Nikolai Kozyrev's life story is even more astonishing than his theory of time

Excerpts from the introduction to the "Selected Works" by Kozyrev written by his colleague A. N. Dadaev (1991).

I would like a bit of a break from the military covid op. I am sick of it, I hate it, I despise those who are responsible and those who blindly obeyed, as well as those who keep obeying and keep staying willfully blind. I hate writing about it. I want to write about people I admire and not about the ones I hate.

I previously wrote about Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian physicist who proposed a revolutionary theory of Time as the source of energy in the stars and all bodies in our World:

The Energy of Time: Nikolai Kozyrev's Model of Causal Mechanics.

This is Part 2 of the story, largely focusing on Kozyrev’s biography.

Kozyrev’s Selected Works is a book in Russian available in scanned image format at Ana’s Archive. It contains his most important papers on astrophysics and his own theory of causal mechanics, including experimental work and detailed astronomical, geological and atmospheric observations. The book was published by the Leningrad University Press in 1991.

I tried and failed to find an English translation, and I don’t think a full version of this book is available in English. However, I found Kozyrev’s biography translated into English, abridged included in a science journal article. The English translation is very awkward and some IMO very important information about the history of the repressions against scientists in the 30’s by Stalin’s regime is omitted. For most of this post I made my own translations from the chapter on Kozyrev’s biography by his one-time colleague Dadaev published in this book.

Kozyrev’s life story is both tragic and astonishing.

Nikolai Kozyrev was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on September 2 (20), 1908 in the family of Alexander Kozyrev, a geologist who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture. Kozyrev senior came from a family of Russian peasants from the city of Bugulma, Samara province, but ultimately attained an administrative rank in the Russian imperial government giving him the rights of nobility. Note: my non-Russian, Tatar part of the family are also from Bugulma. Kozyrev’s mother, Yulia Nikolaevna was from the family of a merchant, Shihobalov.

Kozyrev graduated from the secondary school in 1924 and initially entered the pedagogical institute, but, with urging from his professors, transferred to studying astrophysics at the Leningrad University, where he completed his studies in 1928. He then began working at the Pulkovo Observatory (later became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences) as a postgraduate student. At Pulkovo he became friends with two other postgraduate students - V.A. Ambartsumian and D.I. Eropkin.

“The Trio” became memorable at Pulkovo due to their outstanding abilities, original early scientific publications, but also due to their rebellion against the bureaucratic administration which was being unrolled throughout Soviet academia during the 1920’s-30’s. The new regime’s objective was to eliminate any traces of self-governance in academia, such as replacement of the leadership previously elected by scientific peers with the Communist Party-appointed administrators. These changes were not in favor of any independent thinkers.

Kozyrev’s early publications included articles on spectrometry-based measurements of the temperature of solar flares and solar spots. He demonstrated that there should be a radial equilibrium within the solar spots, and that the spots are located deeper in the solar atmosphere than had been previously thought. In 1934, Kozyrev published a paper on radial equilibrium and extended photosphere of the stars in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). In the same issue of Notices, albeit with data published six months later than Kozyrev’s, S. Chandrasekhar proposed a more generalized theory. The theory became known as Kozyrev-Chandrasekhar.

Note that today it is hard to find a mention of Kozyrev’s work in the archives of Chandrasekhar (on the University of Chicago’s page dedicated to Chandrasekhar’s work, Kozyrev’s name is only mentioned in the photo collection).

Kozyrev maintained scientific collaboration with his friend Eropkin who was focused on the areas of geophysics. They jointly undertook several expeditions to perform spectrographic measurements of the polar lights. However, their work repeatedly ran into administrative obstacles, staffing intrigues and conflicts. In 1936 they were falsely accused of misusing funds for the expeditions. The false accusations were used to dismiss the scientists from Pulkovo and start a court case against them. The case was dismissed in 1936 with the court even issuing a reprimand to the administration of Pulkovo for “poor staff relations”. Kozyrev and Eropkin had to file a countersuit to get reinstated as employees at Pulkovo, and administrative court struggles continued for almost a year.

In the meantime, in October, 1936, in Leningrad, arrests of scientists had begun. One of the first to be arrested was the corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Boris V. Numerov (1891–1941), the director of the Astronomical Institute, an outstanding scientist in the field of astronomy and geodesy. He was accused of being the organizer of a terrorist anti-Soviet group amongst intellectuals. The wave of arrests reached Pulkovo. Kozyrev was arrested on the evening of the 19th anniversary of October revolution. On the night of December 5th (Day of the Stalin’s Constitution, the “most democratic in the world”) his friend Eropkin was arrested in Leningrad.

