Who was Irina Zaslavskaya?

It’s no exaggeration to say that the AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives contains thousands of group portraits; we currently have 7,159 images tagged with “portraits, group,” and possibly more group portraits that are not tagged. Many group portraits tend to be... a bit stiff. They’re important! But not always the most lively. Important because they often show who attended schools and conferences together, who might have been colleagues, and other “who’s who” type information. Sometimes, they represent the only image we might have of a particular scientist. Many of these group portraits can be pretty formal in nature, rigid seas of faces that might give some indication of the personalities of the subjects or their rapport with one another, but not as much as one might hope for. (I’m looking at you, Members of AAS at the 45th meeting . Sidenote – I think the photographer must have called out: gentlemen in the front row, please take off your hats!) To be fair to some of these older portraits, older photography technology required people to stand very still for photographs for long periods because the shutter was slow and any movement would cause the photo to blur.

This is not to say that all of our group portraits of schools and conferences are stiff and formal – far from it. However, when I came across this particular group portrait, everyone looked so jovial and pleased to be there that I was intrigued, particularly by the woman with her hands tucked under her chin.

Since it is Women’s History Month, and because we have been working to identify women in our photo collection, I decided to find out more about her. For this image, we happily have everyone in the photo identified in our metadata, which is not always the case, and she is identified as Irina Zaslavskaya. Great start! You may have noticed that there is another woman in this photo, Olga Pakhomova. She is identified in the description, along with her occupation (“an experimenter from the spectroscopic department”), so I decided to keep my focus on Irina.

The search

By using her linked subject term in our metadata, I found two other images with Irina Zaslavskaya, both taken at the same event and probably on the same day (our metadata says “May 1955”).

I tried to find out more about her with my librarian sleuthing skills...and found exactly nothing. Zilch. I had an intuitive sense that there was more to her story, though. I just had to find out more!

I went back to our only source of information: the photo’s metadata. From the description, I knew that she must have an affiliation with the Institute of Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. And not definitely, but maybe, she was Ukrainian. While sometimes women who appear in our photos are the family members of scientists, when I first examined the photo, I thought that this did not seem to be the case. This information is not called out in the metadata, no one shares her last name, and something about her position and posture in the three photos makes her appear more on friendly, collegial terms with the other subjects rather than intimately familial. While none of this precludes her from being a family member, I thought it was more likely that she herself was a physicist. However! I was wrong about there being no familial connection, as we will later see.

To find out more about her, I decided to try searching for her name in Ukrainian, with the help of Google Translate: Ірина Заславська, plus the word “physics” in Ukrainian: фізика. This gave me results! Unfortunately, they were all in Ukrainian, as one might expect, and some in Russian. Fortunately, Google Translate again came to my aid, as well as one of our AIP historians, Anna Doel , who can read Ukrainian and Russian.

From the Ukrainian and Russian sources, it quickly became evident that not only was Irina Zaslavskaya a physicist, but she also played an important role in Ukrainian history, which ultimately affected her ability to participate in physics as a career.
Who was Irina Zaslavskaya?

According to her Ukrainian Wikipedia article , which is mostly based on a Ukrainian encyclopedia entry , Irina Georgievna Zaslavskaya was born on July 7, 1927 in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, then part of the USSR. For the rest of this post, I will take the liberty of calling her just by her first name, Irina. While I could not find out anything about her childhood, we know that she graduated from Kyiv University in 1951. Her husband, Yuriy Tsekhmistrenko, was also a physicist. He appears in that first photo , seated just to the right of Irina (I was wrong! She does appear to be looking fondly at him). I wasn’t able to find out when they married, but from our photograph date, they at least knew each other in 1955.

In 1965, she was awarded the degree “Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences,” which is roughly equivalent to an American PhD. At some point, presumably after her graduation, she got a job at the V. E. Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics, NAS of Ukraine, as a researcher in the field of physics. The only information I could find about her work had to do with her dismissal from the job in 1968. Why was she dismissed? To answer this question, we must enter the world of Ukrainian political history in the 1960s.

Politics come to play

The 1960s were a turbulent time in Ukraine, which was then under Soviet rule as part of the USSR. The Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s to mid-1960s gave USSR citizens more freedom from censorship and repression than they had under Stalin in previous decades. A group of young intellectuals who espoused Ukrainian nationalism in opposition of decades of Russification, known as the Sixtiers , emerged during the 60s, and Irina was one of them. However, in 1965 and 1966, the KGB ordered a purge of the intellectuals associated with the Sixtiers movement, leading to approximately 200 arrests. Irina was not among those arrested, but she did take action!

