N.G. Basov - the genius was there!

Abstract

Nikolai Basov was born on December 14, 1922 in the village of Usman, Tambov province and, perhaps, is the only Nobel Prize winner who was born on the territory of the state called the "Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic". 16 days after his birth, the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSR, as well as the Transcaucasian SFSR, will join the RSFSR and the Great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created. Five years later, the family of Gennady Fedorovich Basov, a professor at the Voronezh Forestry Institute, a specialist in the impact of forest plantations on groundwater and surface drainage, and his wife, Zinaida Andreevna Molchanova, finally moved to Voronezh. I must say that Nikolai Gennadievich's path from the beginning of higher education to the scientific breakthrough that brought the Nobel Prize was exceptionally fast, the fastest for a Soviet physicist. However, higher education itself had to wait: when Nikolai turned 19, the Great Patriotic War began. It was at the Kuibyshev Medical Academy that he was trained as a doctor's assistant and from 1943 went to the First Ukrainian Front, reaching Prague with him. Surprisingly, both Soviet laser creators went through the most brutal war and, nevertheless, survived!