UPTI Affair

Some UPTI members during the visit of Lev Landau (rightmost). The leftmost is Lev Shubnikov, executed

UPTI Affair (Ukrainian: Справа УФТІ, Sprava UFTI; Russian: Дело УФТИ, Delo UFTI) was a series of repressions against a number of scholars of the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute in Kharkov, Soviet Ukraine, by the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) during 1938, a part of the Great Purge.[1]

As a result, the UFTI leaders, including a Soviet experimental physicist Lev Shubnikov, were arrested and executed during this crisis. In the response to the state of affairs, the Soviet physicists Moisey Korets [ru] and Lev Landau, wrote the Korets–Landau leaflet which directly condemned Joseph Stalin and the secret police NKVD. Korets and Landau, as well as another implicated scientist, Yuri Rumer, were arrested. Landau was released, but Korets and Rumer were imprisoned in sharashkas of gulag.

  1. ^ (in Ukrainian) Landau, atom splitting and secret bunker. Yak in the crackdown of Stalinist repressions in Kharkiv they set up "Kremnіevu Valley", Ukrayinska Pravda (12 February 2021)