condemnation of Trotskyites and Zinovievites alike both by a party conference and by the Comintern; and in November, 1927, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were formally expelled from the party. Two months later Trotsky was forcibly removed from Moscow and sent to Alma-Ata in central Asia. He was finally expelled from Russia in January, 1929.
In the struggle thus concluded personal rivalries had been intertwined not only with the issue of foreign policy already referred to but with internal political controversies. Trotsky had always been an advocate of industrialization and planning. Stalin opened the campaign against him with the nep slogans of conciliating the peasant and with the charge, repeated and illustrated ad nauseam, that Trotsky was guilty of ‘underestimating the peasant’. But Stalin soon saw the dangers of going too far, and from the end of 1925 onwards cleverly steered a middle course between the ‘left’ opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev, who were accused of ignoring the peasant, and the ‘right’ opposition of Rykov and Bukharin, who exaggerated the policy of appeasing the peasant.
After the rout of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin’s position was not yet supreme in the Politburo. He still had to deal with the ‘right’ opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Contrary to the prophecies of the recently defeated opposition, the influence of the Bukharin group did not overshadow that of Stalin. The fifteenth Congress elected a new Politburo of nine and in the new line-up Stalin had a majority of votes, among them Kaganovich and Mikoyan. The flaring up of conflicting forces inside the Politburo did not come until 1928, when in view of the grain famine ‘emergency measures’ were instituted by the Politburo, resulting in Stalin’s call for ‘the elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Although in the councils of the Politburo these measures were opposed by Bukharin and his group, it was not until April, 1929, that Stalin openly denounced Bukharin as the leader of the ‘right’ opposition to his policy in the countryside. Soon after, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were excluded from the Politburo and other significant posts. Stalin’s ascendancy in the Politburo was now complete, and from this moment he was recognized as the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union – a position consecrated by the unusual demonstrations with which his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in December, 1929. At the very moment of Trotsky’s expulsion Stalin was preparing a powerful swing-over towards industrialization. The first Five-year Plan was launched by him in 1928. Its inevitable concomitant, the collectivization of agriculture, though not seriously taken in hand till 1931, had been on the party agenda since the end of 1927. Throughout this period, though mistakes were made (notably in the estimate of the pace at which collectivization could be carried out), Stalin’s sense of timing was on the whole superb. Few, if any, of the policies which he applied were original to himself; but he was unique in his sense of when to act and when to wait.
In the middle thirties, with industrialization well on the way and collectivization a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may well have seemed to be sailing out into smoother waters. The second Five-year Plan promised an increased output of consumer goods. Stalin’s public pronouncements assumed a more optimistic tone, and he may well have originally conceived the ‘Stalin constitution’, promulgated in 1936, as the crown of his work. Socialism had been achieved; the road to Communism, however distant the goal, lay open; increased material prosperity and broader constitutional liberties were a vision of the immediate future. These expectations, if they were entertained, were not fulfilled. In the middle thirties the Soviet Union entered a new period of storm and stress. The murder of Kirov at the end of 1934 was the symptom or starting-point of a grave internal crisis; and in international affairs Germany regained her power in a form particularly menacing to the Soviet Union. The internal crisis was obscure, the evidence relating to it contentious, and it was dealt with by methods which left a lasting cloud on Stalin’s name. The growing-pains of collective farming, the liquidation of the kulaks, the need – in face of the Nazi menace – to increase the pace of industrialization had all imposed severe strains on the population and bred discontent, sometimes in high places. Stalin decided to strike hard. In the panic which followed old scores were paid off and new grudges indulged, and things probably went a good deal farther than Stalin or anyone else intended at the start.
Treason Trials
In 1935 and 1936 successive trials were held in which all those prominent Bolsheviks who had at one time or another been implicated in ‘Trotskyism’ or other forms of opposition to the regime – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin among them – were condemned and shot for self-confessed treason. In 1937 a number of the leading generals were shot on similar charges without public trial. Of the leading Bolsheviks of the first generation hardly any survived except Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov. In 1938 the purge was at last stayed. Yagoda, long the head of the gpu and its successor the nkvd, who had been removed from office at the end of 1936, was now himself executed; and Yezhov, his successor, formerly an influential party leader, disappeared from the scene about the same time. Judgment on the purge will depend partly on the amount of credence given to reports and confessions of active treason on the part of the accused; and it has to be admitted that the Soviet polity afterwards survived the almost intolerable strains of war with fewer breaks and fissures than most observers had been prepared to predict. Nevertheless it is certain that the damage done by the purges to Soviet prestige in the west was a fatal handicap to the foreign policy of a common defensive front with the western Powers to which Soviet diplomacy was at that time committed. This was probably the gravest and most disastrous miscalculation of that period.
