May 11, 2020
Victory Day - Remembering WWII Veterans
On May 9, Russia celebrated Victory Day, the holiday that commemorates the end of World War II. No other country suffered greater loss of life and destruction as the Soviet Union. Even after 75 years the exact number of military and civil casualties remains unknown. Over 62,000 people were called to the front from Yakutia alone, which had a pre-war population of 413,800, with more than half killed in action.
Many from the first generation of Soviet permafrost scientists fought on the battlefields of WWII. Petr Shvetsov, the author of three chapters in "Principles of Geocryology" (1959), volunteered to the Red Army in the early days of the war and took part in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and the Operation Bagration. Evgeny Katasonov, who developed the cryofacies method in 1954, was wounded and captured in August 1941 when his regiment was encircled near the border with Poland. In June 1944 he escaped from the POW camp and joined the partisans in Slovakia and later the regular troops of the Red Army. Egor Molochushkin, who studied subsea permafrost in the Laptev Sea in the 1960s, was drafted to the Army in summer 1942 at the age of 19. He was badly wounded at the battle of Kursk where he fought as a private in the Rifles. Igor Nekrasov, who led large-scale regional permafrost studies all over Siberia in the 1960s-1980s, took command of an engineer platoon in January 1945 and met the victory day on the Oder. Nikolay Grigoriev, known for his pioneer investigations of the Arctic coastal permafrost, was assigned to Ferrying Division 78727-K in 1943 to conduct site investigations and construct auxiliary airfields for the ALSIB route. Nikolay Ivanov, the author of landmark books on heat and mass transfer in permafrost, served in communications units of the military airports in Yakutia and Magadan Region during the entire war.
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| Igor Nekrasov (1926–1989) |
Evgeny Katasonov (1921–1988) |
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| Nikolay Ivanov (1923-1991) |
Egor Molochushkin (1923-1976) |
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| Petr Shvetsov (1910-1992) |
Nikolay Grigoriev (1911-2005) |