A Scientist in Russia: My Story

Abstract

Born on December 12, 1937, I remember the first bombing of Moscow by the Germans in 1941. My schooling began in 1944, and I soon became interested in chemistry, setting up a kind of makeshift chemical laboratory behind a high cupboard in my house. I enrolled in Moscow University in 1955 and published my first scientific paper in 1959. After entering graduate school in 1960, I produced dense silica with a rutile structure, a natural analog of which was later named stishovite. I received my doctorate in 1961 and got a job at the Institute of Crystallography in 1962, where I worked until 1993. My first visit to the West was in 1976. I was became a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech in 1989–1990 and a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1990. I was a Miller Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an Orson Anderson Distinguished Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1993 to 2022, I was director of the Institute for High Pressure Physics. During that time, I was awarded the P. Bridgman Gold Medal and the Gold Medal of P. Kapitsa.