Aleksandr Nikolayevich Nesmeyanov

Academy Presidency and the Malenkov Summons

When Academy President S. I. Vavilov died in 1951, Politburo member G. M. Malenkov summoned Nesmeyanov and offered him the vacant presidency. Nesmeyanov raised his vegetarian convictions, which he said had nothing to do with Tolstoyism, the 1940 arrest of his brother whose fate remained unknown to him, and the fact that he was a Party member while the tradition had been a non-Party president. None of these arguments impressed Malenkov, and the matter was already decided. Nesmeyanov was elected president on 16 February 1951 at an extraordinary session of the Academy's general meeting, and on 19 May 1961 he resigned the post of his own accord.

His record as an organizer was also extensive. During his rectorship of Moscow State University (1948–1951), construction began on the large university complex on the Sparrow (Lenin) Hills. He founded the Institute of Scientific Information in 1952 and opened the Institute of Organoelement Compounds in 1954, directing it until his death; the institute now bears his name. According to INEOS, he was also dean of the Chemistry Department (1945–1948), head of the USSR State Prize committee (1947–1956) and of the Lenin Prize committee (1956–1961), and a member of the World Peace Council.

Political Record and the Sakharov Letter

Nesmeyanov was a member of the VKP(b) from 1944. In May 1969, at the Academic Council of INEOS, he spoke against electing R. Rokhlin as a senior researcher, citing Rokhlin's opposition to the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. His intervention did not change the vote, and Rokhlin was elected. In 1973 he was one of the academicians who signed the letter published in Pravda condemning the 'behaviour' of Academician A. D. Sakharov.

Scientific School: Diazo Method, Metallotropy, Ferrocene

Nesmeyanov created a new discipline on the border between inorganic and organic chemistry and named it the 'chemistry of organoelement compounds'. In 1929 he proposed the diazo method (the 'Nesmeyanov reaction') for obtaining arylmercury halides, later extended to organometallic compounds of thallium, germanium, tin, lead, arsenic, antimony and bismuth. He discovered metallotropy, a special tautomerism in which an organometallic group is reversibly transferred, and with A. E. Borisov formulated the rule that electrophilic and homolytic substitution at an olefinic carbon atom proceeds with retention of the geometric configuration (the Nesmeyanov-Borisov rule). From 1954 he directed ferrocene research at Moscow State University and INEOS, leading to photosensitive compositions, the iron-deficiency drug ferrocerone and, based on cymantrene, a new antiknock agent for motor gasoline.

Family and the Repressed Brother

Nesmeyanov was born in Moscow into a teacher's family. His brother Vasily Nesmeyanov (1904–1941) was deputy head of the Topographic and Geodetic Service of the Main Directorate of Geodesy and Cartography under the USSR Sovnarkom. He was shot on 28 July 1941 on espionage charges and rehabilitated on 17 September 1955 by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. His brother Andrei (1911–1983) was a radiochemist and corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Sources disagree on the death year of his son Nikolai: 1982 in the Russian-language Wikipedia and 1992 in the English-language Wikipedia; both give his birth year as 1932.

After stepping down from the Academy presidency in 1961, Nesmeyanov pivoted to an entirely new research direction: producing food by chemical synthesis, bypassing agriculture altogether. The idea drew inspiration from the pioneering work of Mendeleev and Berthelot and was pursued at the Institute of Organoelement Compounds (INEOS), which he had founded. The core aim was to develop processes that could replicate the appearance, taste, smell, colour, and texture of natural food so faithfully as to be indistinguishable from it.

The most famous result was artificial black caviar. Built on a protein base extracted from fish roe and encapsulated in gelatin to mimic the texture and colour of natural caviar, it became the world's first commercial protein-analogue food product. Other processes developed under his direction included new forms of potato products, pasta and grain derivatives, and combined meat products blending plant and animal proteins.

Nesmeyanov regarded this work not as an engineering curiosity but as a fundamental solution to humanity's food problem. In his 1965 monograph The Problem of Food Synthesis, he framed artificial food as a long-term strategy for environmental conservation, efficient land use, and a growing global population. A distant forerunner of today's alternative meats, cultured proteins, and food engineering, his radical vision took half a century to become mainstream food science.