The wave of arrests and execution of scientists based on undisclosed accusations continued without any apparent logic - a new head of department would be arrested weeks after the previous head of the department was sent to political prison and/or executed. The full set of charges against 100+ scientists arrested in 1936-1937 in Leningrad alone was disclosed only decades later, in the late 1980’s. They were accused of being connected to a “fascist Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist organization”, allegedly set up by the German intelligence forces in 1932 with an objective of overthrowing the Soviet regime. This formulation of the charges became available from declassified KGB documentation in 1989.

The Pulkovo astronomers, arrested between November and the following February, were tried in Leningrad on May 25, 1937. Most were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, removal of civil rights for 5 additional years, and confiscation of all assets. The “trial” for each political prisoner lasted several minutes, without disclosure of charges, without defense representation, and only accepting “confessions of the accused” - confessions obtained by torture. Executions by firing squad for many followed later in the day of the trial.

According to the Soviet legal codes at the time, the 10 year imprisonment term was the maximum, beyond which was only execution. However, almost all political prisoners died or were executed before the expiry of their sentences.

Of all arrested and condemned Pulkovo scientists, only Kozyrev survived. Kozyrev’s friend Eropkin was executed along with many others. Many executions were performed in prisons by “special tribunals” without even nominal court sanctions. It is not possible to know the fate of many people who perished in the repressions. Death certificates, issued in 1956 to the families of the rehabilitated can hardly be considered reliable. As an example, one listed cause of death as “diabetes” for the same person listed as executed at the prison camp in the declassified KGB documentation.

While it was at some time proposed that Kozyrev was targeted in 1936-37 due to his prior conflicts with academic administrators, this was unlikely. The scope of the repressions was a much broader, and a largely indiscriminate operation. The repressions in the late 1930’s by Stalin’s regime implemented by the NKVD (predecessor to KGB) was designed to suppress any possible political opposition and especially target the “intellectual class”. Later disclosures, including by the Khrushev’s government, revealed that the repressions had been pre-planned in advance, with pre-manufactured scenarios of “terrorist plots”, accusations and plans of imprisonment/execution.

Note: if you think this totalitarian horror is only possible under a communist regime, this approach is very similar to the arrests of the J6 “insurrectionists” on made-up terrorism charges, or intense prosecution and lawfare against doctors who are trying to treat their patients during the DOD-faked “covid pandemic”, or scientists who do not want to participate in fraud - the standard approach of fabricating plots by the national security-intelligence apparatus for political aims. Apparently, every aspiring totalitarian deep state shares the same playbook:

Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist.

If you think the NKVD invented this, they didn’t. The tactic to set up “terrorist plots and sleeper cells of radicals” and then “foil their evil plans” to “protect” the public with ever increasing totalitarian control measures and the upward extraction of wealth was used by the tsarist Russia, and by many governments prior to that.

Specifically, the Leningrad bureau of NKVD dreamed up “terrorist cells” of “organized intellectuals” conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government and fabricated dossiers for the closed-door prosecution. Decades later, the farfetchedness of those materials was plainly obvious. But back then the atmosphere of the top-down terror incentivized snitching and witch hunts.

The imaginary rosters of the subversive organizations were created by the NKVD by going through the university HR records and identifying plausible targets to paint as a conspiracist - typically because the target came from a middle or upper class (deemed hostile to the proletariat by default), although that wasn’t strictly necessary. Any pretext to assign membership in the fictional counter-revolutionary organization was utilized. Another widely used pretext was an accusation of international espionage, which was quite easy because all Pulkovo scientists routinely corresponded with their academic colleagues in other countries. Thus the fictional “terrorist organization” was fabricated. Subsequently its “discovery and elimination” was implemented by beating out false confessions and false witness statements from the accused in order to provide convictions and further credence to the entire repression scheme.

Kozyrev was lucky to survive. Later in life he was reluctant to discuss his time in prison and in labor camps, although some parts of his memories were included in Solzhenytsyn’s GULAG Archipelago, and several works by other authors.

