A History of Tragic Times

"In a memorable episode, Dirac and his wife visit their closest friends, Peter and Anna Kapitza, in Russia. In 1934, the long arm of the Soviet state had wrenched Kapitza, despite his devoted long-distance fellow-traveling, away from his lab at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford and back into the Soviet Union. In 1937 the friends reunited at the Kapitzas’ summer house in the piney woods of Bolshevo, “with wild strawberries ripe for gathering and a fast-flowing river close by.” They arrived only “days before Stalin authorized the torture of suspected enemies of the people,” Farmelo writes. “On the roads around Bolshevo, some of the trucks marked ‘Meat’ and ‘Vegetables’ hid prisoners on their way to be shot and buried in the forests to the north of the city which Dirac admired through his binoculars.”"

New York Times