Nuclear physics in Russia
Russian nuclear physics predates the Bolshevik Revolution by more than a decade. Work on radioactive minerals found in central Asia began in 1900 and the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences began a large-scale investigation in 1909. The 1917 Revolution gave a boost to scientific research and over 10 physics institutes were established in major Russian towns, particularly St Petersburg, in the years which followed. In the 1920s and early 1930s many prominent Russian physicists worked abroad, encouraged by the new regime initially as the best way to raise the level of expertise quickly. These included Kirill Sinelnikov, Pyotr Kapitsa and Vladimir Vernadsky.
By the early 1930s there were several research centres specialising in nuclear physics. Kirill Sinelnikov returned from Cambridge in 1931 to organise a department at the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology (later renamed Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, KIPT) in Kharkov, which had been set up in 1928. Academician Abram Ioffe formed another group at the Leningrad Physics and Technical Institute (FTI), later becoming independent as the Ioffe Institute, including the young Igor Kurchatov. At the urging of Kurchatov and his colleagues, the Academy of Sciences set up a "Committee for the Problem of Uranium" in June 1940 chaired by Vitaly Khlopin, and a fund was established to investigate the central Asian uranium deposits.