History, Michel Foucault wrote, “is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and possibly the most cluttered area of our memory; but it is equally the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence” [120, p. 218].

What is left of Mandelstam in the historical memory? In the Introduction to this book, this has already been mentioned. Let us reiterate what was said in somewhat different terms. Mandelstam’s life and work are reflected in the reports and recollections of his friends and colleagues that have been written in connection with his death. Some of these reports have become the fundamental articles on the development of the scientific problems on which Mandelstam with his colleagues worked. They are adjoined by articles written by Mandelstam’s colleagues and friends on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, which happened 34 years after his death. Such articles are not very many, because many of Mandelstam’s friends and his coauthors were already dead. In addition, about Mandelstam his contemporaries, former students, and graduate students recollected and did so on different occasions or just for no reason.

About Mandelstam, letters are kept in different archives. Mandelstam was reserved in his letters like he was probably reserved in his life. The letters are laconic enough. Mandelstam often asked to excuse him for a delayed reply. There are  no emotions in his letters. A few letters addressed to Richard von Mises make an exception.

Mandelstam left a stream of papers on physics and radio-engineering. This stream started with his Strasbourg dissertation and gained power with the passage of time. In this outpour, Mandelstam’s articles spilled over each other, with the subsequent articles correcting and supplementing the earlier ones. Mandelstam was an integral part of the scientific realm of his time. The common neglect of Mandelstam’s work results in a deficient and often peculiarly lopsided perception of physics in the first half of the twentieth century.

The radio-engineering equipment with which Mandelstam and Papalexy worked in the 1910s, 1920s, and even the 1930s has gone. But their articles on radio are interesting not only from a historical point of view. They evidenced how a young scientist was growing and how the collaboration between Mandelstam and Papalexy progressed.

The Brillouin-Mandelstam effect and combinational scattering of light were applied in the course of the investigations of the structure of matter and the interaction of matter with radiation. Lasers not only provided better observation of the Mandelstam-Brillouin effect but also led to the discovery of the stimulated effect which has high intensity (the stimulated light scattering has also been discovered).

In the Russian literature, these effects are connected with L.I. Mandelstam and G.S. Landsberg, respectively. However, over the last decades the expression “Raman effect” has become widespread in the Russian literature.

Physicists keep L.I. Mandelstam as a deeply decent man in their collective scattered memory. This characteristic has been fixed by A.N. Krylov, who addressed the 1944 joint meeting of the Department of Physics and Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, the meeting in commemoration of Mandelstam. A.N. Krylov called Mandelstam “righteous”. S.I. Vavilov told about “uncompromising moral” of Mandelstam at that meeting.

L.I. Mandelstam was a man of science, and his communication with outward things seldom exceeded the bounds of scientific communication. The archives have not fixed any conflicts of Mandelstam with colleagues. His tactful attitude to A.S. Predvoditelev was emphasized above. Mandelstam did not enter any explicit conflicts with Timiriazev, although they were scientifically antipodes. Concerning Kasterin’s paper in Odessa (see Chap. 5), the paper resulting in Tamm’s indignation, “Mandelstam was at a loss, he could not say anything”, as Tamm himself said by describing Mandelstam’s reaction.

L.I. Mandelstam lived in the terrible time of Stalin’s move to power and his domination. As was noted, Mandelstam’s former graduate student A.A. Vitt had been arrested and died in a prison.

Tamm’s graduate student who worked for MSU Physics Institute, Semen Petrovich Shubin, was executed in 1938. In the first half of the 1930s, Shubin, who was exiled from Moscow, was in correspondence with Mandelstam [8, pp. 63–64]. In the past, S.P. Shubin was a Trotskyist and, although he broke with political activity, any communication with him was perilous (see [308]).

According to Feinberg’s recollections (in an interview which the American Institute of Physics holds, E.L. Feinberg gave information from what others have told) in 1930 in the process of the faculty meeting dedicated to condemnation of the so-called Industrial Party (Prompartii), Mandelstam and Predvoditelev abstained from voting for the suggestion about the capital punishment.

