1883–1960
○ Heart attack
Father of Soviet ferrous metallurgy who built Kuznetsk
A chemistry student, young Bardin wandered into Professor Izhevsky's lecture and resolved: 'I will be a blast-furnace operator.' Thirty years later, that resolve was Europe's largest steelworks.
A village tailor's son, Bardin studied metallurgy at Kyiv Polytechnic and learned steelmaking as a labourer in American mills. A disciple of blast-furnace master Mikhail Kurako, he rebuilt the works of Yuzovka, Yenakiyevo, Makeyevka, and Kamenskoye, then as chief engineer of the Kuznetsk Combine (1929–1937) erected Europe's largest blast furnaces in 1,000 days. Made a full Academician in 1932 without a single paper, he was vice-president of the Academy of Sciences from 1942. In wartime he concentrated Ural science on defence; afterwards he championed oxygen-converter steelmaking and continuous casting. A non-party figure the security organs never touched, he adopted eleven children of his repressed colleagues.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1910Graduated Kyiv Polytechnic; engineer at Yuzovka Works
- 1910–1911Labourer at US machine-building and steel plants
- 1915–1923Workshop chief then chief engineer, Yenakiyevo Works
- 1924–1925Chief engineer, Makeyevka Works
- 1925–1929Chief engineer, Dzerzhinsky Works, Kamenskoye
- 1929–1937Chief engineer, Kuznetsk Metallurgical Combine (KMK)
- 1937–1939Chief engineer, Ferrous Metallurgy Directorate → Chairman of Technical Council
- 1939Deputy People's Commissar of Ferrous Metallurgy
- 1939–1960Director, Institute of Metallurgy, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1942–1960Vice-President, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1944–1960Founding director, TsNIIchermet
Related historical events
Oxygen and Continuous Casting: Reorganizing Postwar Steelmaking
After directing the Kuznetsk construction, Bardin moved to the centre of Soviet ferrous-metallurgy technical policy. In 1936, still chief engineer of the Kuznetsk combine, he visited the rolling laboratory of V. N. Voskresensky and was shown strip steel drawn for the first time by the slabless (direct-rolling) method; his verdict was that the laboratory was 'doing a necessary thing.' In 1938, as chief engineer of the Main Directorate of the Metallurgical Industry, he backed the request to transfer the laboratory into the ferrous-metallurgy system, and in 1939, as Deputy People's Commissar of Ferrous Metallurgy, he approved its revised technical design. That institutional line produced TsNIIchermet, established by a State Defence Committee decision of 27 April 1944; Bardin directed it from 1944 until his death in 1960, and in 1960 the institute was named for him.
In the postwar years he pushed oxygen into steelmaking. He published 'Prospects for the Use of Oxygen in Blast-Furnace Production' in 1946 and 'On Introducing the Use of Oxygen and Slabless Rolling into Ferrous Metallurgy' in 1955. He received the first-degree Stalin Prize in 1949 for developing and industrially applying oxygen intensification of the open-hearth process, and the Lenin Prize in 1958 for creating the first industrial plants for the continuous casting of steel. Alongside this institute work he taught from 1943 at the Moscow Steel Institute named for Stalin, holding its chair of economics and organization of metallurgical production until 1960, and in 1940-1946 he led the team of scientists that drew up the design for the Cherepovets steelworks.