The Tragedy of Mathematics in Russia

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Tsunami swept over the Russian mathematical community in 1999 after publication of the complete shorthand notes of the meetings of the notorious Emergency Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on the case of Academician Luzin [1]. Soon the article [2] appeared in the USA which revealed the personal testimony of G. G. Lorentz (1910–2006) about the mathematical life of that time in the USSR.1The Commission for the “hearing of the case of Ac[ademician] Luzin” was convened by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after the article “Enemies under the Mask of a Soviet Citizen” in the Pravda newspaper on July 3, 1936.Luzin was accused of all theoretically possible instances of misconduct in science and depicted as an enemy that combined “moral unscrupulousness and scientific dishonesty with deeply concealed enmity and hatred to every bit of the Soviet life.” It was alleged that he publishes “would-be scientific papers,” “feels no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements,” and stands close to the ideology of the “black hundred,” orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.” The closing of the lampoon read: