People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1914–1987 ○ Natural causes

Three-time Hero of Socialist Labor, a self-taught physicist who became the theorist of Soviet nuclear weapons and a giant of cosmology

29 August 1949, after the first Soviet atomic bomb test: "What astonished me was the grass. There was an uncanny silence, and suddenly I saw the grass lie flat — the shock wave had arrived. Silence and flattened grass — that is the strongest impression of a nuclear explosion."

A self-taught physicist from a Jewish family in Minsk. In 1939–1941 he and Khariton made the first kinetic calculation of the uranium chain reaction; as head of the theoretical department at Arzamas-16 he led calculations for the first Soviet nuclear test and the hydrogen bomb. He left weapons work in 1963 for astrophysics, pioneering the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect, the theory of cosmic large-scale structure, and the foundations of black hole evaporation. Signed the 'Letter of Three Hundred' against Lysenko in 1955; foreign member of the Royal Society and US National Academy of Sciences.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1930–2019 ○ Natural causes

Communist physicist whose semiconductor heterostructures opened the IT era

Demonstrating Russia's social stratification in the 2000s, he held up a wine glass and said: 'The contents of this glass belong — alas! — to just ten percent of the population. And the stem that holds the glass is the rest of the population.'

Zhores Alferov was a Soviet applied physicist who pioneered semiconductor heterostructure physics and built the first continuous-wave room-temperature semiconductor laser in 1968, laying the physical foundation for fiber-optic communication, CDs, and barcode readers. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. As director of the Ioffe Institute from 1987, chairman of the St. Petersburg Scientific Center from 1989, and vice-president of the USSR and Russian Academy of Sciences, he preserved Russia's basic science through the collapse of the Soviet Union. He served in the State Duma from 1995 on the Communist Party list, defending science funding and fiercely opposing the 2013 Academy reforms. Named after Jean Jaurès, he remained a communist all his life while leading one side of the Cold War's optoelectronics race.