I was born and raised in the country that was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I grew up along with my people, taking the same path as millions of my contemporaries: progressing from kindergarten to school, with Pioneer camp in the summer, and then to the institute and the Komsomol.

    World War II changed many things in my life. My father was killed and my elder sister died of illness and exhaustion. Victory Day, however, will live in my memory forever. The sensations of springtime and the end of the terrible war made the world seem sunny and bright.

    The death of loved ones, hunger and cold - that is what the war gave my family. I remember how my mother and I went to all of the remote villages in Lesnoy district, in the north of Tver Region, in the hope of trading one of our children's coats or suits for something to eat. We had to survive, and my mother knew that everything would be fine if we could just survive the cold and bleak winter of 1941-2. She was right, but first we had to endure several more grim years of war.

Sarov Monastery in XVIII century
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    My mother loved me very much, and she always said that I gave her nothing but happiness and no worries at all. Before I was born, she and my father moved from Kalinin Region to Moscow Region with their three-year-old daughter in search of a living. Once one of my mother's friends invited her to go shopping:
    'Nadya, calico fabric is on sale today in Tsaritsino. Get ready, and we'll go to the store.'
    'But I have an appointment at the hospital,' my mother replied.'
    'Go ahead and have another one. It might be a boy,' her friend said, and they went shopping for material. That is how my fate was decided!

    On a cold and snowy morning in 1934, on 12 February, my mother was taken to the maternity centre by sleigh, and before the driver had finished smoking a cigarette, the head nurse ran outside and shouted to him: 'It is a boy!' It was an easy labour, and that is how I came into the world - because of a woman's passion for shopping.

    One of my most vivid memories is of the military railroad car in which my mother, my younger sister and I rode to the city of Nikel in the north of the Kola Peninsula on a labour recruitment drive. After my native Tver (Kalinin Region), the north became my second home. That is where I first saw the forbidding blue mountain ranges of the north and the unforgettable dancing colours of the Northern Lights. Seven years went by quickly in the far north and after I graduated from secondary school in Nikel I went to Moscow, where I hoped to become an engineer-physicist. I had done well in school, especially in physics and mathematics.

    I was admitted to the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute in 1952. The institute was on Malaya Pionerskaya Street at first, and then it moved to Kirovskaya. At that time it was called the Moscow Institute of Mechanics. During my third year I was transferred to a theorists' group. I worked on my thesis with Academician Ya. B. Zeidovich. I graduated from the institute with honours and a specialty in "Theoretical Nuclear Physics'.

    My classes at the institute were easy and enjoyable, and I took all of my tests and examinations ahead of schedule. I led the life of an average student, but my life took a dramatic turn after I met Lyudmila, my future wife, in Losinka, a suburb of Moscow, and had to exchange my carefree lifestyle for the destitute existence of a married student.

View of the bell-tower of Sarov Monastery
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My son Sergey was born during my fourth year at the Institute. I forgot about vacations and worked in the summer, learning plumbing from my father-in-law in the private dachas where we worked together, installing water heaters. In spite of everything else, things were still going well at the Institute. The only problem was that the three of us were living in a single room measuring only eight square metres - one bed with a night-table, and one chair for all three of us. That is why I agreed with pleasure when Ya.B.Zeidovich asked me to take a test for a job in the closed city. As soon us the test was over, Yakov Borisovich gave me the assignment to the 'installation' (that is what the secret city of Arzamas-16 was formerly called). The training I received as a student in the Institute's acclaimed seminars and during my preparations for qualifying examinations with Academician L.D. Landau in the Vorobyevi Gory (Sparrow Hills) was of great help to me in the test. Later, when I was working on the theory of pulsed fission reactions, I read the marvellous works by Dau, as Lev Davidovich was called affectionately by everyone, in this field. They were the classic works on the physics of microprocesses of fission chain reaction as well as macroscopic effects of an atomic explosion.

    I came to the closed city for the first time in 1957 to write a thesis on the compression of super-small radioactive nuclear matter. It was a sheltered and peaceful town in the centre of Russia. I was impressed by its cleanliness and by the calm and smooth pace of life there, with no hint at all of the barbed-wire face nearby and the strict requirements for residence in the city. The Sarov Monastery in the centre of the town was erected by the history of Russia itself, and the small Sarovka River flowing past the monastery was a remarkably compatible addition to this marvellous landscape. The town was surrounded on all sides by the Russian heartland, with its everyday poverty and bold and carefree holiday spirit. This seemed to be the place where the past and the future of Mother Russia came together.

