will not be long before man will receive atomic energy for his disposal, a source of energy which will make it possible for him to build his life as he pleases.” World leaders such as England's Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus, and Albert Einstein, who quantified the energy latent in matter in his formula
To direct the new program, Ioffe chose Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov, an exceptional twenty-nine-year-old physicist, the son of a surveyor and a teacher, born in the pine-forested Chelyabinsk region of the southern Urals in 1903. Kurchatov was young for the job, but he was a natural leader, vigorous and self-confident. One of his contemporaries, Anatoli P. Alexandrov, remembers his characteristic tenacity:
I was always struck by his great sense of responsibility for whatever problem he was working on, whatever its dimensions may have been. A lot of us, after all, take a careless, haphazard attitude toward many aspects of life that seem secondary to us. There wasn't a bit of that attitude in Igor Vasilievich… [He] would sink his teeth into us and drink our blood until we'd fulfilled [our obligations]. At the same time, there was nothing pedantic about him. He would throw himself into things with such evident joy and conviction that finally we, too, would get caught up in his energetic style…
We'd already nicknamed him “General.”…
Within a year, justifying Ioffe's confidence in him, Kurchatov had organized and headed the First All-Union (i.e., nationwide) Conference on Nuclear Physics, with international attendance. With Abram I. Alikhanov, he built a small cyclotron that became, in 1934, the first cyclotron operating outside the Berkeley, California, laboratory of the instrument's inventor, Ernest O. Lawrence. He directed research at Fiztekh in 1934 and 1935 that resulted in twenty-four published scientific papers.
Kurchatov was “the liveliest of men,” Alexandrov comments, “witty, cheerful, always ready for a joke.” He had been a “lanky stripling,” his student and biographer Igor N. Golovin writes, but by the 1930s, after recovering from tuberculosis, he had developed “a powerful physique, broad shoulders and ever-rosy cheeks.” “Such a nice soul,” an Englishwoman who knew him wrote home, “like a teddy bear, no one could ever be cross with him.” He was handsome, Sergei Frish says — “a young, clean-shaven man with a strong, resolute chin and dark hair standing straight up over his forehead.” Golovin mentions lively black eyes as well, and notes that Kurchatov “worked harder than anyone else… He never gave himself airs, never let his accomplishments go to his head.”
When Igor was six, his father, a senior surveyor in government service, took a cut in pay to move west over the Urals from the rural Chelyabinsk area to Ulyanovsk, on the Volga, where the three Kurchatov children could attend a proper academic
The two surviving Kurchatov children — Igor and his brother Boris, two years younger — thrived in the Crimea. Both boys did well in
A chance encounter with Orso Corbino's
The Great War impoverished the Kurchatov family. Igor added night vocational school to his heavy schedule, qualified as a machinist and worked part-time in a machine shop while taking nothing but 5's — straight A's — during his final two years of
After the Revolution, in 1920, when he was seventeen years old, Kurchatov matriculated in physics and mathematics at Crimean State, one of about seventy students at the struggling, recently nationalized university. None of the foreign physics literature in the university library dated past 1913 and there were no textbooks, but the rector of the school was a distinguished chemist and managed to bring in scientists of national reputation for courses of lectures, among them Abram Ioffe, theoretical physicist Yakov I. Frenkel and future physics Nobel laureate Igor E. Tamm.
In the wake of war and revolution there was barely enough to eat. After midday lectures, students at Crimean State got a free meal of fish soup thickened with barley so flinty they nicknamed it “shrapnel.” The distinction of an assistantship in the physics laboratory in the summer of 1921 gratified Kurchatov in part because it won him an additional ration of 150 grams — about five ounces — of daily bread.
Kurchatov finished the four-year university course in three years. He chose to prepare a thesis in theoretical physics because the university laboratory was not adequately equipped for original experimental work; he defended his dissertation in the summer of 1923- His physics professor, who was leaving for work at an institute in Baku, invited the new graduate to join him. Drawn from childhood to ships and the sea, Kurchatov chose instead to enroll in a program in nautical engineering in Petrograd. He suffered through a winter short on resources in the bitter northern cold, eking out a living as a supervisor in the physics department of a weather station, sleeping on a table in the unheated instrument building in a huge black fur coat. “This is no life I'm living,” he wrote a friend that winter, uncharacteristically depressed, “but a rusted-out tin can with a hole in it.” But the station director gave him real problems to solve, including measuring the alpha-radioactivity of freshly fallen snow, and the work finally won him for physics. He returned to the Crimea in 1924 to help his family — his father had been sentenced to three years of internal exile — and later joined his former teacher in Baku.
In the meantime, one of Kurchatov's physics classmates, his future brother-in-law Kirill Sinelnikov, had caught Ioffe's eye and accepted his invitation to work at Fiztekh. Sinelnikov told the institute director about his talented friend. Off went another invitation. Kurchatov returned to Leningrad, this time to take up his life's work. (He married Sinelnikov's sister Marina in 1927.)
Kurchatov quickly impressed Ioffe. “It was almost routine to chase him out of the laboratory at midnight,” the senior physicist recalls. In the in-terwar years Ioffe sent twenty of his proteges abroad “to the best foreign laboratories where [they] could meet new people and familiarize [themselves] with new scientific techniques.” Like a young entrepreneur too busy to bother going to college, Kurchatov never found time for foreign study. “He kept putting off taking advantage of [this opportunity],” Ioffe adds. “Everytime it was time to leave he was on an interesting experiment that he preferred to the trip.”
Others left and won international reputations. Peter Kapitza explored cryogenics and strong magnetic fields at Cambridge University and became a favorite of Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand-born Nobel laureate who directed the Cavendish Laboratory there; Kapitza would earn a Nobel in his turn. So would theoretician Lev Landau, who worked in Germany during this period with his young Hungarian counterpart Edward Teller. The German emigre physicist Rudolf Peierls remembers a walking tour of the Caucasus with Landau after Landau had returned home when the Soviet theoretician pointed out that a nuclear reaction that produced secondary neutrons, if it could be found, would make possible the release of atomic energy — “remarkably clear vision in 1934,” comments Peierls, “just two years after the discovery of the neutron.” Less conspicuously, but with more enduring influence on Soviet history, Yuli Borisovich Khariton, the youngest son of a St. Petersburg journalist and an actress in the Moscow Art Theater — “compact, ascetically slight and very sprightly,” a friend describes him — worked at Fiztekh on chemical chain reactions with Semenov, their discoverer, before earning a doctorate in theoretical physics at the Cavendish in 1927. Alarmed by the growing mood of fascism he found in Germany on his return passage, Khariton at twenty-four organized an explosives laboratory in the new Institute of Physical Chemistry, a Fiztekh spinoff. These were only a few of Ioffe's talented proteges.
Their talents barely protected them from the Great Terror that began in the Soviet Union after the
