Anatoly Alexandrov (physicist)
Soviet physicist (1903-1994)
Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov (Russian: Анато́лий Петро́вич Алекса́ндров, 13 February 1903 – 3 February 1994) was a Soviet physicist who played a crucial and centralizing role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and in the development of nuclear reactors in the Soviet Union.
From 1960 he was the director of the Kurchatov Institute, and from 1975 until 1986 he was the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Throughout his career, Alexandrov was the recipient of many honors, civil citations, and state awards for his work.
Early life
Anatoly Alexandrov was born on 13 February 1903 into a Russian family of a prominent judge in the town of Tarashcha, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine).
In 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, Alexandrov graduated from high school in Kiev. The certificate gave the right to enter the university at the physics and mathematics or medical faculty. When the Red Army captured Kiev on February 5, 1919, Alexandrov and a friend were at a dacha in Mlynka. He and his friend encountered an officer of the White Guard, who urged them to enlist. They went to the front with the officer.
At the age of 16, he became a cadet and fought in the Army of Wrangel as a machine gunner, and was awarded three Crosses of St.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anatoly Alexandrov (physicist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.