Munich and After
Treaty with the Nazis
Soviet foreign policy in the thirties, as much as Soviet domestic policy, was clearly Stalin’s creation. He had long been by inclination a Soviet nationalist rather than an internationalist; and now that he was firmly established in the seat of power he was unlikely to shrink from any of the implications of ‘Socialism in one country’. Faced by the German menace, he executed without embarrassment the ideological change of front necessary to bring the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and to conclude treaties of alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In the end it was not lack of Soviet good will that defeated this project, but the weakness of France and what appeared to Soviet eyes as a dual policy on the part of Great Britain. So long as Great Britain could be suspected of hesitating between a deal with Germany and a common front against her, Stalin on his side would equally keep both doors open. Munich, though a severe shock to prospects of cooperation, was partly offset by British rearmament, and the riddle of British policy was unsolved throughout the winter. On March 10, 1939, at the eighteenth party congress Stalin gave what was doubtless intended as a note of warning that Soviet policy was ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by war-mongers’. But his speech was overtaken by the march of events.
It was Hitler’s seizure of Prague in the middle of March which fired the train. Great Britain now prepared feverishly for war and sought for allies in the east. Two alternatives were still open to her. She could have an alliance with the Soviet Union at the price of accepting Soviet policy in Eastern Europe – in Poland, in Rumania, in the Baltic States; or she could have alliances with the anti-Soviet Governments of these countries at the price of driving the Soviet Union into the hostile camp. British diplomacy was too simple-minded, and too ignorant of eastern Europe, to understand the hard choice before it. It plunged impetuously into the pacts of guarantee with Poland and Rumania; and within a few days, on May 3, 1939, the resignation of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov signalled a vital change in Soviet foreign policy. The British mission which had been sent to Moscow found itself unable to make any progress. Negotiations continued; but unless Great Britain was prepared to abandon the Polish alliance, or put severe pressure on her new ally, their eventual break-down was certain. When Hitler decided to wait no longer, Stalin for his part did not hesitate. Ribbentrop came to Moscow and the German-Soviet treaty was signed. It is fair to infer that Stalin regarded it as a pis aller. He would have preferred alliance with the western Powers, but could not have it on any terms which he would have found tolerable.
Uneasy Neutrality
Twenty-two months of most uneasy neutrality followed. The German advance in Poland was answered by a corresponding Soviet move to reoccupy the White Russian territories ceded to Poland by the treaty of Riga in 1921. Thus, by the autumn of 1939, Soviet and German power already confronted each other in Poland, on the Danube, and on the Baltic. The war against Finland in the winter of 1939-40 was designed to strengthen the defences of Leningrad by pushing forward the frontier in a westerly direction. It eventually achieved this object, but at the cost of much discredit to Soviet prestige and the formal expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.
After the fall of France, Soviet fears of German victory and German predominance grew apace; and military and industrial preparations were pressed forward. Stalin now probably foresaw the inevitability of conflict, but was determined not to provoke or hasten it. In November, 1940, he sent Molotov on a visit to Berlin without being able to mitigate the palpable clash of interests. On the other hand, Japanese neutrality was assured when Matsuoka was effusively received in Moscow in April, 1941. In the following month Stalin, hitherto only Secretary-General of the party and without official rank, became President of the Council of People’s Commissars – the Soviet Prime Minister. The appointment sounded a note of alarm at home and of warning abroad.