Some episodes of the prison and camp life of Kozyrev are very important to understanding of his subsequent scientific work. One episode concerns the textbook Course of Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy (published by Pulkovo Observatory, 1934-36). While being held in prison, Kozyrev continued thinking about his scientific research in theoretical physics, specifically about the question of the source of stellar energy. He was stumped because he needed data about certain types of stars - data that he knew were contained in the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics. Kozyrev’s cellmate was sent to the solitary confinement for five days and upon return was so mentally and physically damaged that he died shortly afterwards. Kozyrev was then left alone in his cell, clinging to shreds of sanity himself by intensely thinking about cosmos. And one day, mysteriously, the exact book that he desperately needed, the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics was pushed through the observation port of his cell door by an unknown person.

By different accounts, Kozyrev used the book between one and three days, scanning through it and memorizing the data. Then the book was noticed by a prison guard and taken away. Until the end of his life Kozyrev thought that the book was from the prison library, but the way it appeared in his cell was “it fell from heavens”. However it is very unlikely that the exact volume of a highly specialized, small-circulation science textbook would have been found in a prison library. It is more likely that someone delivered it. It is also possible that under conditions of physical and mental deprivation, Kozyrev drew the necessary data from his memory, and may have had a dream/delirium about the book appearing in the cell.

Another known episode describes that once consumed by his thoughts, Kozyrev began to pace his prison cell. This was forbidden: during the day the prisoners were required to sit on a stool, and at night lie on the bunk. For this infringement he was sent to the solitary confinement for five days, during February. The temperature in the confinement cell was about zero degrees Celsius, and the prisoners were left barefooted, in underwear only. The daily meal contained a piece of bread and a mug of hot water. With the mug it was possible to briefly warm one’s freezing hands but not the body. Kozyrev began to pray to God. He recalled that after some time of intense prayer he began to feel internal warmth, and thus was able to survive the 5 or even 6 days of the freezing hell.

Later in life Kozyrev tried to figure out how the internal heat could have been generated, and noted in his theoretical works that people have an ability to survive for long periods of time without food, “sustained by the Holy Spirit”. What is the Holy Spirit? If He is the source of energy then energy can appear through Him in any natural body, whether a man, or a star, or a planet. What universal source can generate the energy? Twenty years later Kozyrev advanced these ideas in his theory of Time as the source of energy in our World.

Until May 1939, Kozyrev was in prison, then afterwards he was sent into the Norilsk labor camps. Being sent to labor camps might have saved Kozyrev’s life, as due to the war and shortage of qualified engineers, he became a needed specialist in mining and geology. In 1940 he was sent to the Dudinsky Permafrost Station as a geodesist. He was allowed to work unguarded as there was no possibility of escape anyway: he was surrounded by hundreds of miles of the frozen tundra.

On October 25, 1941, “for engaging in hostile counter-revolutionary propaganda amongst the prisoners” he was again arrested, and sentenced to death.

What kind of “counter-revolutionary propaganda” was considered grave enough to warrant the death penalty? Kozyrev recalled several official charges: 1) that he thought the theory of expanding universe was valid; 2) he thought that Esenin was a good poet and that Dunaevsky was a bad music composer; 3) during a fight in the barracks he declared that social being does not determine the consciousness (i.e. disagreed with Karl Marx); 4) he also disagreed with Friedrich Engels calling Isaac Newton “an inductive ass”. Regarding the last point, the accused was argumentative and said “I have not read Engels, but I believe Newton is one of the greatest scientists of all time”.

Therefore, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Russia reconsidered Kozyrev’s previous sentence as too liberal and replaced it with the death penalty. However, the warden of the Noril-Lag (part of the GULAG) tore up the order of execution in front of Kozyrev, saying that the regional center didn’t have any firing squads. In reality, Kozyrev was needed, as an expert, for the building of a copper-nickel mining facility, as the only other nickel mine near the Finnish border was then located behind the WWII front line. He worked as the superintendent for geology and prospecting expeditions until March of 1945.

In August 1944, a petition asking specifically for liberation of Kozyrev was sent to the Minister of Internal Affairs, signed by three members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Vavilov, Shayn, and Mihailov. What can explain this? In 1943, the Soviet intelligence agencies received the information about the creation of nuclear weapons by the USA and realized they needed to enter the nuclear race. Many Soviet physicists were in custody at the time. Many were already dead. It became a matter of urgency to return those who were still alive in prison camps, however, the question remains as to how the 3 academicians who supposedly signed the petition knew that Kozyrev was still alive? In addition, the judicial revision was almost inconceivable back then. The decisions of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR had never been reconsidered.

