Family, early life and education Yulii Borisovich Khariton was born in
Saint Petersburg,
Russian Empire, to an ethnic middle class
Russian Jewish family, on 27 February 1904. His father, Boris Osipovich Khariton, was a
political journalist, editor, and publisher who had attained a
law degree from
Kiev University in Ukraine. His father worked for the newspaper
Rech, the main organ of the
Constitutional Democratic Party, and was a well known figure in the political circles of Russia. His father, Boris Khariton, remained there until
Latvia's
annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940 and, at the age of sixty-four, was then arrested by the
NKVD and sentenced to seven years of
forced labour in a
Gulag, where he died. Yulii's mother never returned to Russia and divorced his father, only to marry her psychiatrist, Dr.
Max Eitingon. Yulii was home schooled by his Estonian housekeeper, hired by his father, who taught him the
German language. During
World War II, Khariton's knowledge of the physics of explosions was used in experimental studies on Soviet and foreign weaponry, while continuing his leadership of the Institute of Chemical Physics. Physicist
Igor Kurchatov asked Khariton to become part of the Soviet atomic project in 1943, in Laboratory No. 2 of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. In May 1945, as part of a team of physicists sent to Berlin to investigate Nazi atomic bomb research, Khariton found 100 tonnes of uranium oxide, which was transported back to Moscow; this reduced development time for domestic plutonium production. After the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Special Committee was established including Kurchatov and Khariton. Khariton was made scientific director of
KB-11 (design bureau-11) also known as Arzamas-16 and colloquially as the 'Installation', located in the closed city of
Sarov,
Nizhny Novgorod Oblast to develop Soviet nuclear weapons (the organisation is now known as the
All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF). Khariton remained as its scientific director for 46 years. Along with other senior scientists, he was regarded as too important to fly and had his own private train carriage. He was elected as a corresponding member of the
Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946, and as a full member in 1953. His diplomacy meant absorbing criticism and put-downs from political leaders who came and went. KB-11 was sometimes sneered at for having a significant number of staff with Jewish backgrounds, Khariton included. The second Installation under
Yevgeny Zababakhin had fewer, and there had been awkward professional relations; it was comically referred to as "Egypt" by politicians, with obvious comparative implications with KB-11: the dining room at KB-11 was termed 'the synagogue.' ==Awards and legacy==