THEIR NAMES are in the history of the Institute

Guests of honour. Invaluable gift

On the birthday of Dubna founder Mikhail G. Meshcheryakov, our Institute was visited by Mikhail Grigorievich's niece Galina Panteleevna, professor at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), keeper of the Meshcheryakov family archive.

A.Zlotnikova, G.Meshcheryakova, N.Kavalerova and K.Kozubsky

To a large extent, thanks to her, we know about Mikhail Grigorievich not only as an outstanding scientist and organizer of science, but also as a person. Galina Panteleevna has carefully preserved for many years the letters of Mikhail Grigorievich to his brother Panteley and other family members from the front, from the tests of the atomic bomb on the Bikini Atoll in the USA, correspondence with relatives scattered by the war. She transferred part of this archive to the Laboratory of Information Technologies, the founder and director of which was Mikhail Grigorievich.

On 16 September, Mikhail Grigorievich's niece Galina Panteleevna Meshcheryakova and his granddaughter Darya Abisheva visited MLIT. The last time they were in Dubna was four years ago, when the Institute celebrated the 110th anniversary of Mikhail Grigorievich's birth. Over the past years, a memorial office of M.G.Meshcheryakov was opened in the laboratory in the room where he worked in his last years. The guests were shown the office and the exhibition. Galina Panteleevna handed over letters from M.G. to his mother and brother from different times and other documents to MLIT for the museum. The guests also visited the MICC hall, where they learnt about the computing equipment and the Govorun supercomputer.

On 17 September, Galina Panteleevna talked to the museum staff for four hours at the JINR Museum, told them about the family, Cossack roots, traditions and the fates of the Meshcheryakovs. The Leningrad blockade left a big mark on the souls of Mikhail Grigorievich's relatives and he himself miraculously survived the war after being seriously wounded and having three operations. Fate preserved him, perhaps, so that Dubna would appear on the map of the country and so that the whole world would learn about the scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics - development of the synchrocyclotron, the first large accelerator in the USSR. Galina Panteleevna thanked the museum staff for preserving the memory of her uncle and left a note in the book of honored visitors.

Nadezhda Kavalerova,
Tatyana Strizh