One little discussed aspect of the current “cancel culture” phenomenon in West and the cringeworthy displays of cowardice that it produced especially in academia is that it has revealed a dirty little secret: nobody’s work, even that of a greatest genius, is now important.

Perhaps the exception are the unknown scientists engaged in secret research for the US military. But other than that, you can be a Nobel prize winning physicist or a medical researcher whose groundbreaking work saves the lives of thousands, and it all doesn’t matter: if you

express the wrong kind of views on all kinds of matters, you can be “cancelled”, your employer will not defend you, your research grant money will evaporate. Nobel prizes, Fields medals, ground breaking research are now only important for universities as means of acquiring points

in university rankings, other than that, nobody cares. The atmosphere that has been created resembles that in the Soviet Union, with one exception: the Soviets did care. For the Soviets, physics, mathematics and a few other fields were the magic potion that was going to make them

“catch up with and surpass “ America. For the sake of this, they would tolerate a lot. Kapitsa, who was basically kidnapped from Britain (he came to a Moscow from Cambrudge to visit his mother after being promised he would be able to go back, and of course, he wasn’t allowed)

refused to work on nuclear weapons. Stalin agreed that he coukd work on other things. Rutherford sent Kapitsa’s entire laboratory from Cambridge, Stalin gave Kapitsa full control of it: he could employ whoever he liked and he created one of the best research institutes

in the world. When one young employee of the institute, already considered a genius, Lev Landau, was arrested for writing a leaflet comparing stalinism with nazism, there seem to be no salvation for him but Kapitsa was able to persuade Stalin to have him released (it was all

done through letters, Stalin and Kapitsa never met although several times a meeting was being arranged). Of course not everybody could be saved, Landau’s friend, the brilliant physicist Matvei Bronstein arrested in 1937 for no reason at all (this was a case of “a list arrest”

the people on the list were already “sentenced” before their arrest and executed the next day, although officially they received a sentence of ten years in a labor camp “without the right of correspondence”). Of course nobody could help in such cases. Nobody could also help the

Russian genetists, including the great Nicolai Vavilov, but that’s was because Stalin (and Malenkov) genuinely believed in Lysenko’s illiterate theories and thought that the genetists were dangerously slowing down the advancement of Soviet agriculture. The treatment of Soviet

genetists strongly resembles that of some of the best Western scientists (such as Richard Lindzen or Freeman Dyson) who rejected climate alarmism (although, of course, the “administrative measures” in the West have been much milder, so far at least). After Stalin, the situation

similar. The physicist Andrei Sakharov and the mathematician Igor Shafarevich, were involved in open dissent for many years (Shafarevich, was a closevfriend and associate of Solzhenitsyn and shared all of his ideas, including his panslavism, religiosity &, arguably,

antisemitism) but no action was never taken against him. Sakharov was eventually exiled to Gorky (to be released by Gorbachev) and the Poliburo asked the Soviet Academy of Science to expel him - the Academy refused (would the American National Academy of Sciences or the British

Royal Society dare to show so much defiance these days?)
When the great semiotician and linguist Vyscheslav was fired by a Moscow University in 1958 for refusing to condemn Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” and actually accused of having contacts with “Western spies”, he was offered a

research position, with better pay and conditions than a university professorship, in a secret lab working on development of Soviet computers. The lab did not care about “having contacts with Westetn spies” - it had more important things to do (why woukd they want someone like

Ivanov? The Soviets were working on automatic translation, which they thought would be very useful for intelligence purposes, and a Ivanov was recognised as one of the best experts in this area).
Of course, this Soviet attitude applied only to STEM - it is, in fact, described

by Solzhenitsyn, who himself was originally a mathematician. Recently Yulia Latynia contrasted that attitude of the Soviets with that of the Putin regime that has humiliated the Academy of Sciences and reduced its status and has actually shown no desire even to attempt to stem

the brain drain of a Russia’s best scientists (although there have been a few cases of some actually going back recently). Putin’s Russia, like Musollini’s Italy, likes only to pretend to be great power and is quite happy to see trouble makers emigrate, no matter how important

their work could be for Russia.
Everything in a Russia, is, of course, very corrupt. But in a more subtle way this is also true in Western science and even mathematics.
In 2006 Grigori Perelman was awarded the Fields medal for solving one of the hardest & most important

problems in mathematics: the Poincaré Conjecture. Perelman turned down the prize, which is considered the most prestigious in mathematics. Perelman resigned his job at a Russia’s prestigious Steklov Institute a year earlier. In 2010 he was awarded the Millenium Prize, worth one

million dollars, which he also turned down. He explained his reasons a rare interview with the New Yorker. What he said, applies, of course, not only to mathematicians.