December 10 in Russian history. Nobel prize awards.

The 10 December, the day when Alfred Nobel died, for more than 100 years has been the day when Nobel prizes are awarded. For the last five years, there were no Russians among the winners. Here's the list of Russian/Soviet Nobel prize winners:

• Ivan Pavlov, Physiology or Medicine, 1904
• Ilya Mechnikov, Physiology or Medicine, 1908
• Ivan Bunin, Literature, 1933
• Nikolay Semenov, Chemistry, 1956
• Pavel Cherenkov, Physics, 1958
• Boris Pasternak, Literature, 1958 (forced to decline)
• Lev Landau, Physics, 1962
• Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, Physics, 1964
• Nicolay G. Basov, Physics, 1964
• Michail Sholokhov, Literature, 1965
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Literature, 1970
• Leonid Kantorovich, Economics, 1975
• Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace, 1990
• Zhores I. Alferov, Physics, 2000
• Alexei A. Abrikosov, Physics, 2003
• Vitaly Ginzburg, Physics, 2003

Some years ago, though, Kommersant newspaper compiled a list of Nobel prize winners with connections to Russia:

Year of award	Category	Name	Relation to Russia (USSR)
1903	Physics	Marie Curie (born Marie Sklodowska)	Born in Warsaw (Russian part of Poland)
1904	Physiology and medicine	Ivan Petrovich Pavlov	Subject of the Russian Empire; later a citizen of the USSR
1905	Literature	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Born in the Russian part of Poland; subject of the Russian Empire
1908	Physiology and medicine	Ilya Ilich Mechnikov	Subject of the Russian Empire
1911	Chemistry	Marie Curie	Born in Warsaw (Russian part of Poland)
1933	Literature	Ivan Alekseevich Bunin	Born in Voronezh (Russian Empire); at the time of the award, a stateless person resident in France
1945	Physiology and medicine	Ernst Boris Chain	Son of a native of Mogileva (Russian Empire, now Belarus)
1952	Physiology and medicine	Selman Abraham Waksman	Born in Priluky (now Ukraine; left the Russian Empire are age 22)
1956	Chemistry	Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Igor Evgenevich Tamm	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Ilya Mikhailovich Frank	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Physics	Pavel Alekseevich Cherenkov	Citizen of the USSR
1958	Literature	Boris Leonidovich Pasternak*	Citizen of the USSR
1960	Physics	Donald Arthur Glaser	Son of a Russian woman (Russian Empire)
1961	Chemistry	Melvin Calvin	Son of Russian immigrants
1962	Physics	Lev Davidovich Landau	Citizen of the USSR
1964	Physics	Nikolai Gennadievich Basov	Citizen of the USSR
1964	Physics	Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov	Citizen of the USSR
1965	Physiology and medicine	André Michel Lvov	Son of Russian immigrants
1965	Literature	Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov	Citizen of the USSR
1970	Literature	Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn	Citizen of the USSR at the time of the award (later stripped of citizenship and expelled from the country; now a citizen of Russia)
1970	Physiology and medicine	Sir Bernard Katz	Son of Russian immigrants
1971	Economics	Simon Smith Kuznets	Born in Kharkov (Russian Empire, now Ukraine); left the country in 1922
1971	Physics	Dennis Gabor	Great-grandson of a Russian subject
1973	Economics	Vasily (Vasilevich) Leontev	Born in St. Petersburg; left the Soviet Union after graduating from Leningrad University in 1925
1975	Peace Prize	Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov	Citizen of the USSR
1975	Economics	Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich	Citizen of the USSR
1976	Literature	Saul Bellow	Son of Russian immigrants
1977	Chemistry	Ilya (Romanovich) Prigogine	Born in Moscow (Russian Empire); left Russia at age 4
1977	Physiology and medicine	Andrew Victor Schally	Born in Wilno (Poland; later Vilnius, USSR; now Lithuania
1978	Physics	Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa	Citizen of the USSR
1978	Physiology and medicine	Daniel Nathans	Son of Russian immigrants
1979	Physics	Sheldon Lee Glashow (Glukhovsky)	Son of Russian immigrants
1979	Chemistry	Herbert Brown (Brovarnik)	Son of Russian immigrants
1980	Chemistry	Paul Berg	Son of a Russian immigrant
1981	Physics	Arthur Schawlow	Son of a Riga native (Russian Empire, now Latvia)
1981	Chemistry	Roald Hoffmann (Saffran)	Born in the city of Zloczow (Poland; later Zolochev, USSR; now Zolochiv, Ukraine)
1982	Chemistry	Aaron Klug	Born into a family of Russian natives (Russian Empire)
1982	Physiology and medicine	John Vane	Son of Russian immigrants
1986	Physiology and medicine	Stanley Cohen	Son of Russian immigrants
1987	Literature	Joseph Brodsky	Born in Leningrad (USSR); left the country in 1972
1988	Physiology and medicine	Gertrude Bell Elion	Daughter of Russian emigrants
1990	Physics	Jerome Isaac Friedman	Son of Russian immigrants
1990	Peace Prize	Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev	Citizen of the USSR
1995	Peace Prize	Joseph Rotblat	Born in Warsaw; subject of the Russian Empire until Poland declared independence
2000	Physics	Zhores Ivanovich Alferov	Citizen of Russia
2002	Physiology and medicine	Robert Horwitz	Grandson of a Russian immigrant
2003	Physics	Aleksei Alekseevich Abrikosov	Citizen of Russia and the United States
2003	Physics	Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg	Citizen of Russia

