Curated playlist
Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Petrovich Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa, and by the age of fourteen he was thinking about flight. Novels by Jules Verne had pulled him toward aeronautics. In 1923 he wrote a letter to Konstantin…
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Lifshitz was only the second person to pass Lev Landau's Theoretical Minimum exam. Just 43 people ever did.
- Nikolai VavilovBotanist Nikolai Vavilov set out to end famine but was arrested in 1940 and died in a Soviet prison.
- Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon, then spent his life trying to limit its damage.
- Andrey VyshinskyIn 1917, Andrey Vyshinsky signed an order to arrest Lenin. He later became Stalin's feared state prosecutor.
- Lev LandauPhysicist Lev Landau was jailed in 1938 over a leaflet comparing Stalinism to Nazism. A letter to Stalin freed him.
- Ivan PavlovIvan Pavlov spent his early career studying how a dog's stomach works. His famous discovery came almost by accident.
- Alexander ProkhorovWhile studying ruby in 1957, physicist Alexander Prokhorov realized it could serve as a laser's active medium.
- Trofim LysenkoTrofim Lysenko, a peasant who learned to read at 13, came to rule Soviet biology. He denied that genes exist.
- Vladimir VernadskyVladimir Vernadsky argued that living things are a geological force. His 1926 book The Biosphere made the case.
- Valery LegasovIn August 1986, Valery Legasov stood before the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and spoke for five hours. The report he carried for the Soviet delegation ran to 388 pages. Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist, not a reactor…