Russia at War
Heavy Burden of Responsibility
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the almost immediate threat to the capital placed on Stalin’s shoulders an enormous weight of anxiety and responsibility. From the outset, the supreme direction of the war effort and defence organization became vested in the State Defence Committee consisting of five members – Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, and Malenkov, with Stalin as chairman, though it was not till March, 1943, that he assumed the rank of marshal, and later of generalissimo. During the war his customary public speeches on May 1 and on the eve of November 7 took the form of large-scale reviews of military operations and war policy. He was also active in a diplomatic role. Before the war Stalin had been almost entirely inaccessible to foreigners. Now, apart from regular conversations with the allied Ambassadors, he received a constant flow of distinguished visitors. Lord Beaverbrook and Mr Harriman were in Moscow in August, 1941, to organize supplies from the west; Mr Churchill came in August, 1942, and again, with Mr Eden, in October, 1944. In December, 1943, Stalin met President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill at Teheran, and in February, 1945, at Yalta. The last meeting of the Big Three, with Mr Truman succeeding Roosevelt and Mr Attlee replacing Mr Churchill in the middle of the proceedings, took place at Potsdam in July, 1945.
Among his diplomatic activities Stalin was particularly concerned with the perennial problem of Soviet-Polish relations. By dint of much patience he eventually secured the recognition of the new Polish Government by his allies, and the acceptance by them as the frontier, between the Soviet Union and Poland, of the so-called ‘Curzon line’ originally drawn by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He worked untiringly to secure for his country that place of undisputed equality with the other Great Powers to which its achievements and sacrifices in the war entitled it.
Domestic Policy
Comintern and Church
Two striking decisions of domestic policy during the war – the disbandment of Comintern and the renewed recognition of the Orthodox Church – were undoubtedly taken by Stalin out of deference for allied opinion; but they were in line with this long-standing inclination, accentuated by the war, to give precedence to national over ideological considerations. The reforms of 1944 which accorded separate armies and separate rights of diplomatic representation abroad to the major constituent republics of the Soviet Union were perhaps partly designed to secure to the Ukraine and White Russia independent membership and voting power in the United Nations. When the war ended Stalin was in his sixty-sixth year. A holiday of two-and-a-half months in the autumn of 1945 at Sochi on the Black Sea produced the usual crop of rumours, but was no more than a merited and necessary respite from the burden of public affairs. In December he was back in Moscow for the visit of Mr Bevin and Mr Byrnes. Thenceforward there were few personal contacts between Stalin and representatives of the western Powers. In February, 1946, he took part in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, making the principal campaign speech, in which he forecast an early end of bread rationing – a hope which was defeated by the bad harvest. He also declared that it was the intention of the Soviet Communist Party to organize a new effort in the economic field, the aim of which would be to treble pre-war production figures. Although advanced in years, Stalin still continued to hold the reins of power and in March, 1946, he was again confirmed as Secretary of the central committee of the party. In the same year the State Publishing House began publication of a collected edition of his works.
Growing Mistrust
The unparalleled popularity in the non-Communist world with which the Russian people in general, and Marshal Stalin in particular, had emerged from the war thus early gave place to mistrust. It had been hoped that the pre-war doctrine which was associated with Stalin’s name, of ‘socialism in one country’, would provide the basis for peaceful coexistence in the post-war period. Stalin’s own comments on international affairs sometimes tended to confirm, and sometimes to deny, this prospect. Thus in answer to questions put to him by the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times in September, 1946, Stalin declared that, in spite of ideological differences, he believed in the possibility of lasting cooperation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies, and that Communism in one country was perfectly possible. This provoked worldwide interest and was regarded as a welcome statement, contributing much to the easing of growing international tension. A month later, however, in reply to questions sent to him by the United Press of America, he asserted that in his opinion ‘the incendiaries of a new war’, naming several prominent British and American statesmen, constituted the most serious threat to world peace, and thus destroyed the earlier good impression.
Russia’s post-war policy towards her neighbours did nothing to confirm Stalin’s peaceful protestations. The independent Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, had already been incorporated in Russia in 1940. Finland and Bulgaria were compelled to surrender territory to Russia as the price of defeat, and Poland suffered even greater amputations as the reward of victory. In the Far East Russia claimed North Sakhalin and the Kurilles Islands as her price for taking part in the war against Japan. In all the countries which had been overrun by the Red Army it was only a question of time before a Communist regime had been set up and its opponents liquidated. By the middle of 1948 the borders of Communism stretched from the Elbe to the Adriatic. A year later Communism had triumphed in China. Stalin controlled the destinies of an empire far larger than any Tsar had ever dreamed of.
