UPTI Affair

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.

In 1937 (after Landau left for Moscow), five leading employees of the UPTI were arrested and shot : Lev Shubnikov, L. V. Rozenkevich, V. S. Gorsky, V. P. Fomin  and K.B.

Pyotr Frolovich Komarov, who replaced Weisberg in this position, and the head of the supply department, Konstantin Aleksandrovich Nikolaevsky, were shot.

In 1953, after the end of his period of exile, he was hired as a senior researcher at the West Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Korets was arrested on April 27, 1938, amnestied on March 18, 1952, after serving 14 years in the correctional labour camp, and until 1958 he was in exile, working at the Intaugol [ru] ("Inta-Coal") plant.

[3] UPTI ceased to exist as a center of theoretical and experimental physics on a European scale, and Houtermans ended up in Nazi Germany, involved there in the German nuclear program.