@DaseindustriesLtd comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model 1yr ago

2

The book in question:

... In the case of Luzin, however, the criticism of Alexandrov and Kolmogorov was more personal. Luzin resented the fact that the two occupied themselves with new topics—topology for Alexandrov, probability theory for Kolmogorov—that he did not work in; furthermore, the first topic had potentially more general developments than descriptive set theory, of which Luzin was the unique master. Luzin once made a very offensive remark about Kolmogorov and Alexandrov. In 1946, on the floor of the Academy of Sciences, Kolmogorov said something about his recent work on topology to Luzin, and the latter replied, “Eto ne topologiia, eto topolozhstvo” (“This is not topology, this is topolozhstvo”). Kolmogorov reddened and struck Luzin in the face. The word “topolozhstvo” is an invented term with a very clear meaning. In Russian the word skotolozhstvo means “bestiality,” while muzhelozhstvo means “sodomy.” Therefore, “topolozhstvo” was a word contrived by Luzin that might be translated as “to- pological pederasty.” It was an extremely insulting thing for Luzin to say to Kolmogorov, and the latter’s anger is understandable.

Yeah, very cute. Exemplary Kremlinology.

Back to Novikov. The first Luzin affair, one of 1936:

In 1936 an editorial about Luzin appeared in the newspaper Pravda, which described his actions as «Peculiar Sabotage». His behaviour was filthy for a professor, it is true. All the facts were true. He quarrelled with young P. Alexandrov after his good works on set theory. He was harassing Suslin, which is a nasty story. He stole from P. Novikov, my father. He wouldn't let Kolmogorov into the Academy. But such a politically scary term! The Steklovka debriefing was obligatory. The Georgian elastic rigidity man Kupradze, the secretary of the Steklovka party bureau, refused – and, losing his career, went back to Georgia. (He only revived it by volunteering at the front). I do not know who prepared and led this meeting. A perfunctory speech of condemnation was mandatory. Lavrentiev did not come the first time; he got brought in. My father was the only one who said no, I will not speak. That wasn't easy at the time. You shouldn't think that everyone who spoke was really guilty of an act of harassment. No, they were puppets. Lavrentiev, Lusternik, Schnirelman definitely weren't enemies of Luzin. His enemies then were Aleksandrov and Kolmogorov – among the mathematicians. But they weren't Party members. The philosopher Kolman loathed Luzin, he would have gladly done so. But he was not part of that circle, he did not know the facts. Most importantly, he had to be an insider to learn these facts. Back then, the investigation [of this puzzle] was carried out by my father (I think together with Lusternik and Lavrentiev, who knew the party circles). They've established that there was a letter from P.Alexandrov to an influential man called Hvorostin, indignantly outlining Luzin's atrocities. Hvorostin was in Saratov and had great connections in the Central Committee. He hated Luzin, it was known. Hvorostin, they decided, was the one who passed the materials to the CC and initiated the article. Pavel Sergeyevich was a great master of pool! This reached Stalin (through Kapitsa, I think). He was surprised: it was a case he had not yet planned for the academic establishment. Stalin is said to have responded: «Newspaper Pravda, comrades, is not wrong. But it says that his sabotage is peculiar. So the punishment must also be peculiar. Limit yourselves to debriefing».

Aaronson's link states, meanwhile:

On 21 November 1930, the declaration of the "initiative group" of the Moscow Mathematical Society which consisted of Luzin's former students Lazar Lyusternik and Lev Schnirelmann along with Alexander Gelfondand Lev Pontryagin claimed that “there appeared active counter-revolutionaries among mathematicians”.[6]Some of these mathematicians were pointed out, including the advisor of Luzin, Dmitri Egorov. In September 1930, Egorov was arrested on the basis of his religious beliefs [Orthodox Christian]. He then left the position of director of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was replaced by Ernst Kolman. As a result, Luzin left the Moscow Mathematical Society and Moscow State University. Egorov died on 10 September 1931, after a hunger strike initiated in prison. In 1931, Kolman brought the first complaint against Luzin.

