After Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Peace Prize in October 2021, we remember other Russian laureates of various Nobel Prizes over the years.
Alexander Kislov
Russian Empire
1. Ivan Pavlov – Physiology and Medicine, 1904
Ivan Pavlov
General goods
Famous for his experiments with dogs, a pioneer in physiology, Pavlov was Russia’s first Nobel laureate ever. He was rewarded for his work with digestive physiology. Read more about Pavlov here.
2. Ilya Mechnikov – Physiology and Medicine, 1908
Ilya Mechnikov
Library of Congress
Renowned biologist and pioneer in embryology, Mechnikov was also called the father of innate immunity, and he opened up cell-mediated immunity. But when he received the prize “for works on immunity”, he had already worked for a decade in France, joining the Louis Pasteur Institute. Read more about Mechnikov’s discovery here.
Soviet times
3. Ivan Bunin – Literature, 1933
Ivan Bunin
Maxim Dmitriev / Public Domain
Ivan Bunin had already emigrated to France when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the strict artistic talent with which he recreated the typical Russian character in literary prose. Read more about the fight between Ivan Bunin and Maxim Gorky over the prize and Nobel’s family connection here.
4. Nikolay Semyonov – Chemistry, 1956
Nikolay Semyonov
Tsesarsky / Sputnik
Semyonov was the only Soviet Nobel laureate in chemistry. He received the award for his work on the chemical transformation mechanism, together with a British physical chemist Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood.
5. Boris Pasternak – Literature, 1958
Boris Pasternak
General goods
After his opus magnum Doctor Zhivago, banned in the Soviet Union, was published in the West (not without CIA intervention), the Swedish Academy rewarded him for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. The award caused a scandal in the Soviet Union and after a campaign of intimidation, he was forced to decline the award.
6. Pavel Cherenkov, Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank – Physics, 1958
Picture LR: Pavel Cherenkov, Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank
Photo from the Nobel Foundation’s archive
Three physicists received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation made in the 1930s. Cherenkov first noticed the blue glow from an underwater nuclear reactor and then, together with colleagues, investigated and described the phenomenon.
7. Lev Landau – Physics, 1962
Lev Landau
General goods
Landau contributed massively to the development of theoretical physics and is considered a founder of the so-called “Landau school” of physicists. He was recognized for his pioneering theories of condensed matter, especially liquid helium. read more about ‘DAU’ film saga named after Lev Landau.
8. Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov – Physics, 1964
Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov
Photo from the Nobel Foundation’s archive
The laser creators, two skilled physicists, received the award for “basic work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the design of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser laser principle.” They shared the prize with the American scientist Charles H. Townes who worked in the same field.
9. Mikhail Sholokhov – Literature, 1965
Mikhail Sholokhov
Nikolai Kochnev / Sputnik
The author of the epic novel ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was rewarded “for the artistic power and integrity with which he in his epic about Don has expressed a historical phase in the life of the Russian people”. This time, the Soviet authorities recognized the award. Read more about Sholokhov here.
10. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Literature, 1970
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Yury Dolyagin / Sputnik
The author, who struggled with all the horrors of the Soviet labor camps and then opened the Gulag to the mass reader, was rewarded “for the ethical power with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” This time the Soviets launched a propaganda campaign against Solzhenitsyn, and he could not receive his award until eight years later. Read more about the author here.
11. Leonid Kantorovich – Economic Sciences, 1975
Leonid Kantorovich
Sputnik
The Soviet mathematician and economist was a founder of linear programming. He shared the Swedish Riksbank’s prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel with the Dutch-American Tjalling C. Koopmans “for their contribution to the theory of optimal resource allocation”.
12. Andrei Sakharov – Peace Prize, 1975
Andrey Sakharov
Boris Kaufman / Sputnik
One of the founders of thermonuclear weapons, a dissident and human rights activist, Sakharov was rewarded “for his fight for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations.” Five years later, he would be asked to leave the Soviet Union for his political activism and campaign against the war in Afghanistan. Read more about Andrei Sakharov here.
13. Pyotr Kapitsa – Physics, 1978
Pyotr Kapitsa
Abram Sterenberg / Sputnik
An illumination of Soviet physics and a founder of the Institute of Physical Problems was rewarded “for his basic inventions and discoveries in the field of low-temperature physics”.
14. Joseph Brodsky – Literature, 1987
Joseph Brodsky
Getty pictures
Although he emigrated to the United States in 1972 and began writing essays in English, he remained a very Russian poet. A great intellectual, professor of Russian literature at American universities, he was rewarded “for an all-encompassing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”
15. Mikhail Gorbachev – Peace Prize, 1990
Mikhail Gorbachev
Boris Babanov / Sputnik
The first Soviet president is still one of the most controversial politicians in Russia, with many people torn between blaming him for the collapse of the Soviet Union or praising him for perestroika and freedom of speech. He was one of those responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was rewarded “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations”.
Modern Russia
16. Zhores Alferov – Physics, 2000
Zhores Alferov
Igor Samoilov / Sputnik
Alferov, a well-known physicist and deputy to the Russian parliament, was awarded “for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and optoelectronics”. He shared the prize with the German-American physicist Herbert Kroemer, who worked independently in the same field.
17. Alexei Abrikosov, Vitaly Ginzburg – Physics, 2003
Alexei Abrikosov, Vitaly Ginzburg
Legion Media; Getty pictures
Vitaly Ginzburg participated in the work of former Nobel laureates – Cherenkov and Landau, and was one of the authors of Ginzburg-Landau’s theory of superconductivity. Their colleague Abrikosov helped develop the theory by discovering a fluxon called the “Abrikosov vortex”. He has lived in the United States since the early 1990s. Two great doctors shared the prize with the British-American doctor Sir Anthony James Leggett “for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids”.
18. Konstantin Novoselov – Physics, 2010
Konstantin Novoselov
Grigory Sysoev / Sputnik
Researcher Novoselov left the country in the 1990s, and in the Netherlands he met another Russian-born doctor, Andre Geim. They started working together and then moved to the UK, where they continued to work together. They are best known for discovering graphene. And they shared the Nobel Prize “for groundbreaking experiments on the two-dimensional material graphene.”
19. Dmitry Muratov – Peace Prize, 2021
Dmitry Muratov
Vladimir Astaplovich / Sputnik
The editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, along with Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, was rewarded “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a prerequisite for democracy and lasting peace.” It is symbolic that Muratov received the award on the 15th anniversary of his death Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta who was murdered because of her stories that revealed human rights violations in Russia and Chechnya. Read more about Dmitry Muratov here.
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Source: sn.dk