The First Russian President of IUPAC: Victor Kondratiev by Elena Zaitseva-Baum
V
ictor Nikolaevitch Kondratiev was elected a member of the Bureau, the Executive Committee and the Editorial Board of IUPAC at the beginning of the XXIst International Conference in Montreal, in August of 1961. He succeeded Boris A. Kazanski (1891-1973) who had resigned. At this time the Academy of Science of USSR was the national adhering body in IUPAC since 1930. As a full member of the USSR Academy of Science (1953) Kondratiev was indeed a world-renowned scientist at that time. He began his scientific work in Petrograd (known as Leningrad since 1924) in the Physical-Technical Radiological Institute where he designed the first spectrometer for research purposes in the USSR. In 1925 he was trained by James Franck at the Physical Institute of the University of Gottingen where he mastered the spectroscopic methods and studied photochemical reactions. Later, Kondratiev’s main scientific activity was associated with the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Academy of Science of USSR (Institut khimicheskoĭ fiziki, Leningrad), located in Moscow after 1943 and established by the Nobel laureate Nikolaï N. Semenov (1896-1986) in 1931. As a corresponding member of Academy of Science of USSR (1943), Kondratiev held the position of the deputy director of this Institute beginning in 1948. His most famous works were devoted to the investigation of elementary processes during chemical transformations in the gaseous phase. Kondratiev’s career and his international contacts explain why the scientist was immediately elected at the Bureau. He was also involved in the Commission on Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy
Kondratiev’s portrait—date unknown. Photo from the archives of the Institute of Chemical Physics RAS.
(CMSS) as associate member from 1963 on. In 1965, owing to Kondratiev’s efforts, the 20th IUPAC Congress was held in the USSR (Moscow, 12-18 July) for the first time. Under his supervision as chairman of the Soviet Organizing Committee, 570 proposals were selected out of the 760 submitted. Kondratiev who was elected IUPAC vice-president some days before this congress at the IUPAC general assembly in Paris (2-9 July), was elected president in 1967 for a two year term. The scientist also took part in founding CODATA (1966) as an interdisciplinary Committee of ICSU. Notably, he participated in a special Task Group of this Committee, established in 1969, and his most important initiative was the foundation of the special kinetic section within the Task Group [1]. As president of the IUPAC, Kondratiev brought up the question about the composition of Division Committees and Commissions (memoranda 1967 and 1969). The Memorandum (from left to right) Nikolaï N. Semenov, Cyril N.Hinshelwood, Victor N. Kondratiev written in 1967 contained two main proposals: “(1) that each in 1956. Photo from the archives of the Institute of Chemical Physics RAS. Chemistry International
July-September 2019
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