In 1936 the Great Purge began. Millions of people were arrested or executed, including leading members of the intelligentsia. In July–August of that year, Luzin was criticized in Pravda in a series of anonymous articles whose authorship later was attributed to Kolman.[7] It was alleged that Luzin published “would-be scientific papers”, “felt no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements”, and stood close to the ideology of the “black hundreds”, orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.”[8]

One of the complaints was that he published his major results in foreign journals. The article triggered a special hearing on Luzin's case by the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where the allegations were reviewed and formalized. At the hearing, Aleksandrov, Lyusternik, Khinchin, Kolmogorov and some other students of Luzin accused him of plagiarism from Pyotr Novikov and Mikhail Suslin and various forms of misconduct, which included denying promotions to Kolmogorov and Khinchin. According to some researchers, Aleksandrov and Kolmogorov had been involved in a homosexual relationship in the 1930s, a fact the police used to pressure them into testifying against their former teacher.

Then Wikipedia goes on to cite Graham&Kantor and Yushkevich for that claim. Graham had interviewed the militant and violent Stalinist Kolman, («He would play a sinister role in many events in Soviet history, and was a major accuser of Egorov, Florensky, and Luzin») a few times, «both in the Soviet Union and later in the United States». Kolman later «renounced communism», kept publishing his philosophical work, and died peacefully in Sweden, where he got asylum, at the age of 86.

Aaronson also cites Gessen' s book on Perelman, Frenkel, refers to Arnold, proudly namedrops Levin... And I can't help but think his perspective is a bit shte.. sheltered, compressed in a peculiar dimension, of which the bully-nerd one is just an elaboration. But that's the narrow perspective the whole of West is informed through; «Masha» Gessen is our final arbiter.

Ruzya Solodovnik, Gessen's maternal grandmother, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Gessen's maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.

There's more to us than perspectives of deranged hereditary bluecheka whom Aaronson intuitively trusts –more bad stuff, but more good too. Purges of the late 30s-40s left a permanent blemish on my people's history, but who counts Egorovs snuffed out by those poor victims just a decade before, and pauses to marvel at the complexity of the conflict, in all matters petty and grand? And to cite S. Novikov again:

Forget the tears of those Communists who, as they used to say, got what they fought for. Forget their descendants too, for whom all was well until the evil Stalin began to exterminate their parents in the 1930s. Let's call this type of crime intra-communist, and we are not communists. We do not care about it at all.

@theincompetencetheorist, I've written and erased a condescending response to the effect that, while Soviets had managed to intimidate and shame people into mouthing the party line for a while as part of a generic power struggle, they have not and perhaps could not cultivate guilt for wrongthink.

This guilt comes naturally to Western peoples, and so your tyranny, shall it be established once by virtue of centralization and technological advances, will be sustainable indefinitely. It will be defended by the best and bravest among you who fear losing the respect of their loved ones, as opposed to chaotic opportunists and wretched small-minded apparatchiks with material concerns – who are known to be despised by talented, well-connected and fuckable dissidents.

Context

theincompetencetheorist DaseindustriesLtd 1yr ago

Cultivating guilt for wrongthink can only take you so far. The simulacra of showing guilt is as good for some than having actual guilt.

The techonological tools of our oppression is already breaking by the seams of their complexity. The apparatchiks that are trying to control them are uninterested in why they are breaking, they are just yelling at people who claim to understand the tools to fix them so they work like it is supposed to. And the moment the machine grinds to a halt because the ones who really know how it works gets ousted or executed the grip of tyranny will slip.

I'm limited to my time. I tried to communicate this with the second paragraph of my first post in this thread. But now I see that it wasn't as well written as I hoped for. I was trying to communicate the flawed ideas the roots our current attempt at tyranny. At the fringes they show the flaw in their ideology trying to treat the simulacra interchangeable with reality. But as we have seen with with the recent events after these people lost the total grip of twitter their grip on power was tenuous at best, and we will see the full consequences in a few years.

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