The process of reconsidering his sentence took 18 months, and a key role was played by inspector N. A. Bogomolov (Note: interestingly, the name means “praying to God”) who was brave enough to conclude that there had been no basis to charge Kozyrev with a crime of treason in the first place. This was a dangerous position to take, as this opened the door to revise the convictions of all other scientists swept up in Stalin’s repressions. According to Kozyrev himself, the deciding factor at the end of the investigation was the question posed by the inspector “Do you believe in God?”, to which Kozyrev replied “yes”. Afterwards he found out that the inspector took this as the verification of his honesty answering all other questions of the investigation. This is indeed shocking, considering that professing religious beliefs and taking them as evidence of honesty at the time would have been the reason for another imprisonment or a death sentence for both Kozyrev and Bogomolov.

Kozyrev was liberated “conditionally ahead of schedule” by a special meeting of the KGB on December 14, 1946. This meant that with the slightest pretext he could be behind bars again. He was finally cleared of all charges only by February 21, 1958.

Kozyrev was invited by academician Shayn to work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, then under construction. He accepted, but first he went to Leningrad to complete his yet unfinished doctoral thesis, the defense of which took place at the Leningrad University on March 10th, 1947, i.e. only about 3 months after his return from labor camps. Many colleagues were surprised: when did he write the dissertation? Apparently, he had composed the dissertation during his ten years in prison. By some accounts he carried it all in his head, although by other accounts, including that of his son, there was a rough draft in a notebook that he carried sewn into his clothes. Some pages from it were seen photographed and presented upside-down at an exhibit dedicated to his work shortly after his death (in order to not attract too much attention to the still prohibited topic of discussion), but the whereabouts of the notebook today are unknown. Still, it is a long way from a rough draft to a finished dissertation. In addition, how would one keep abreast of the scientific literature published during a decade of imprisonment?

His colleague Dadaev, who was present at the defense of the dissertation, and many years later researched and wrote up his biography, explained that Kozyrev had an incredible ability to review scientific literature. The library at Pulkovo was producing a biweekly exhibit of all newly arrived scientific literature, typically containing 100+ papers and books. He would review all of it in a couple of hours, zeroing in on precisely what he needed and without making any notes, as if he knew upfront who would produce anything worthwhile. Another reason noted by Dadaev as an explanation to how the dissertation was accomplished - Kozyrev’s work was so fundamental and so original that not much in science had changed to influence it one way or another during his decade in prison. In fact, this last point remains the same and perhaps even more true today. What 10 years? The major works of art as all original thinking are timeless: they transcend centuries as if they are but brief moments.

Dadaev wrote:

Defense of the dissertation occurred at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad University: the dissertation was titled “Sources of Stellar Energy and the Theory of the Internal Structure of Stars”. […]I was permitted to be present at this defense. Discussion was rather animated, because […] Kozyrev put forward a new idea as to the source of the stellar energy, subverting the already widespread conviction that thermonuclear reactions are the source of energy in the entrails of stars.

The Academic Council of the University awarded Kozyrev the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Kozyrev’s dissertation was published in two parts, in the Proceedings of the Crimean Astrophysics Observatory in 1948 (part I), and in 1951 (part II).

Kozyrev’s dissertation proposed a radically different view on the internal processes of the stars, arguing that the stars are not nuclear reactors but rather machines that convert yet unknown energy - the energy of time - into radiation. The stellar “machines” are extremely efficient as they barely consume any of their own material for production of massive amounts of energy, contradicting the conventionally accepted theory of nuclear fusion as the source of the stellar energy. Later on confirmations of his theory came from, e.g., the failure to detect neutrino streams from the Sun and additionally from detection of the solar 160 min pulses or oscillations, measured by academician A.B. Severny and several other independent scientists, including by Stanford Observatory in the 70’s. Subsequently, similar oscillations were found for the Earth magnetosphere and ionosphere and for some stars and star clusters. Yet, today the internet search engines will proclaim that this finding is controversial and “unconfirmed” because it threatens the mainstream failed dogma of stars as nuclear furnaces and the fake Climate Change models that use these assumptions.

Kozyrev planned to write the third part of his dissertation, investigating further the source of the solar energy, however it was never completed. He produced an enormous research output making major discoveries about the geological and atmospheric properties of Venus, Mars and the Moon. In august 1958, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union gathered in Moscow. Kozyrev’s “Causal Mechanics” paper was published for this event, describing the principles of his theory of time as the source of non-nuclear stellar energy. This work provided a fundamentally different view of the universal forces of nature, of life itself, acting simultaneously everywhere, defying the thermal death and giving us the World that, quoting Kozyrev “sparkles afresh, renewed each day”.

