ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to shed new light on the material conditions and the emotional factors that influenced Soviet physicists, who were later involved in the ideological dispute in the second half of the 1940s, focusing the differences between the full-time university staff of Moscow State University and the part-time staff who worked in concurrence with other jobs they had mainly at the Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. During the war the majority of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences continued scientific research mainly for military purposes. Significant results were achieved in various fields of science. At the same time, the wartime experience deepened a “rift” between scientists inside and outside of the Academy. Particularly the wartime evacuation of the scientific research institutes and the institutions of higher education to the different places resulted in strengthening the tendency of the functional separation between the Academy of Sciences and universities, which had already exacerbated a serious confrontation among Soviet scientists even before the war. The university professors and lecturers accumulated the jealousy and hatred toward some of their “colleagues” with a record of splendid academic and scientific achievements.
