Evgeny Velikhov, who passed away just two months shy of his 90th birthday, was a great scientist and a good man. A physics graduate of Moscow State University, he spent most of his career moving through the ranks of Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In 1988, Velikhov was appointed director of Kurchatov Institute. He also led ITER, the international program for the creation of the thermonuclear experimental TOKOMAK, a concept originally developed by Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov.
Velikhov’s early life was not suggestive of his future success in the Soviet hierarchy. Both of his grandfathers were arrested and shot in the 1930s during the Stalinist mass repressions. His mother died when he was a toddler and so he was mostly raised by his grandmother Vera, a Baltic German, who readily shared her hate of Vladimir Lenin and writer Maksim Gorky with her grandson. As for Joseph Stalin, she called him a criminal mass murderer. As a young boy, Velikhov spoke both Russian and German, reading brothers Grimm and later Goethe, in original.
In the 1980s, with Gorbachev in power, Velikhov focused considerable energies on achieving the nuclear tests bans and arranging for a regular inspections of the nuclear polygons by American and Soviet counterparts. Coming to the US, he worked with the ASF director Bob Kaiser, then a journalist at the WaPo, on a significant article on nuclear disarmament.
When Forum for the Survival of Mankind was due to meet in the USA, it was Velikhov who pushed for an approval for Sakharov’s travel abroad. Sakharov’s trip almost did not happen, and it was Velikhov whom Sakharov’s wife Elena called in the middle of the night: “Zhenya, we’ve got a problem.” Velikhov was able to solve this problem, as he solved numerous others for scores of different people, with his characteristic ingenuity and good humor. Back then, in November 1988, Velikhov was soon next to Sakharov in New York, assisted by ASF director Nina Bouis, who fondly remembers how Velikhov was the first person to explain her fractals.
The ASF expresses it deepest condolences to the family of Evgeny Velikhov.