It was the coup d’état in Prague in February, 1948, which finally forced western Europe and North America into action for their common defence. The North-Atlantic Treaty was signed in April, 1949. But even before then the west had successfully met another outward thrust by Russia. It was in June, 1948, that the air-lift began which nullified the effects of the blockade of Berlin. Stalin remained, as always, in the background during this period of dynamic Russian expansion. It was only rarely that he received a foreign diplomat, though leaders of the satellite States naturally had readier access to him. From time to time the suggestion was made for a new conference between Stalin, the American President and the British Prime Minister, but none of them came to anything. It was in 1946 that President Truman disclosed that he had invited Stalin to Washington for a social visit, but that Stalin had found it necessary to decline for reasons of health. In the last interview which he gave to a foreign correspondent (to the representative of the New York Times in December last year) he indicated that he held a favourable view of proposals for talks between himself and the head of the new American Administration, President Eisenhower, and that he was interested in any new diplomatic move to end hostilities in Korea. President Eisenhower declared his willingness last month to hold a meeting with Stalin in certain circumstances, and Mr Churchill subsequently told the House of Commons that he did not rule out the possibility of three-cornered discussions.
Stalin’s New Role: Economic Theorist
It was in the last year of his life that Stalin appeared in a role which would have surprised former colleagues, such as Lenin and Trotsky, but which therefore may well have given him most pride – as an economic theorist in the tradition of (and not less important than) Marx, Engels and Lenin. Shortly before the nineteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was held in Moscow in October, 1952 – the first congress since 1939 – Stalin published his Economic Problems of Socialism in the ussr, which has since become the definitive text-book for Communists in all countries. In this work he warned his readers that, for all Russia’s successes in building a new society, it was wrong to think that the natural economic laws did not apply as much in Russia as elsewhere. He also forecast a deepening crisis of capitalism, that west European countries would dissociate themselves from the United States, and that war between these capitalist countries was inevitable. He also outlined a programme of basic preliminary conditions necessary for the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union. At the Congress there was a reorganization of party organs – the Politburo and the Orgburo being brought together in a single body, the Praesidium of the Central Committee, of which Stalin became chairman.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December, 1949, there were widespread celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and busts of Stalin were erected on 38 of the highest peaks in the Soviet Union. It marked, too, the inauguration of international Stalin peace prizes, to be awarded each year on his birthday. On March 3, 1953, it was announced by Moscow radio that Stalin was gravely ill as the result of a haemorrhage, that he had lost consciousness and speech, and that he would take no part in leading activity for a prolonged period.
Only a few details are known of Stalin’s personal life. In 1903 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a profoundly religious woman and the sister of a Georgian comrade, who left him a son, Yasha, when she died in 1907 of pneumonia. His second wife, whom he married in 1918 – Nadezhda Alliluyeva – was 20 years younger than himself and was the daughter of a Bolshevik worker, with whom Stalin had contacts in both the Caucasus and St Petersburg. She was formerly one of Lenin’s secretaries and later studied at a technical college in Moscow. This marriage, too, ended with the death of his wife, in November, 1932. She left him two children – a daughter, Svetlana, and a son, Vassili, now a high ranking officer in the Soviet Air Force. Late in life he married Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo.
Alan Turing
7 June 1954
Dr Alan Mathison Turing, obe, frs, whose death at the age of 41 has already been reported, was born on June 23, 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing. He was educated at Sherborne School and at King’s College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1935. He was appointed obe in 1941 for wartime services in the Foreign Office and was elected frs in 1951. Until 1939 he was a pure mathematician and logician, but after the war most of his work was connected with the design and use of automatic computing machines, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then since 1948 at Manchester University, where he was a Reader at the time of his death.
The discovery which will give Turing a permanent place in mathematical logic was made not long after he had graduated. This was his proof that (contrary to the then prevailing view of Hilbert and his school at Göttingen) there are classes of mathematical problem which cannot be solved by any fixed and definite process. The crucial step in his proof was to clarify the notion of a ‘definite process’, which he interpreted as ‘something that could be done by an automatic machine’. Although other proofs of insolubility were published at about the same time by other authors, the ‘Turing machine’ has remained the most vivid, and in many ways the most convincing, interpretation of these essentially equivalent theories. The description that he then gave of a ‘universal’ computing machine was entirely theoretical in purpose, but Turing’s strong interest in all kinds of practical experiment made him even then interested in the possibility of actually constructing a machine on these lines.
