Year: 2026
Type: other
Abstract: in the village of Chernovskoye Kopi, Chita Region, located a few hundred kilometers east of Lake Baikal.One of his ancestors, a Jewish anarchist from present-day Belarus, was exiled to Siberia in the 19th century.In 1937, during the Great Terror, Victor's father was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in Kolyma.His mother was then fired from her job and the family was evicted from their apartment.To support themselves, his mother bought a goat, but the upcoming war with Nazi Germany forced them to sell it.To this end, Victor was sent to the market, where he was spotted by a gypsy fortune-teller.When she saw him, she shouted to the whole market, 'Look!Here comes the lucky one!Look at himhe's really lucky!'.This sounded unreal to Victor, given the circumstances.Ten years later, however, his father was released and rehabilitated.He was informed that he had served these 10 years by 'mistake', as his sentence had been canceled; but this decision never made it to Kolyma.He returned to his previous job and the whole family moved to a new apartment in Irkutsk.Victor was then able to graduate from high school and enrolled at Irkutsk State University in 1951.From then on, Victor believed the gypsy woman was right and that he was indeed lucky.In 1955, he graduated with honors from Irkutsk State University defending a Master's thesis that presented theoretical formulas for the quantitative XRD analysis of mineral mixtures.He then worked as an assistant in the Physics Department until 1961.He was teaching 1200 hours a year while preparing his PhD thesis on the crystallography of clays, including
Source: Clays and Clay Minerals
Author: Bruno Lanson
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7172293125