O caso Luzin

Ontem ocorria uma animada discussão sobre o processo de revisão do Qualis, e um dos pontos era qual a pontuação que deveriam receber as revistas nacionais. Um ponto era que revistas nacionais eram supervalorizadas no Qualis atual, e o ponto contrário era que revistas nacionais desempenham um papel importante ao permitir a comunicação e discussão de alguns tópicos de interesse apenas local. Uma discussão muito importante.
Depois da discussão lembrei de um caso famoso na matemática :

The Luzin affair of 1936

On November 21, 1930 the declaration of the “initiative group” of the Moscow Mathematical Society which consisted of former Luzin's students Lazar Lyusternik and Lev Shnirelman along with Alexander Gelfond and Lev Pontryagin claimed that “there appeared active counter-revolutionaries among mathematicians.” Some of these mathematicians were pointed out, including the advisor of Luzin, Dimitri Egorov. In September 1930, Dmitri Egorov was arrested on the basis of his religious beliefs and died in 1931. After his arrest he left the position of the director of the Moscow Mathematical Society and after him the director became Ernst Kolman. As a result, Luzin left the Moscow Mathematical Society and Moscow State University. In 1931, Ernst Kolman made the first complaint against Luzin.

In July-August 1936 Luzin was criticised in Pravda in a series of anonymous articles. It was alleged that he published “would-be scientific papers,” “felt no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements,” stood close to the ideology of the “black hundreds”, orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.” Luzin was claimed at a special trial of a Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR which endorsed all accusations of Luzin as an enemy under the mask of a Soviet citizen. One of the complaints was that he published his major results in foreign journals. The method of political insinuations and slander was used against the old Muscovite professorship many years before the article in Pravda.

The political offensive against Luzin was launched not only by Stalin's repressive ideological authorities but also by a group of Luzin's students headed by Pavel Alexandrov. Although the Commission convicted Luzin, he was neither expelled from the Academy nor arrested. There has been some speculation about why his punishment was so much milder than that of most people condemned at that time, but the reason for this does not seem to be known for certain. However, he was never rehabilitated even after the death of Stalin^{[4] [5]}.

Ter publicações internacionais já foi um ato de traição.