It was natural at the end of the war for him to accept an invitation to work at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of the ace, the first large computer to be begun in this country. He threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, thoroughly enjoying the rapid alternation of abstract questions of design with problems of practical engineering. Later at Manchester he devoted himself more particularly to problems arising out of the use of the machine. It was at this time that he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing’s view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.
The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the age of 27 and 33. A mathematical theory of the chemical basis of organic growth which he had lately started to develop has been tragically interrupted, and must remain a fragment. Important though his contributions to logic have been, few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.
Henri Matisse
A master of modern French painting
3 November 1954
M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.
Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.
Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.
Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.
‘Les Fauves’
Up to now, though he was experimenting, Matisse had not kicked over the traces. He was exhibiting regularly at the official Salon, and in 1904 the dealer Vollard, from whom he had bought Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ to hang in his studio, gave him a one-man show of nearly 50 pictures. The explosion came at the Autumn Salon of 1905. For this exhibition Matisse organized a collection of works by the more advanced painters, including himself, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck, and these were hung in a room by themselves. An indignant critic, Louis Vauxcelles, writing in Gil Blas, called the room a ‘cage aux Fauves’ or ‘cage of wild beasts’, and the name stuck. Beyond distortion or deformation of natural appearance in the interests of design and vehemence in statement, the Fauves had no common doctrine. Fauvism, in fact, might be described as a violent wrenching away of the picture from literal representation.
A picture that came in for special abuse was Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’. This, for which Mme Matisse was the model, was bought by the American writer Miss Gertrude Stein, who was doing useful propaganda for the rebels. In 1906 she introduced Matisse to Picasso, who was then painting her portrait. Matisse was now celebrated. The Galerie Druet gave him a big one-man show, and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.
Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.
Visit to America
On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.
Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.
Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.
In 1947 Matisse offered to design and build a chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, and this was consecrated in 1951. An architect built it on a plan suggested by the artist and inside Matisse painted three large compositions in black on white ceramic tiles. Last year there was an exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate Gallery, and he was honoured by the National Arts Foundation in New York as an ‘outstanding artist of 1953’. Matisse was a member of the French Communist Party, but his standing with the Communists in recent years was unclear. Criticism came from Russia of his chapel at Vence, and in 1952 the French Communist Party was reported to be considering his expulsion for not falling into line with Moscow’s instructions that art must be ‘realistic and depict Communist ideals’.
There can be no doubt about Matisse’s technical competence as a painter, but graceful as they are, his innumerable ‘Odalisques’ in Mediterranean interiors may to some minds end by becoming rather boring. Matisse himself said: ‘While working, I never try to think, only to feel.’ That is enough to explain his distortions, perhaps also his defects. As a colourist he was something more than decorative, because he had in high degree the rare capacity to establish the position of objects in the depth of the picture by the relations between colours, without the aid of linear or atmospheric perspective.
Sir Alexander Fleming
Discoverer of penicillin
11 March 1955
Sir Alexander Fleming, d.sc, mb, frcp, frcs, frs, the discoverer of penicillin, died suddenly yesterday at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 73.
Alexander Fleming, the son of a farmer, was born at Lochfield, near Darvel, in Ayrshire, on August 6, 1881. He received his early education at the village school and at Kilmarnock Academy. At 13 years of age he was sent to live with his brother in London, where, for the next two or three years, he continued his education by attending the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. At that time he displayed no particular scientific ability nor felt any urge to be a doctor. For some years he worked in a shipping office in Leadenhall Street, but he found office routine deadly dull and after four years in the City a small legacy enabled him to escape. The brother with whom he was living had already taken his medical degree and he encouraged his younger brother to take up medicine. Thus at the age of 20 he became a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, winning the senior entrance scholarship in natural science. He showed that he had found his true bent by winning almost every class prize and scholarship during his student career. He qualified in 1906 and at the mb, bs examination of London University in 1908 he obtained honours and was awarded a gold medal.
