Stalin`s Meteorologist: One Manas Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death, Rolin Olivier

Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century. --Nature

In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Unions meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and sentenced to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other political prisoners in a camp on Solovetsky Island, under vast northern skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937--a fact kept from his family for nearly twenty years.

Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexeis story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world that Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution, maintaining that hed been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him. His stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long.