The Most Russian Person

And I also thought of writing a book about Medyanik. His fate is amazing. Awesome. Fiery fate! So I will try to interview this Fate. The Fate of a wonderful person.

On June 2, 2006, Ivan Nikiforovich Medyanik turned 94, and this little story is about him. I hope it will be my gift for his jubilee, the 95th anniversary, in appreciation for what he had done for millions of people.

I'm on friendly terms with my memory…

WHEN Ivan Nikiforovich goes through the memory of past days and years, it takes me aback. Top secret ideas, classified towns, objects, names in his stories acquire the coloring of such frank commonness, the taste of the ordinary servitude that at the beginning of our acquaintance (I confess!), somewhere deep down doubt arises if it was in reality. Has his memory changed? Isn’t there a natural desire to attach your name to the significant and fateful events of the Fatherland? After all, human vanity is a mysterious and incomprehensible category.

No, no and no! His memory didn’t betray him, he was, in fact, a witness and direct participant of those bygone events. And he does not boast, does not expect the thunder of copper pipes of glory – this tall, grayhaired man with a piercing glance of intelligent eyes and a faint grin, that seems to forgive my disbelief, speaks calmly and confidently.

Yes, he is not a nuclear physicist, not a professor, not a doctor of science. He did not take part in “capturing” the evasive neutrino, did not invent the electron brain, did not split the atom, did not “weigh” the star from Andromeda or Cassiopea's, did not beat his head against the wall seeking the right solution in clever projects.

He introduced himself as an experienced motorist, builder, transport worker. He has got a lot more professions that he had mastered, complying to the most severe life circumstances. Later I will tell about it, too.

Now, at ninety-five, he continues to drive. He himself drives. The driver's license of the new sample is valid until 2009. The traffic police GAI (I use the old, familiar to the ear abbreviation of the team of law enforcement officers) do not stop him to verify the identification or for violation of the medical, precisely, age restrictions. Yes, they know, they know our grand-dad, they know Ivan Nikiforovich in Stavropol region, and Mineralnye Vody, in Moscow, in the Urals, he is remembered in all classified “Chelyabinsk” ones, and on the once super classified “Mayak”.

He is neither a professor, nor a doctor of science, nor an academician. But he has the title “Veteran of Nuclear Energy and Industry”. And he is proud of it by right. He was directly involved in the preparation of the testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb which our brilliant nuclear scientists, the finest scientific minds in the world, created “to fear the enemies and world imperialism”.

The first received radioactive plutonium – this monstrous deadly “stuffing” for the first Soviet atomic bomb – was delivered to its destination in February 1949 by Ivan Nikiforovich Medyanik. It was dangerous. It was extremely dangerous! Both for the driver himself, and for his obligatory escort from the department of Lavrentiy Beria – colonel N. M. Ryzhov, and for classified cities, not-marked on any map, in which the bomb was grown from the idea to the real incarnation. Dangerous eventually for hundreds of thousands of people, for the earth, and the sky, and for the whole of Urals with its innumerable natural resources.

Winter, frozen roads, hard and remote, where every unexpected bump could turn a disaster – everything is remembered by Ivan Nikiforovich as if he had just brushed off cold sweat from the forehead from tension, natural excitement, and involuntary fear for a possible unforeseen error.

The car with a deadly cargo was sent in its dangerous trip by a well-known physicist Yuliy Borisovich Khariton, having “blessed” it in his “scientist way”.

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov met it at the destination point, openly pleased. He shook Ivan Nikiforovich Medyanik's hand “like a nuclear scientist to a nuclear scientist” and smiled slyly.

Everything worked out. Plutonium, without which the bomb was just an empty shell, was delivered to the laboratory. The last months came before the test. The rest, just lazy or too young, do not know: On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested at a nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk.

The USSR nuclear shield – as opposed to the United States – declared itself in full voice!

“And do you yourself, Ivan Nikiforovich, remember those famous scientists with whom you had to communicate or at least see on the famous “Mayak” (Chelyabinsk-40)?”

“Will you give me a piece of paper,” Ivan Nikiforovich gets excited, “I will write the names of those you probably have no idea about, no offense.”

And he took the pen.

I here give names and surnames written by Ivan Nikiforovich. This is an incomplete list of people, involved in the production of the atomic bomb at “Mayak”:

I. V. Kurchatov

A. N. Nesmeyanov

L. P. Beria

L. D. Landau

Y. B. Khariton

P. L. Kapitsa

B. L. Vannikov

I. E. Tamm

A. P. Alexandrov

L. V. Kantorovich

A. D. Sakharov

A. M. Prokhorov

S. P. Korolev

N. G. Basov

B. G. Muzrukov

A. F. Joffe

A. I. Alikhanov

M. G. Pervukhin

A. S. Nikiforov

P. A. Cherenkov

N. I. Bochvar

V. G. Khlopin

N. A. Dollezhal

V. S. Emelyanov

I. M. Frank

A. I. Alikhanyan

N. N. Semyonov

S. L. Sobolev

V. I. Alferov

I. F. Tevosyan

M. M. Tsarevsky