In 1909 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1906 he had begun to assist Sir Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s Hospital, and this association led to his taking up the study of bacteriology. Under the stimulating influence of Wright, who was at that time engaged in his researches on the opsonic theory, he acquired great experience and skill in bacteriological technique and in clinical pathology. For recreation he attended the drills and parades of the London Scottish, which he had joined as a private in the year before he resigned from his post with the shipping company. For some years he went to the annual camp and, being a fair shot, to the meetings at Bisley. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he resigned from the London Scottish so that he could go to France as a captain in the ramc. He worked in Sir Almroth Wright’s laboratory in the Casino at Boulogne and received a mention in dispatches. At the end of the war he returned to St Mary’s as assistant to Sir Almroth Wright and was also appointed lecturer in bacteriology in the medical school. He subsequently became director of the department of systematic bacteriology and assistant director of the inoculation department. For some years he acted as pathologist to the venereal disease department at St Mary’s and was also pathologist to the London Lock Hospital. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London, the post being tenable at St Mary’s. He retired with the title emeritus in 1948, but continued at St Mary’s as head of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Micro-Biology. Though last year he formally handed over the reins to Professor R. Cruikshank, he continued his own research work there and only the day before yesterday was at the institute discussing plans for the lecture tour in the Middle East he had been asked to undertake by the British Council.
Fleming’s first notable discovery, that of lysozyme, was made in 1922. He had for some time been interested in antiseptics and in naturally occurring antibacterial substances. In culturing nasal secretion from a patient with an acute cold he found a remarkable element that had the power of dissolving bacteria. This bacteriolyte element, which he also found in tears and other body fluids, he isolated and named lysozyme.
A Lucky Accident
Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when Fleming was engaged in bacteriological researches on staphylococci. For examination purposes he had to remove the covers of his culture plates and a mould spore drifted on to a plate. After a time it revealed itself by developing into a colony about half an inch across. It was no new thing for a bacteriologist to find that a mould had grown on a culture plate which had lain on the bench for a week, but the strange thing in this particular case was that the bacterial colonies in the neighbourhood of the mould appeared to be fading away. What had a week before been vigorous staphylococcus colonies were now faint shadows of their former selves. Fleming might have merely discarded the contaminated culture plate but fortunately his previous research work on antiseptics and on naturally occurring antibacterial substances caused him to take special note of the apparent anti-bacterial action of the mould.
He made sub-cultures of the mould and investigated the properties of the antibacterial substance. He found that while the crude culture fluid in which the mould had grown was strongly antibacterial it was non-toxic to animals and human beings. The crude penicillin was, however, very unstable and was too weak and too crude for injection. Early attempts at concentration were not very successful, and after a few tentative trials its clinical use was not pursued, although it continued to be used in Fleming’s laboratory for differential culture. The position in 1929 was that Fleming had discovered and named penicillin, had investigated its antibacterial power, and had suggested that it might be useful as an antiseptic applied to infected lesions. Attempts to produce a concentrated extract capable of clinical application were not successful and had been abandoned. In the light of later knowledge Fleming’s original paper of 1929 was remarkable. It covered nearly the whole field, realized most of the problems and made considerable progress in solving them. The resuscitation of penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent was due to the brilliant work of Sir Howard Florey and his colleagues at Oxford, notably Dr E. B. Chain.
Overwhelmed with Honours
After the establishment of penicillin as a life-saving drug Fleming was overwhelmed with honours. He was knighted in 1944 and in the following year he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Sir Howard Florey and Dr E. B. Chain. He was William Julius Mickle Fellow of London University in 1942, and received an award of merit from the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association in 1943. He was elected frs in 1943 and frcp in 1944, under the special by-law. His other honours included the Moxon medal of the Royal College of Physicians (1945), the Charles Mickle Fellowship of Toronto University (1944), the John Scott medal of the City Guild of Philadelphia (1944), the Cameron prize of Edinburgh University (1945), the Albert Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts (1946), the honorary Gold Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons (1946), the Actonian Prize of the Royal Institution, and the honorary Freedom of the Boroughs of Paddington, Darvel, and Chelsea. He had innumerable honorary degrees from British and foreign universities, and in 1951 was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Only last weekend thieves stole property from his flat in Chelsea worth about £1,000 and later an appeal was made to them to return a gold seal of great sentimental value.