April 3 in Russian history

1933: The first kidney tranplantation was performed by Yuri Voronoy. Some sources give different dates, some even speak of the tranplantation being done in 1934 or 1936. His experiments started in 1929 and in 1930 he managed to transplant a kidney to a dog's neck. As the Ukrainian National museum of medicine reports:

Yu.Yu. Voronoy renounced the thought to take an organ from an alive man, since he thought that “one cannot make a healthy man invalid removing a necessary organ for the problematic saving of a patient”. He decided to use the kidney from a dead body. As we succeeded to establish, on April, 1933 (not in 1934, as it was informed in some sources, 1934 — is the year of publication of Yu. Yu. Voronoy’s work) the surgeon Yu. Yu. Voronoy made the transplantation of the kidney taken from a dead body. The recipient was a woman of 26 years, whose own kidneys did not function for 4 days because of acute poisoning with mercury biochloride. The donor’s kidney belonged to a man of 60 who died as a result of craniocerebral trauma, and was taken 6 hours after his death. ... She [the recipient] lived with the transplanted kidney more than 48 hours. Voronoy had every reason to think that the short-term transplant grafting (only during two days) does not compromise the kidney transplantation as the method of treatment under some forms of mercury biochloride poisonings. And what is more, he supposed that in case of dying off of the first implanted kidney, it is recommended to substitute it by a new, fresh kidney, i. e., he proposed the repeated transplantation. ... Yu. Yu. Voronoy outstripped for a long time the development of transplantology. Suffice it to say that clinical transplantations of the corpse kidney in most countries all over the world were made only in the 50–60’s of the 20th century. Professor Voronoy took part in development of other urgent trends of experimental and clinical surgery. He studied in detail the extremely important problem of the shock. But the problems of transplantology continued to remain the main ones in scientific activity of Voronoy. In 1950 he informed about 5 operations of the corpse kidney transplantation under severe nephrologic diseases.

1945: His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God, emperor of Ethiopia, transfers 10,000 pounds to the population of the USSR, suffering from the consequences of the Nazi occupation.

1945: The government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic decides to build a monument in Babiy Yar, a gully in Kiev, used by the Nazis as the place of mass executions. On September 27, 1941, 752 patients of a mental hospital were killed. On September 29-30, 33,771 Jews, almost whole Jewish population of Kiev, were executed. In October, 17,000 more Jews were killed there. Later, 621 member of the Ukrainian nationalist organization OUN were also killed. The executions were continuing till autumn of 1943, when the Soviet troops liberated Kiev. The total number of victims is not clear, various sources estimate it between 70,000 and 200,000 people. It is not clear why, but the monument was not built. Moreover, the authorities of Kiev preferred to make a dump in Babiy yar. In 1950, a wall was built and the gully was turned into a collector for liquid waste of nearby brick plant. In 1961, the wall fell and the mudflow destroyed a district of Kiev known as Kurenyovka. About 3,000 people died in this tragedy. In 1965 a granite stele was built. Only in 1976, on July 2, a monument was erected with the inscription: "To the Soviet citizens, soldiers and officers of the Soviet army, killed by fascists in Babiy Yar". Later, in 1990s, more monuments were built commemorating not all victims, but only certain groups of them: Jews, members of OUN, patients of the mental hospital, etc. There's also a cross erected in the memory of German prisoners of war.