There is no information of how Mandelstam behaved himself in the course of the meetings supporting the condemnation of the “enemies of people”. Probably, he tried to avoid participating in such meetings.

Prestige of the Mandelstam School is so high that a number of prominent physicists, who never worked with Mandelstam and with his former graduate students, recommended themselves as members of the Mandelstam community. For example, Corresponding Member of Russian Academy of Sciences, Nikolai Vasilievich Karlov, who was Rector of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Chairman of the Higher Certifying Commission (1987–1997), introduced himself as a representative of the third generation of Mandelstam’s disciples (his recollections are in [172]). However, Academician Nobel Prize winner Prokhorov really was Karlov’s supervisor. True, Prokhorov started as Researcher at the laboratory of oscillations that Papalexy headed.

In Chap. 10, we were concerned with A.M. Zhabotinskii’s research, which was based on the Mandelstam-Andronov theory of non-linear oscillations and consisted in establishing the mechanism of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction. As was noted, in his main book Zhabotinskii called himself belonging to the Mandelstam School. However, the real supervisor of Zhabotinskii was S.E. Schnol’, who was Biophysicist and did not belong to the Mandelstam School.

Chapter 11 shows that some fragments of the Mandelstam School went into a recession. Mandelstam's graduate students did not all become friends with each other. However, they all felt themselves as members of a community. But what Alpert writes about Migulin shows that the moral and spiritual interconnections between those who could be taken as a member of the Mandelstam community tend to become blurred.

Like other structures, scientific schools become blurred; they disperse as time goes by.

Scientific schools are one of the characteristic messages of Soviet science [176, 187]. However, what does this book say about the Soviet science as a historical phenomenon? The facts collected in this book show that science (and scientists) materially and financially were supported by the Soviet government body. We refer to physics, technology, and mathematics. Humanities and biological science need a special discussion. However, science had a moral support in the USSR, too. As we have seen, scientist’s scientific results played an important part in his career, in obtaining him the scientific degrees and academic positions. State rewards, premiums, etc., were given to people who really contributed to science. The authority highly appreciated the consultations of scientists. Under many reservations, one can state that the Academy of Sciences enjoyed a kind of autonomy.

The moral support proceeded from many factors: romanticism of the state ideology, its atheism, tacit positivism.Footnote 1 Let us recall that when a Soviet official wanted to praise Marxist philosophy he characterized it as scientific and not the reverse. In the Russian historical literature, a remarkable fact was pointed out: Stalin eliminated the term “Marxist biology” in T.D. Lysenko’s 1948 paper (this does not mean that he refused to support Lysenko) [299]. Certainly, the totalitarian regime was an obstacle to the development of science. First of all, it was an obstacle to the development of a scientific culture which is connected with international scientific contacts. However, Mandelstam’s lectures show that there were loopholes here.

In the contemporary history of science, the topic of the Marxist ideological pressure put upon scientific research became popular (see, e.g., [140, 176, 324–326]). The 1948–1953 “Ideological campaigns” became a favorite topic of the Russian historical literature in the 1990s. Usually, the authors sympathize with the “victims” of the campaign among whom there were prominent scientists (“victims” are those who were called “idealists” and “Machists”). However, they do not pay attention to the fact that in the long run the “victims” often won victories: They often reached success in their social status.

It should also be noted that “the direct contribution of physicists in the military and economic might of the Soviet Union, which provided the high international prestige of the country, was due to their contribution to world science and, what is also important, it was connected with their indirect contribution to the scientific culture and ethics in the country” [176, p. 14]. Since the end of the 1920s, L.I. Mandelstam’s community of physicists had become one of the most important factors that determine not only the standards of scientific productivity and the quality of scientific research, but also the approach to humanitarian components of science and research ethics.