Ernst Kolman orArnošt Yaromirovich Kolman (Russian:Арношт Яромирович Кольман); 6 December 1892 – 22 January 1979) was aMarxist propagandist, an ideological enforcer in Soviet science, and an informant during theStalinist purges. At the age of 84 he soughtasylum inSweden and published a retraction of his previous activity.
He was born in Prague to a Jewish family and studied atCharles University.[1]
DuringWorld War I he fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by the Russian forces. After theRussian Revolution he joined theBolshevik party and worked as a party functionary in theRed Army and theCommunist International.
In 1923 Kolman was assigned to the party apparatus in Moscow, where he quickly assumed the role of ideological watchdog in scientific community. He became deputy head of the Moscow Party Science Department in 1936.[2]
In 1930Dmitri Egorov, the president ofMoscow Mathematical Society was arrested by Soviet secret police. Under threat of the society's closure, Ernst Kolman was elected its new president, a position he held from 1930 to 1932.[1]
Kolman attended theSecond International Congress of the History of Science and Technology held inLondon in June–July 1931. He was part of a delegation of Soviet scientists led byNikolai Bukharin.[3]
He attacked a number of prominent Soviet mathematicians and physicists, accusing them ofwrecking and different political crimes. Kolman initiated the so-called "Academician Luzin case". In July–August 1936,Nikolai Luzin was criticised inPravda in a series of anonymous articles, whose authorship later was attributed to Kolman.[4] Luzin was accused of publishing his works in foreign scientific journals and denounced for being close to the “slightly modernized ideology of theblack hundreds, orthodoxy, andmonarchy.”
AfterWorld War II Kolman was sent toCzechoslovakia, where he worked as a head of the propaganda department of theCommunist Party of Czechoslovakia Central Committee. He helped to establish communist party control over the Czekhoslovak scientific community. At the 10thInternational Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam Kolman attacked all non-Marxist philosophies as "fascist and imperialist."[5]
In 1948 Kolman criticizedRudolf Slánský andKlement Gottwald. He was summoned back to USSR and spent three years at theLubianka prison, until Stalin's death.
He returned toCzechoslovakia in 1958–1963, and then lived in Moscow, where he became increasingly disaffected with Soviet communism.
Kolman authored several books ondialectical materialism andhistorical materialism.
In 1976 he applied for political asylum inSweden, making him the oldest asylum seeker from the Soviet Union at the time at 84.[6] He terminated his 58-year membership of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union on September 22, 1976, in an open letter addressed to party general secretaryLeonid Brezhnev.[7] On 9 December 1976, the Czechoslovak government revoked his membership of theCzechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He died on 22 January 1979 in Stockholm.
Pavel Kovaly, "Arnoŝt Kolman: Portrait of a Marxist-Leninist philosopher," Studies in East European Thought 12 (1972): 337–366.
(Reuters) Prof. Ernst Kolman, confidant of Lenin and pupil of Einstein, has died in a Stockholm suburb at the age of 85.