1966: Soviet spacecraft Luna-10 becomes the first man-made object ever to orbit another celestial body. It enters the Lunar orbit and begins to collect scientific data using a spectrometer, a magnetometer and a number of other tools. Among other things, Luna 10 discovers a strange objects under the surface of the Moon, called 'mascons' (mass concentrations). On May 29, 1966, Luna 10 fell onto the Moon. On April 3, during the XXIII CPSU congress (BTW, it was the first congress where L.Brezhnev was the general secretary of the Communist Party), Luna 10 transmitted back to the Earth a sound record of L'Internationale.

March 29 in Russian history

1847: 19 years old Leo Tolstoy begins a diary which he will continue for all his life. In the complete set of his works the diaries occupy 13 volumes.

1933: The Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper published an article by G.Munblit "The book about a shallow world". It was a positive review of a new book written by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, "The Golden Calf". The real names of Ilf and Petrov were Ilya Faynzilberg and Yevgeny Kataev. "The Golden Calf" was a sequel of their earlier book, "The Twelve Chairs". Both books are the adventures of a swindler Ostap Bender, somehow similar to the stories about Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker by O'Henry. Unlike O'Henry, though, Ilf and Petrov wrote satyre. They ridiculed everyone and everything, from the aristocrats of the times before the revolution, to Soviet bureaucracy, to the flourishing bourgeois habits of the people pretending to be communists. Though a negative character, Ostap Bender was loved by generations of Soviet readers. I tried to find "The Golden Calf" online, but unfortunately, only some first chapters are available here. The full text of "The Twelve Chairs" is here. Just try some first chapters and, I hope, you'll like it. It's not just incredibly funny, but it might also give some impressions about the life in the early Soviet Union.

BTW, while searching for the text of the books, I found an interesting web-site which I had no time to explore, but which seems promising: SovLit.com.

1945: The troops of the 3rd Belorussian front finished the liquidation of the surrounded Eastern Prussian group of the fascist army to the south-west of Koenigsberg. The troops of the 2nd Belorussian front continued the liquidation of the fascist troops in the eastern part of Gdansk (Danzig) and to the north from Gdynia.

February 13 in Russian history

1921: Duke Kropotkin, scientist and famous theorist of anarchy, buried in Moscow. All anarchists were released from the Moscow jails to participate in the funerals, after they promised to return to the jails after the ceremony. And they did.

1934: Soviet steamship Chelyuskin sunk in the Chukchi Sea. It was an epic story of the heroism of "real Soviet people", which became a significant part of the mythology of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Chelyuskin was built in 1933 in Denmark and named after Semion Chelyuskin, Russian polar explorer, a participant of the "Great Northern Expedition" of 1733-1743. On August 2, 1933, Chelyuskin left from Leningrad with 112 people. The expedition was led by the Soviet geographer Otto Schmidt and the captain was Vladimir Voronin. The task of the crew was to prove the possibility of navigating along the Northern Sea Route in one summer. It was done by Sibiryakov in 1932, but Sibiryakov was an icebreaker, not a cargo ship. They almost reached their goal, but in November, 1933, in the Chukchi Sea, near the Bering strait, they were stopped by heavy icepacks. After three months, the ship sunk, crashed by ice. The crew managed to save food, bricks and wood. One man died during the evacuation. Schmidt and Voronin were the last to leave the sinking ship. A government commission was formed to organize the rescue operation. Some Western newspapers wrote that it is impossible to save the people, because there were no icebreakers able to navigate the Arctic Ocean in winter and that it was cruel to incite hope in these doomed people. The rescue commission hoped to use aviation. The American government offered their assistance, but they could not help with the aviation, because flights in the Arctic were cancelled due to recent crashes. On March 5, the airplane piloted by Anatoly Lyapidevsky found the camp of the Chelyuskinites, landed on ice and rescued ten women and one baby, who was born in September on board of Chelyuskin. During the second attempt, Lyapidevsky's airplane was damaged. The government decided to send three groups of pilots. The first group departed to the USA, where two airplanes were bought from Pan Am. One of them was damaged soon and another, piloted by Mavrikiy Slepnyov, rescued 5 people and later evacuated O.Schmidt, who was seriously ill. Other people were saved by pilots Kamanin, Pivenshtein, Demirov, Bestanzhiev, Molokov, Vodopyanov and Doronin on Soviet R-5 planes. The engine of Galyshev's plane broke and he could not participate. On April 13, the last people were evacuated. The Chelyuskinites later spoke that the leadership of Otto Schmidt, who published a newspaper in the camp and read lectures on philosophy, was the key in their survival.

