Background
He was born in Prague to a Jewish family and studied at Charles University.
educationist university professor writer
He was born in Prague to a Jewish family and studied at Charles University.
In June 1931, Kolman attended the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology with a group of Soviet scientists led by Bukharin.
During the First world war he fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by the Russian forces. After the Russian revolution he joined the Bolshevik party and worked as a party functionary in the Red Army and the Communist International. In 1923 Kolman was assigned to the party apparatus in Moscow, where he quickly assumed the role of ideological watchdog in scientific community.
He became deputy head of the Moscow party Science Department in 1936.
In 1930 Dmitri Egorov, the president of Moscow Mathematical Society was arrested by Soviet secret police. Under threat of the society"s closure, Ernst Kolman was elected its new president, a position he held from 1930 to 1932.
Kolman initiated the so-called "Academician Luzin case". In July–August 1936, Nikolai Luzin was criticised in Pravda in a series of anonymous articles, whose authorship later was attributed to Kolman.
After World World War II Kolman was sent to Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a head of the propaganda department of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Central Committee.
He helped to establish communist party control over the Czekhoslovak scientific community. At the 10th International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam Kolman attacked all non-Marxist philosophies as "fascist and imperialist." In 1948 Kolman criticized Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald. He was summoned back to Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics and spent three years at the Lubianka prison, until Stalin"s death.
On 9 December 1976, the Czechoslovak government revoked his membership of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
He died on 22 January 1979 in Stockholm.
He attacked a number of prominent Soviet mathematicians and physicists, accusing them of wrecking and different political crimes. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1958–1963, and then lived in Moscow, where he became increasingly disaffected with Soviet communism. In 1976 he applied for political asylum in Sweden, making him the oldest asylum seeker from the Soviet Union at the time at 84.
He terminated his 58-year membership of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics communist party on September 22 1976, in an open letter addressed to party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev.
Kolman authored several books on dialectical materialism and historical materialism.