On 21 November 1930, the declaration of the "initiative group" of the
Moscow Mathematical Society which consisted of Luzin's former students Lazar Lyusternik and
Lev Schnirelmann along with
Alexander Gelfond and
Lev Pontryagin claimed that "there appeared active counter-revolutionaries among mathematicians". Some of these mathematicians were pointed out, including the advisor of Luzin,
Dmitri Egorov. In September 1930, Egorov was arrested on the basis of his religious beliefs. He then left the position of director of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was replaced by
Ernst Kolman. As a result, Luzin left the Moscow Mathematical Society and Moscow State University. Egorov died on 10 September 1931, after a
hunger strike initiated in prison. In 1931, Kolman brought the first complaint against Luzin. In 1936 the
Great Purge began. Millions of people were arrested or executed, including leading members of the intelligentsia. In July–August of that year, Luzin was criticized in
Pravda in a series of anonymous articles whose authorship later was attributed to Kolman. It was alleged that Luzin published "would-be scientific papers", "felt no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements", and stood close to the ideology of the "
black hundreds", orthodoxy, and
monarchy "fascist-type modernized but slightly." One of the complaints was that he published his major results in foreign journals. The article triggered a special hearing on Luzin's case by the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, where the allegations were reviewed and formalized. At the hearing,
Alexandrov,
Lyusternik,
Khinchin,
Kolmogorov and some other students of Luzin accused him of plagiarism from
Pyotr Novikov and
Mikhail Suslin and various forms of misconduct, which included denying promotions to Kolmogorov and Khinchin. According to some researchers, Alexandrov and Kolmogorov had been involved in a homosexual relationship in the 1930s, a fact the police used to pressure them into testifying against their former teacher.
Sergei Sobolev,
Gleb Krzhizhanovsky and
Otto Schmidt incriminated Luzin with charges of disloyalty to Soviet power. The methods of political insinuations and slander had been used against the old Muscovite professorship already several years before the article in
Pravda. The hearings were completed in five sessions between July 7, 1936, and July 15, 1936, and people testifying, as well as the nature of accusations, changed from one session to another. In the initial session, the accusations were separated into accusations of scientific misconduct, which included plagiarism; accusations of professional misconduct, which mostly involved accusations of nepotism in promotions and reviews; and political accusations, which were the most serious. The initial review on July 7, which most prominently featured Alexandrov and Kolmogorov, concluded in a warning to Luzin regarding plagiarism while stressing the overall importance of his work, cleared him politically, yet recommended to relieve him of administrative duties. However, this outcome did not seem to satisfy the instigators of the case, so that from the second hearing on, the nature of accusations shifted: now the primary focus was that Luzin published his papers extensively in France rather than in Soviet journals, and his pre-Soviet sympathies were brought to the forefront. The special hearing of the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union endorsed all accusations of Luzin as an "enemy under the mask of a Soviet citizen." The 1936 decision of the Academy of Sciences was not canceled after Stalin's death. The decision was finally
reversed on January 17, 2012. == Honors ==