The Most Russian Person. Владимир Шатакишвили

appetizing, beautifully decorated greenery, decorated various cooking fixings in the form of twisted in a spiral rings of carrots, onions. Outlets of vegetables, cold beef melting in the mouth, ham, olivesd – just an exhibition of the achievements of the national economy, no less no more! But alcohol was asked to add.

      And it all started! Volodya, who always controled himself, did not drink, and I, with my passion to making toasts, took control of the table. Our neighbors liked toasts, and it added enthusiasm. Things were gaining momentum and were worthy of attention by Eldar Ryazanov for his next masterpiece, when the master brings comedy to such an extent that tragedy could happen after it…

      Somewhere by midnight I’ve had my doze and even exceeded it. When we were about to leave, I began to insist that our companions should be taken home. Volodya tried to stop me, persuade me, reminding that we had a plane early in the morning, that there was no time to sleep. But it was impossible to stop me. And Volodya, of course, could not leave his friend to the mercy of fate, to leave alone in Moscow at night with the drunk ladies, knowing my ability to throw money with or without reason.

      We traveled by taxi for a long time, not knowing how far our lovely ladies had gotten. I was dozing, then came to my senses, and for this reason I did not remember the route. Volodya saw the road clearly, but he knew Moscow badly. The only thing that crashed into the memory was the monument to Kurchatov. I remember getting out of the car, how the ladies invited us to have a cup of coffee for vigour. And we went! What for? But having previously arranged with the taxi driver that he would wait for us for about fifteen minutes. Volodya was very unhappy with the night journey. Two o'clock at night, and we were far from the center drinking coffee on the outskirts… There was the reason to become indignant. Fifteen minutes or even more passed, finally, we said goodbye, to our luck found the taxi on the spot, got in and came back to the hotel.

      At last! The concert was over, you could relax and even take a little nap… The clock hands showed three in the morning. The driver was in a hurry to the taxi park, as he had to be back and then like a bolt from the blue.

      “Where is the jacket?” I howled like a wolf. “Volodya, tell me, where could I leave the jacket?”

      Horror is drawn on his face too. In the leather jacket I took off in the hallway, there was everything: plane tickets, money, passports, other documents…

      I sobered up instantly and remembered how we arrived, how I took off the jacket and stayed in a woolen pullover, and how I was leaving the ladies cosy home in the far outskirts, how threw on a sheepskin coat, forgetting about the jacket. Here it is, the very edge beyond which lies the tragedy! What to do? We did not know the names of random friends, their addresses, or phone numbers and was it at all? The only thing that I remember was a monument to Kurchatov! “Thank you, Igor Vasilyevich, thank you for that mark! Of course, you are a great scientist, physicist, we give you glory! But now it is you, Igor Vasilyevich, who must help, save me from being ruined!” In such a half-crazy delusion we ran out into the street. Fortunately, the hotel has taxi cars on duty.

      “Where are we going?” one of the drivers cheered up.

      “If you can find a monument to Kurchatov, we are going with you!”

      The driver’s eyes popped out of his head. Just after three o'clock in the morning, two mad people rushed into the car and are crazily interested in the sights of the capital. How to react to it? Most likely, seeing us, he understood that it was a serious matter and got involved in the work. The monument was found. So what is next? We drove two or three blocks, but all in vain. There was not a single light in all the windows. At last we found the house. Seeing obscene inscriptions in the elevator we realized that we were on the right track. We rang the bell. The door of the apartment opened. Yes, it was them, our saviours! And the jacket was in the hallway, alive and good! We checked, valuables were in place – passports, money, tickets… All-in-all, the show was over! The public could go home. The women spoke in vying, “Your forgotten in a hurry jacket was immediately noticed, but it was late – you have already left the house. It became clear from the hotel business card where to look for, so we decided to inform the administrator in the morning.”

      I don’t know if they would call the hotel or not, but I think that’s what would have happened. It’s good that the actresses turned out to be decent women, they didn’t touch either the money or the documents, otherwise we couldn’t get out of the trap we had made for ourselves. I instructed myself, children and grandchildren: taking alcohol, be circumspect and vigilant. Of course, first of all, I take it on my account, weigh this commandment up on myself, putting it in my own moral tablets.

      “Yes, I agree, an interesting adventure. Good thing that it ended well for you.”

      From molecular level to atomic!

      Here is, for example, another case: when another star academician, Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal, came to the Laboratory No. 2 (later it became Kurchatov Atomic Center) at the invitation of Igor Vasilyevich and the academician said right off the bat, “You are an expert in chemical engineering, so let's work together! We need a reactor to produce plutonium.” Ivan Nikiforovich smiled slyly, “I will not lie, I did not hear the conversation, and could not hear it. But read in the interview. Truely, many-many years later. Looks very much like Kurchatov. Well, and that Dollezhal was also a man of incredible mind and immediately understood what it was for and noticed that his scientific interests “do not coincide with atomic science…”

      Kurchatov said, “You used to work at the molecular level – now work at the nuclear!” Igor Vasilyevich was witty, everyone knew that. And that he loved jokes, they also knew, but all the same, they swallowed the bait.

      And now I remembered the galoshes. So here he gave people a lot to laugh at. All took galoshes at the entrance to the laboratory. And all the galoshes were with the same flannel crimson lining, they so shined, so shined! Well, so, as not to confuse this “mellow shine”, the initials of the host were attached to galoshes. So our Beard changed the initials of the chiefs of quite high rank. Laughter lasted for an hour when they tried to shove their shoes in their own… I almost said “sleigh”. Although it was really that way.

      Here one more… All of us there, at “Mayak”, knew about the top secrecy in the “Kurchatov establishment” at Lubyanka: you couldn’t take out even a piece of paper – everything was accountable. If you have taken a sheet, wrote it up – hand it over on receipt. It was impossible to break the security. And Igor Vasilyevich took it, yes he acted outrageously: he burnt the paper in an ashtray and then laughed, “And it smelled of broken security in the room for a long time…”

      Let's stop for a while. Let us give Ivan Nikiforovich the opportunity to get over the excitement of unwittingly reviving memories.

      Author's retreat

      The documents I have studied, and they are publications in the press, recollections of eyewitnesses, the books by V. Novoselov and V. Tolstikov – “Mysteries of Sorokovka 40th)", P. Zhuravlev – "My Atomic Age", the documentary book of V. Brokhovich "The "Mayak" Chemical Plant", a collective jubilee collection, "The Creators of the Atomic Shield", dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the city of Ozersk (the former Chelyabinsk-40 with the famous "Mayak") created a picture of a difficult and heroic time. The picture, frankly speaking, of not the bright tone…

      After the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hirosima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the world first learned about the consequences of this terrible monster, Stalin immediately responded to this alarming event: Americans need what we are made of.

      This meant that the Soviet development of a nuclear project, begun in 1943 and interrupted by urgent military concerns, should be promptly restored. And naturally, it was necessary to mobilize the Soviet scientists involved in this problem: physicists, chemists, workers of small and medium special engineering to implement the task.

      We needed a sensible scientific project manager.

      In the Kremlin, the Politburo considered two candidates – Igor Vasilyevich KURCHATOV and Abram Isaakovich ALIKHANOV, a highly educated person who was a student of the famous physicist Ioffe. It was Alikhanov who in 1943 during the elections to the Academy of Sciences became