Also in 1958 Kozyrev was able to observe and capture a volcanic plume on the Moon and published a short letter in The Astronomical Circular (No. 197, 1958) as well as an article containing the description of his methods, with a reproduction of the unique spectrogram, in Sky and Telescope (vol. 18, No. 4, 1959). In response to this article the famous astronomer and planetologist, Gerard Kuiper, sent a letter to the Director of Pulkovo Observatory in which he declared that Kozyrev’s spectrogram was a fake. This resulted in years of ruffled feathers in international science circles, as the dogma of the Moon as a “geologically dead body” was “settled science” back then. To give credit to Kuiper, when presented with more information, he withdrew his claims of forgery. Ultimately, in 1969 Kozyrev’s discovery of Lunar volcanism was awarded the gold medal from the International Academy of Astronautics. The discovery that the Moon is not a “dead body” but has evidence of ongoing tectonics has been confirmed by independent observations. It is also claimed that Apollo missions brought back volcanic soil samples, and this forced the change of minds in the international science circles.

I am almost certain that NASA’s Moon landings were faked, so the question is - why did they decide to “confirm” Kozyrev’s discovery and even give him the prestigious medal? My guess is that there was too much other data pointing to the same thing - ongoing tectonic activity on the Moon. The Moon is the closest celestial body, and as the imaging technologies were becoming more powerful. Denying the tectonics would not be a smart idea for NASA in the long run. Tectonic activity on the Moon is consistent with Kozyrev’s theory that celestial bodies, just as everything else present in nature, are alive, continuously drawing the energy from the flow of time.

In December 1969, the State Committee for Affairs of Discovery and Inventions of the USSR awarded Kozyrev the diploma for discovery for “tectonic activity of the Moon”. Despite the conferring of the medal and the diploma, the question of a non-nuclear stellar energy source was not acknowledged. While nominally respected, Kozyrev’s work was systematically sidelined and ignored. After some positive popular press appeared discussing Kozyrev’s theory of time by highly respected science writers, an academic committee was called to review and debate his discoveries. All were systematically shot down as “unconfirmed theories”. I am not a physicist or mathematician, but I do have extensive experience commercializing modern academic intellectual property. From what I have seen of Kozyrev’s papers - the experiments, observational work and theoretical reasoning are exceptionally thorough, lightyears ahead of the nonsense that gets Nobel Prizes today. Kozyrev did not get any official support, even for making the equipment necessary for his experiments. He was forced to work alone, and the only help in mechanical engineering he received was from a volunteer, engineer Nasonov, who one day showed up in Kozyrev’s lab and continued working for him, making lab tools. Nasonov worked evenings and weekends after his primary job at a manufacturing plant, without any pay, and took his own vacation time to accompany Kozyrev to the Crimean Observatory.

The two developed some successful experimental equipment, such as gyroscopic scales to study irreversible natural processes - melting of the snow, heating and cooling of copper wire, evaporation of liquids and fading of the plants.

Kozyrev repeatedly tried to get the attention of the academia to his research and discoveries, some truly unprecedented. For example, he was able to detect the effects of the solar and lunar eclipses on Earth without leaving his lab, simply using his experimental mirrors, the equipment that allowed him to shield and focus the flow of time and detect the disruptions introduced by the eclipses. He documented geological effects of the eclipses and the position of the Moon on the seismic activity on Earth. All of these discoveries fell on deaf ears. The establishment academia remained uninterested and continued treating him generally as a nuisance and a heretic. Ultimately, by 1979 he was forced into retirement that he did not want but had no choice as he would be left without any income otherwise. He died in 1983, aged almost 75.

Kozyrev was not able to complete his theory of causal mechanics, to which he dedicated nearly 40 years of his life. During his life, American probes Voyager-1 and -2 (1979) registered 8 active volcanos on Jupiter’s satellite Io, confirming Kozyrev’s position on wide spread active tectonic activity in the universe, even in the smaller bodies that were deemed too small to have it under prevailing physical theories. He was not recognized for this and other discoveries that he predicted. Nobody seemed to be interested in researching the nature of the “inconvenient” volcanism of smaller celestial bodies then or now - and no wonder! Observations like these defy the prevailing geological theories that are now being used to concoct the Climate Change narratives.

He worked most of his life, alone, with little support. His theory of time remains unfinished because he simply ran out of it.

Art for today: This drawing was completed by my daughter with my instruction. Charcoal and pastel on paper.