Golden Names of Russia

Today, even in scientific publications about the invention of the legendary explosive ”Sinal-AK” during the Great Patriotic War one can meet a very simplified interpretation of events: they say that the cry was raised and a scientist far from military affairs, after thinking for a while, immediately gave a new composition. In July 1941 the City Committee of the CPSU(b) agreed to the proposal, and in August the products produced thirteen Leningrad enterprises and scientific organizations. One can guess that events developed somewhat differently…

The founder of the new scientific field of petrochemistry, President of the All-Union Mineralogical Society, laureate of the Lenin and two Stalin Prizes, Alexander Zavaritsky, according to the recollections of his colleagues, was a very private person. This was due not only to his high state positions and developments of defense purposes, but also to certain circumstances of his life.

One of the largest Russian crystallographers of the 20th century, Ilarion Shafranovsky, became a doctor of sciences at the age of 35. The creator of a vast branch of science - mineralogical crystallography - devoted more than 50 years to research and teaching. However, few knew that the professor had another equally strong passion…

In 1948 one of the most destructive earthquakes in the history of mankind, the intensity of which reached 9-10 points, occurred in the region of Ashkhabad city. According to various estimates, 110,000 to 170,000 people died. The number of injured went off the scale. In the first hours after the disaster, a 60-year-old man came to the emergency response headquarters. ”The city is buried under the rubble. I am not a doctor of medicine, but I am a doctor of science. And I want to offer my help,” he said.

On average, it takes several decades for a university graduate who wants to build a research and teaching career to become a professor. If he turns out to be capable of it at all. However, Grigori Helmersen, the son of a Livonian baron, received the position the year he graduated from the Mining Institute. In the future he was to head his alma mater, become one of the founders of the Russian Geographical Society, an ordinary member of the Academy of Sciences, as well as the initiator and first director of the Geological Committee.

Russia did not learn about sanctions in 2014. Back in the 1930s, during the implementation of the first five-year plans, the USSR waged an active struggle for independence from the global capitalist market. In its attempts to subjugate our country’s economy to its control, the West tried all sorts of tricks: from the credit and ”gold” blockade (refusing to accept Soviet gold in 1920) to the anti-dumping campaign and special treatment for Soviet exports. The only possible path to development remained the policy of import substitution.

The year 1956 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georgy Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist theorist whose works Lenin called the most important ”textbook of communism.” In honor of the anniversary, the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg was named after the revolutionary. At first glance, this seems an ordinary occurrence, but the paradoxical situation was that Plekhanov was a Menshevik and almost openly accused the Bolshevik leader of treason against his homeland. Twenty years after 1917, such figures were, as Beria put it, ”washed into camp dust.

As early as the 2nd century B.C., during the Han dynasty, the Chinese learned to drill wells several hundred meters deep to underground pools of salt solution. Salt was the most important resource in ancient times, used to store food long before refrigerators were invented. The Celestial people used bamboo stalks and an iron chisel to extract it, while the brine was brought to the surface through the same bamboo pipes and using a system of leather valves.

”The patriarch of the diamond industry of the Republic of Sakha and the non-ferrous metallurgy of the USSR”, ”the man-epoch” is how Taras Desyatkin has been called for decades. This is not just a figure of speech or high-flown compliments. It is not a joke because during a quarter of the century under his direct supervision, the teams of enterprises, pits, mines and artisanal teams of the region produced 760 tons of gold.

The main author of the theory of the abiogenous origin of oil, Nikolai Kudryaevtsev, spent decades fighting the ”geological elite,” proving that oil comes from non-biological sources of carbon and hydrogen deep in the Earth’s crust and mantle. He received years in camps for his work, but the concept became popular worldwide and eventually changed the established view of the future of mankind.