Fleming was president of the London Ayrshire Society and of the Pathological and Comparative Medicine Sections of the Royal Society of Medicine. Apart from the papers describing his great discoveries, he contributed to the Medical Research Council System of Bacteriology, to the official Medical History of the 1914–18 War, and to many other publications. He was a keen amateur painter, and he had many friends among artists. He was also very fond of motoring and of gardening. He remained quite unspoiled by the publicity and acclaim that came to him and no one was more aware than he of the indispensable part played by other investigators in the development of penicillin. Animated by the spirit of the true scientist, he looked ever forward.
He was twice married, first to Sarah Marion, daughter of Mr John McElroy. She died in 1949, leaving a son. In 1953 he married Dr Amalia Coutsouris, of Athens, who had been a member of his staff at the Wright-Fleming Institute.
Albert Einstein
Father of nuclear physics
18 April 1955
Professor Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of modern times, died in hospital at Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18 at the age of 76. He had lived a secluded life for some years, though he had been a member of the staff of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, on March 14, 1879. A year later his family moved to Munich, where they remained until he was 15. His parentage was Jewish, but few Jewish usages were observed in his home. He was slow in learning to talk and at the Catholic elementary school which he first attended was known as Biedermeier (‘Honest John’) from his ponderously accurate way of speaking. Both here and at the Luitpold Gymnasium, where the educational system was rigid, he saw little difference between school and barrack. His father, Hermann, had a small electro-chemical factory, but he had a greater genius for living than he had for success. Failing in Munich he moved to Milan and later to Pavia. The son, left unhappily at the gymnasium, was well on the way to manoeuvring his departure from it when he was unexpectedly asked to leave as being ‘disruptive’ of his class. Italy gave him as great an interest in art and music as he already had in Schiller, and the affairs of his father enforced him to seek a career. He had speculated at the age of five on the movement of a compass needle, and he knew that his mathematics, if not his other subjects, were well beyond the usual examination requirements. Combining interest and ability, he arrived at theoretical physics as the field that would most attract him but partly because of his father’s work and partly from his own lack of formal attainment, he thought that technological training would be his best approach. He therefore proposed to study at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, but was at first rejected. He had to qualify for the diploma in modern languages and biology at a cantonal school at Aarau. There he lost his dislike of schooling, and from the age of 17 until the age of 21 he conscientiously followed the course prescribed at Zürich for a teacher of physics and mathematics. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen – a reflection of his dislike of authority.
Annus Mirabilis, 1905
Partly on account of his ancestry, he had difficulty in finding a teaching post, but by the influence of a fellow student he was appointed as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne in 1902. This was the ‘cobbler’s job’, which he maintained later was the way that scientists should earn their living. In the next year he married Mileva Maritsch, a fellow student at the Polytechnic. Two sons were born in quick succession, but there were differences of temperament and interest, and the marriage was dissolved after some years.
Einstein’s first contribution to theoretical physics was made in the same year that he obtained his Patent Office job. Three years later was his annus mirabilis, 1905. Then he burst without warning into an extraordinary range of discovery and new ideas, of which the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was one part, not at the time the most comprehensible by his colleagues. In his earliest work he had simplified Boltzmann’s theory of the random motions of the molecules of a gas, and in 1905 he applied this method to the ‘Brownian movement’ – the impetuous, irregular motion of microscopic particles, suspended in a fluid, that is produced by molecular bombardment. Einstein showed how the number of molecules per unit of volume could be inferred from measurements made of the distances travelled by the visible particles which they hit. Such measurements, made later by Perrin, verified Einstein’s theory so well that the Brownian movement has ever since been regarded as one of the most direct – and impressive – pieces of evidence for the reality of molecules.
In the same year Einstein advanced a revolutionary theory of the photo-electric effect, which has exercised a decisive influence on the modern quantum theory of light. The essence of this effect is that the speed with which electrons are liberated from a metal surface illuminated by ultraviolet light depends only on the colour of the light and not on its brightness. Einstein suggested that the light (from which the escaping electrons must derive their energy) is not continuously distributed in space, but is like a gas with a discrete molecular structure – the ‘molecules’ being photons or units of radiant energy of amounts proportional to the frequency of the light. This assumption gave a concrete physical mechanism for the quantum theory of white light advanced by Planck in 1900, and it provided satisfactory estimates of the speed of photo-electrons. But the importance of Einstein’s theory of photons far transcended the occasion of its suggestion. Its real significance is that it accustomed physicists to accept the dual character of light, which sometimes behaves like a continuous train of waves, and sometimes a hail of bullets, and that in 1924 it suggested to de Broglie that matter itself had a similar ‘dual personality’ and could behave either as a wave or a corpuscle. These conceptions have dominated all subsequent speculations about the ultimate elements of matter and light.