1940: Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov finished his best known masterpiece "Master and Margarita". Less than one month later, he died. Bulgakov started his work on this novel in 1928 or in 1929. In 1930, he burnt the first draft, when he learnt that his piece "Cabal of Sanctimonious Hypocrites, or Molière" was banned . The second version was being written since 1931 till 1936. The last, final version was in active work since 1936 till 1938, but Bulgakov kept adding and modifying the text till 1940. "Master and Margarita" is called by many critics one of the greatest Russian novels of the XX century. I would say, though, that the book is so heavily influenced and so tightly woven with the references to the general European culture, from Bible to Goethe, to Hoffmann, that it should be perceived as one of the greatest works in the European, not Russian, literature. On the other hand, Bulgakov, in his turn, influenced Salman Rushdie's "Satanic verses" and even Rolling Stones. After all, it's a small world, isn't it?

Historian Sergey Platonov

I plan to use this blog to publish a very condensed, sketchy translation of a course in Russian history, written by one of the best Russian historians of the XX century -- Sergey Fyodorovich Platonov. Wikipedia has a very short article about this outstanding personality, but since, in my opinion, he deserves a more detailed biography, I would like to start with a short description of his life.

All articles from this blog will also be posted at Sima Qian Studio history forum.

Sergey Platonov was born in Chernigov, not far from Kiev, on June 16, 1860. In 1878 he entered the St.Petersburg university. In 1888, he published his first large work, where he tried to use Russian folk-tales as a source of new information about the period called the Time of Troubles (the interregnum between 1598-1613), which remained his favourite period for the rest of his life. The work was published both as a thesis and as a monography and received the Uvarov Award of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1899, he became a doctor of sciences and published 'The Time of Troubles' (translation by John T. Alexander published by University Press of Kansas in 1987), an extensive review of the Russian society of the early XVII century.

Platonov became famous when he prepared two history courses: Lectures on Russian history (1899) for universities and a Coursebook on Russian history for schools (1909-1910). For some years, Platonov taught the children of emperor Alexander III, duke Mikhail and duchess Olga. Nikolay II, though, didn't like his works, since they "did not cause love to the fatherhood or the pride of the Russian people." Platonov attempted to avoid the subjective viewpoints of other historians of that period: Kluchevsky's liberalism, conservative monarchism of Ilovaisky, marxism of Pokrovsky. "There is no need to introduce any personal viewpoints into history, since a subjective idea is not a scientific idea."

His opinion of the Bolshevist revolution was negative. The political program of the Soviets is "contrived and utopian," he said. "My worldview was based on Christian morale, positivist philosophy and scientific theory of evolution. Atheism is just alien to me as the religious dogmatism." After the revolution, he worked as the chairman of the Russian administration of archives, director of Pushkin House and the Library of the Academy of Sciences. He published new works about Peter I, relations between Russia and Europe in XVI-XVII centuries, earliest Russian settlements on the banks of the Arctic Ocean, etc.

In 1929, OGPU (ex-Cheka) checked the archives, managed by Platonov and found some documents written by Nikolay II and his brother Mikhail. Platonov was accused of hiding these documents (he reported about them in 1926) and dismissed. Worse than that, in 1930, he was accused of participation in a counter-revolutionary monarchist plot and arrested together with many other famous non-marxist historians.

In August 1931, the main 'criminals' were sentenced to 5 years of exile and deported to Samara, where I live. In 1933, he died here in Samara, but I still do not know where.

(posted at SimaQianStudio)