    The Diveyevski Cathedral and Convent were a few kilometres away from the installation. The pathetic appearance of the convent, ravaged by the historic events of the October Revolution, summoned recollections of the past grandeur of Christianity in Russia. Today, this memorial to the sanctity of faith and religion is being restored, and the relics of St Serafim Sarovski, a holy miracle worker, were laid to rest there in 1991. There is a stone prayer bench dedicated to the memory of Father Serafim in the remote wilderness where he spent many years in seclusion, not far from the city of Sarov (Arzamas-16). Everything happens according to the will of God.

    At that time a few dozen theorists were working in two theoretical divisions of Arzamas-16, which were headed by A.D.Sakharov and Ya.B.Zeldovich. The team was young and boisterous, with strong emotional reactions to all events occurring outside the barbed-wire barrier which surrounded Arzamas-16. The main thing, however, was that the work went well and that there was an atmosphere of intellectual competition. All of us young specialists were fascinated with the amazing possibility of comprehending the micro-universe, and this, combined with a nice private room in a communal dwelling and a family income that was enough for a completely adequate way of life, seemed like paradise after the deprivations of student living. It seems inconceivable now, but the life itself made my dreams come true.

    I remember how I was called to the office of the secretary of the Nikel communist party committee just before graduation from secondary school and how I was offered a chance to attend a military academy, because enrolments were down in the military academic institutions. I replied that I wanted to study nuclear physics. 'Don't be ridiculous! Few people are entrusted with that kind of responsibility,' the secretary told me. Later, teachers from my school stood up for me, and I did not have to go into the military.

Arzamas - The old church of Sarov Monastery
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    That is how I became a theoretical physicist in a nuclear centre and worked on the development of nuclear weapons. It seemed that fate had led me to that city! We lived there in harmony and were completely absorbed in our work. A physicist-theorist was the head (if the project and the team of mathematicians, experimental physicists and designers seemed to come together naturally at each stage of the project. The administrators and scientific supervisors of the 'installation' listened to the opinions of the young theorists, and I , have to admit that we were not intimidated by the prestige of Yakov Borisovich and Andrey Dmitrievich, although we did have great admiration for them. This gave the theorist a big responsibility. Mistakes were rarely excused there; for that matter, there was not much praise for our successes either. Awards and bonuses were granted according to the same rigid hierarchy as in the rest of the country. The usual life cycle of any idea went something like this: from 'This is impossible,' to "That has been already suggested earlier,' and if it was a success - 'What do you have to do with It'! Combined vith the strict requirements for the work with secret documents, all of this gradually fostered a strong sense of responsibility towards each step of the work.

    When I was working on the theory of low energy releases in fission reactions, I came across a discrepancy between the theory and a lengthy set of experimental results. I checked and rechecked the approximated theory dozens of times and made hundreds of calculations on a computer, but the result was always the same. Later at night, it home, after my wife and son had gone to sleep, I would rack my brains in the kitchen, checking each approximation in the theory of radioactive nuclear matter decay in a neutron flux. My labour was rewarded. It turned out that a minor inaccuracy in the theory would cause a major error in the final result of atomic explosion. I searched the classified definitive works of L. D. Landau and found the same inaccuracy there. There is no question that the success in any area requires tremendous efforts as well as knowledge. Incidentally, the refinement of the theory later produced better designs of fission reaction boosters. That was my first persoral minor victory. I took great pride in it and was simply ecstatic. This is all it takes to make a theorist happy - the agreement of the theory with the experiment.

    Late in the evenings after work, the young specialists usually played chess or volleyball far into the night, and on our days off we liked to pick mushrooms in the beautiful birch forests nearby.

    Our trips to the ancient city of Temnikov, on the bank of the Moskva River in the heart of Russian Mordovia, were always a pleasure. A friend of mine had a Pobeda automobile, and my wife and I sometimes drove to the Temnikov bazaar on Sundays in the summer. We drove along a dusty road past ramshackle villages for about two hours to get to the bazaar. Fair-haired children with 'bowl' haircuts ran out into the road to greet the motorists from the secret city and ask them for a sweet. They looked like the children in the scenes from life depicted by Nekrasov. The bazaar was always striking because of the contrast between the colossal variety of colours and patterns in the embroidered clothing of the Mordovians and the extremely meagre variety of merchandise for sale.

    A sharp contrast between the 'closed' city and the Mordovian countryside always made me feel sad about Russia's then current situation. Once we stopped at a village well for a drink of spring water. An old man sat hunched on a bench in front of a peasant hut, and we started a conversation. He was well over ninety. 'You must have seen so much in your life,' I remarked. But it turned out that he had spent his whole life in his village and had even beer kept out of the army by bad health. Amazing are the differences in people's lives - not in how long they live, but how they spend their lives. In short, this is Russia.