Special Theory of Relativity
Although Einstein’s researches in the quantum theory were of vital significance and, in one direction, seemed to show a clearer grasp of its implications than was possessed by its originator, it is with the theories of relativity that his name will always be associated. The ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was published in the same extraordinary year. It expressed in a simple and systematic form the effects produced on the basic instruments of physics – the ‘rigid’ scale and the perfect clock – by relative motion, and thus codified the earlier mathematical investigations of Voigt, the physical speculations of Larmor and the pioneer work of Lorentz. For the first time the optics of moving media received a satisfactory formulation, and Newtonian dynamics itself was generalized so as to express the effect of motion on apparent mass. In particular, Einstein’s deduction that mass and energy are proportional became the basic law of atomic transformation. Apart from its spectacular demonstration in atomic energy, it is supported also by a host of experiments in nuclear physics, in which it is used daily as a tool with which nuclear physicists work. Equally, the design of large engineering machines, such as ‘synchrotrons’, in which nuclear particles are accelerated to high energies, depends directly on its use.
In this group of varied and important publications he showed at once qualities of imagination and insight which were even more vital to his work than mathematical ability, which indeed was a necessary qualification but was not (by the highest standards) exceptional. It was also well for his immediate career that he had more than one contribution to offer.
As soon as the remarkable researches published by Einstein in 1905 became known many attempts were made to secure for him a professorial post. As a result of these efforts he became a Privatdozent at Berne in 1908 and Professor extraordinarius at Zürich in 1909. In 1911 he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, but returned to Zürich to the corresponding post in 1912. During 1913 Planck and Nernst persuaded Einstein to go to Berlin as director of the projected research institute for physics, as a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and as a professor in the University of Berlin – with no duties or obligations. He occupied this post until 1933.
General Theory of Relativity
The ‘General Theory of Relativity’, published in 1916, was the fruit of many years of speculation by Einstein on the questions: ‘Can we distinguish the effects of gravitation and of acceleration?’ and ‘Are light rays bent by gravity?’ To answer these questions he was led to build a great and complex theory, which needs for its systematic expression a new mathematical discipline invented by Ricci and Levi-Civita. The divergences between the predictions of the planetary theory based on Einstein’s theory and those based on the classical theory of Newton are all extremely small, but in one case (the slow changes in the orbit of Mercury) Einstein’s theory provides an explanation which had never been found on Newtonian principles. Moreover, it successfully predicted the deflection of light from distant stars as it grazed the sun’s disc – an effect subsequently verified by British astronomical expeditions in 1919 – and also the reddening of light from very massive stars – which was much later confirmed by observations on the dark companion of Sirius. The success with which ‘general relativity’ gave quantitative predictions of the new phenomena has created a presumption in its favour which has substantially survived.
The application of general relativity to cosmology was implicit in Einstein’s original theory, but became explicit through a modification which he introduced into it in 1917. His contribution in this field was an attempt to provide an answer to an old and ‘insoluble’ problem: ‘How can the universe of stars be uniform in density, fill all space and yet be of finite total mass?’ The subsequent relation of observational evidence of ‘the expanding universe’ to the possible forms of theory that might be developed was done mainly by others, including Lemaître, de Sitter, and Eddington, to whom Einstein served as a stimulus.
During the 1914–18 war two other notable events occurred in his life – he refused to sign the ‘Manifesto of Ninety-two German Intellectuals’ which identified German culture and German militarism, and he contracted a second marriage, with his cousin Elsa. In 1921 he appeared publicly as a supporter of Zionism and he actively collaborated with Weizmann in the establishment of the University of Jerusalem. During the post-war years he travelled and lectured in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States (where he not only lectured on relativity but took part in Weizmann’s campaign for the Jewish National Fund), and England (where he lectured at King’s College, London, and calmed the fears of the Archbishop of Canterbury that relativity was a threat to theology). In 1922 he lectured in Paris, Shanghai, and Kobe, returning home via Palestine and Spain.
