Starinov Notebook

Capture

In February 1942, Starinov's special engineer units operating around Rostov-on-Don repeatedly crossed the ice of the Sea of Azov into the German rear in what were called "ice campaigns." On the night of 23 February 1942, a group under Sergeant Major Maxim Repin raided the enemy garrison at Kosa Krivaya on the northern shore of Taganrog Bay (now Sedovo, Donetsk region), destroyed it, and took prisoners, trophies and documents. Among the documents Repin brought back was a thick notebook.

The notebook contained many formulas, graphs and diagrams. Starinov had German-reading teachers at Rostov University examine it. A Soviet officer who read German initially found nothing of interest in it, but Starinov kept the manuscript, and when he left Rostov he showed it to Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the Southern Front. Malinovsky advised handing it to the office of Sergei Kaftanov, the State Defense Committee's plenipotentiary for science. Starinov passed it to S. A. Balezin, a chemist working in Kaftanov's office, who determined that the notebook contained not fantasy but real judgments about the military use of atomic energy.

Relation to the Soviet atomic programme

Together with Georgy Flyorov's letter, the notebook became grounds for Kaftanov to urge, jointly with Abram Ioffe, that the State Defense Committee create a scientific centre for the nuclear weapons problem. In memoirs published in 1985 Kaftanov wrote that this notebook, along with Flyorov's warning, prompted him and Ioffe to write to the GKO. Some key agencies, including Gosplan, opposed the proposal at the GKO, but Stalin said that it had to be done, and on 28 September 1942 he signed an order "On the organization of work on uranium." That order is regarded as the starting point of the Soviet atomic project.

The notebook should not, however, be treated as a single decisive cause. Later scholarship holds that the notebook, Flyorov's letter and the intelligence materials accumulated from 1941 worked together to make the autumn 1942 decision possible.

Sources and differing accounts

The notebook's existence was first officially mentioned in 1985, in Kaftanov's published memoirs. Starinov himself first described the capture openly in a letter of January 1975 to the Rostov physicist Ivan Builo, and that letter became a basic source for later research.

The accounts differ in detail. In his memoirs Kaftanov remembered the notebook as belonging to a German officer killed by Ukrainian partisans, and as brought to him by Starinov in April 1942. Starinov's own testimony and Sergei Builo's 2018 study describe the capture differently and treat Kaftanov's recollection as inaccurate. The claim that the dead officer was the nuclear physicist Hans Vandervelde has spread through later literature, but several sources say only that he was a German officer of engineer units. Because the sources also differ on the notebook's exact character and on the timing of its delivery, this entry does not settle those points.