Golden Names of Russia

In 2015, the feature film ”Territory” was released, made on behalf of and with the personal support of Vladimir Putin. The head of state’s name was even in the credits, and it premiered at the Kremlin. The extreme North-East of the country, the vast tundra and obsessed with the idea of finding the ”big gold” main character, the prototype of which was a famous graduate of the Mining Institute.

Every third shell and the armor of every second tank were made of the steel of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works during the Great Patriotic War. Today its products are used to manufacture construction, quarry and other special equipment, equipment for shaft sinking and rock processing. It is also used for all coins in Russia from 50 kopecks to 10 rubles. However, a tragic fate awaited the initiator and designer of the country’s largest metallurgical production…

A surprising picture was observed by climbers in the Carpathian Mountains in 1989. Young men, climbing awkwardly over rocks, were carrying a large classroom board and notebooks. Ahead of them, a gray-haired, bearded man with a mandolin in one hand and a sheaf of books in the other was practically running up. This was exactly how the summer school for talented geophysicists and mathematicians looked like. The reason for its popularity lay in its organizer…

Despite the fact that our first blast furnaces appeared in the 17th century near Tula, and the rapid production of pig iron began under Peter the Great, a century later Europe and the United States rapidly overtook Russia in the production of iron-carbon alloys. While from 1800 to 1860 iron production in our country increased twice, in England it increased by ten times and in France it increased by eight times. Introduction of technological innovations was very late and with an eye on the Western world.

On June 22, 2022 there was an earthquake of magnitude 6.1 in Afghanistan, the waves of which were also felt in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and India. As a result of the natural disaster, more than 1.5 thousand people died and about 2 thousand more suffered. All of them lived in provinces, which 70 years ago Soviet geologist and seismologist Georgiy Gorshkov identified as potentially dangerous for underground shocks in this region.

On the last Sunday of August, Miner’s Day is celebrated in Russia and the former Soviet Union, including Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In 2022, the holiday fell on August 28. On the congratulatory posters, there are pictures of stark, ”black gold”-stained faces of the miners. What are coal industry public relations people not telling us?

”For 35 years, the entire economy of the Soviet Union was based on Tatar oil,” said Nikolai Baibakov, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, referring primarily to the Romashkinskoye field. The country applauded its discoverers. Of course, the first place in Russia in terms of reserves and the status of a unique super giant according to the international classification made it a legend. However, there was a scientist, who did the impossible - he could increase the economic significance of the field many times over…

On the first Sunday of September every year, Russia celebrates Oil and Gas Industry Workers Day, often referred to simply as Oilman Day. Although the first mention of the sources of ”black gold” in the country can be found in the 10th century treatise of Byzantine Emperor Constantine Bagrjanorodny ”On State Management”, specialists of the key industry for the national economy got their professional holiday only in 1965 after miners, railwaymen, builders and metallurgists. What happened in the middle of the XX century?

Grigory Perelman ranks ninth on the list of ”One hundred living geniuses” compiled by the British newspaper The Telegraph, and is known worldwide as a phenomenally talented mathematician. In his homeland, however, he is famous not so much for having found an original method for proving Poincaré’s hypothesis, as for having rejected a prize of one million dollars. And in the history of Russian science, this is not the first time such a situation has happened.

The word ”pioneer” is often used to refer to Ignaty Brod. Among his achievements are the creation of a revolutionary doctrine of oil and gas bearing basins, the organization of specialized departments in major domestic universities, and the discovery of dozens of hydrocarbon fields in the North Caucasus and Dagestan. He received the award that kept him alive for the discovery of the Archedinskoye field in Volgograd Oblast. It was from there that the first batches of gas were sent through the trunk pipeline to the war-ravaged Stalingrad. ”Forgotten” Story