Curated playlist
Saint Petersburg State University alumni
- Nikolai GogolNikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once described a planned masterpiece as a Russian answer to Dante's Divine Comedy. He never finished it. On the night of the 24th of February 1852, he burned the manuscript that held most of the second part of…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin was born on the 7th of October 1952 in Leningrad, a city shaped by some of the most catastrophic violence of the 20th century. His older brother Viktor died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad…
- George GamowGeorge Gamow once loaded a kayak with supplies for a 250-kilometer crossing of the Black Sea. The year was 1932. He and his wife Lyubov were trying to paddle from Soviet territory to Turkey. Poor weather foiled the attempt, and the…
- Dmitry MedvedevDmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was born on the 14th of September 1965 in Leningrad, in what was then the Soviet Union. He grew up in a 40-square-metre apartment on Bela Kun Street in the Kupchino district, the only child of a chemical…
- Grigori PerelmanGrigori Perelman was offered one million dollars, and he said no. He was offered the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal, and he said no to that too. He declined both not out of modesty, but out of conviction. When Sir John…
- Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev claimed he saw the answer in a dream. "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required," he recalled. "Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction…
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical…
- Alexander ProkhorovAlexander Prokhorov was born on the 11th of July 1916 in Atherton, Australia, the child of Russian parents who had fled Tsarist repression on the other side of the world. That unusual origin - an Australian childhood, a Russian soul, a…
- Michael RostovtzeffMichael Rostovtzeff arrived in the United States in 1920, a refugee from a revolution he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand. He had fled Russia after the Bolsheviks took power, passing through Sweden and England before…
- Oleg KaluginOleg Danilovich Kalugin was born on the 6th of September 1934 in Leningrad. His father served as an officer within the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. This family background placed him directly into the orbit of Soviet intelligence from…
- Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and never won it. He co-founded Russian Symbolism, helped invent the philosophical novel, and spent the final two decades of his life in exile,…