In early 1944, the President of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Science Akademik A.A. Bogomolets sent a Secret letter to then-Chair of the Council of the People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR Nikita Khrushchev, asking him to look into the possibility of not only procuring a cyclotron laboratory to hasten the Soviet Union’s lagging exploration and exploitation of nuclear physics, but to have the laboratory and its equipment built in the United States. The plan would call for a select group of Soviet physicists to be sent to the US in two phases to become acquainted with the technology.
For his part, Khrushchev sent this document to People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade A.I. Mikoyan on 5 February 1944, along with an accompanying letter in which he wrote, “If there is any possibility of procuring a cyclotron in America, I urge you to satisfy the Ukrainian Academy of Science’s request.” Judging from the fact that later, Leypunskiy made the same request from Stalin himself, the purchase of the cyclotron did not take place. Among other pleas in that letter, Leypunskiy argues for the strategic need to decentralize Soviet nuclear research efforts, specifically to ease the burden of the USSR’s only nuclear physics research laboratory in Moscow by building a number of smaller specialized laboratories across the republics. In spite of a handwritten note by Lavrenty Beria calling for a discussion with Vannikov and Makhnev at the bottom of the letter, the issue apparently remained untouched, as Leypunskiy then turned to the NTS PGU [Science and Technology Council of the First Chief Directorate] in 1946 for assistance in resolving the issue of having a cyclotron built.
The following is a translation of Bogomolets’s classified 1944 letter.
Translating History 