In 1968, Irina, her physicist husband Yuriy Tsekhmistrenko , poet Ivan Svitlychny (featured in the stamp above), literary scholar Ivan Dzyuba, and mathematician Mykhailo Biletsky organized what is now known as the 139 Letter, so named because 139 Ukrainian intellectuals signed the letter. Also known as the Kyiv Letter, it was written as a protest to the arrests that took place in 1965 and 1966. Other notable figures who signed the letter include artists Alla Horska and Halyna Sevruk as well as writer and journalist Viktor Nekrasov . Irina delivered the letter herself, in person, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow.

In July of 1968, the KGB ordered Irina Zaslavskaya’s dismissal from her job at the Institute of Semiconductors of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, a direct result of the letter. Additionally, her husband Yuriy was forbidden from defending his finished doctoral dissertation in physics. Sadly, Irina never had a permanent position in physics again.vii Her friend, artist Alla Horska who signed the 139 Letter, was murdered in 1970 under mysterious circumstances, which are now tentatively attributed to the KGB. Irina (and presumably Yuriy) raised Horska’s son, Oleksii Zaretsky, after her death. Irina also participated in artistic activities. According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine , using sketches by V. Zaretsky ,“in 1974–1975, I. Zaslavskaya created an authorized mosaic at the Consulate General of Poland and a collage at the Consulate General of Czechoslovakia.” She died on March 9, 1976, at age 47.

The Emmanuel Rashba connection

Besides the Internet, our catalog, and other catalogs and databases, I did consult one other important source to find out as much as I could about Irina Zavslavskaya, this interesting woman physicist on whom no English sources can be found: I looked at our donor file for the collection. The photos were donated by Emmanuel Rashba , a Ukrainian-American physicst, and the file contained email correspondence between Rashba and Niels Bohr Library & Archives staff. It also happened to answer another question I had: why we seemed to be the only English-language institution I could find with anything about Irina Zavslavskaya.

From the files, I learned that the assistant librarian and photo administrator of the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA) at the time of the donation, Heather Lindsay, received a digital scan of the image of Michael Dudley Sturge that Rashba had submitted to use for Sturge’s obituary . Physics Today magazine, which published the obituary, gave the photograph of Sturge to the ESVA, and Heather asked for Rashba to approve the photo’s inclusion in the archives.

At this point, she also asked Rashba if he had other photos he might wish to donate to the ESVA. He replied with enthusiasm and supplied us with several photos, along with identifications and comments. Apparently, he wanted to keep his prints, so he asked that his photographs be copied for inclusion in the ESVA, and originals returned to him. He supplied lots of identifications and commentary, making the Rashba Collection all the more valuable to researchers.

While I did not learn anything new about Irina Zavslavskaya from the donor file, besides confirming her identification in our photos through Rashba’s correspondence, I did find this interesting bit of physics history that he wrote, which explains the existence of the Institute of Physics in Kyiv, the place near where the three photos with Irina were taken in May 1955.

-Emmanuel Rashba, September 2004, AIP donor file correspondence

This research journey taught me more than I bargained for about Ukrainian history, donor relations, and the ins and outs of Google Translate. I would like to heartily thank Anna Doel for her support, linguistic and otherwise–this post would not exist without her.

If you have further information about Irina Zaslavskaya or would otherwise like to comment on this post, email us at nbl@aip.org.

References

• Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. (1996-2026.) “ARRESTS OF THE UKRAINIAN INTELLIGENTSIA, 1965.” https://museum.khpg.org/en/1162994453
• Kurlander, David. (10 March2022.) “‘Like a Cold Serpent’: Vyacheslav Chornovil and Cold War Ukrainian Dissidence.”CAFE. https://cafe.com/article/like-a-cold-serpent-vyacheslav-chornovil-and-cold-war-ukrainian-dissidence/
• Petrenko, Igor. (5 October2011.) “Quantum of Understanding.” Tyzhnya. https://tyzhden.ua/kvant-rozuminnia/
  
  • Interview with physicist Vladyslav Olkhovsky, a former student of Yuriy Tsekhmistrenko
• “To the 30th Anniversary of Independence of Ukraine.” (2021.) ISSN 1819-7329.Svitoglyad. No. 4 (90). P. 40
  
  • Section by Vitaly Bondar confirms Irina’s profession in physics and her delivery of the Letter 139.
• Tromly, Benjamin (10 September 2009.) “An Unlikely National Revival: Soviet Higher Learning and the Ukrainian “Sixtiers,” 1953–65" . The Russian Review.68(4): 607–622. doi :10.1111/j.1467-9434.2009.00541.x .ISSN 0036-0341 .
• Zaslavska Iryna Georgievna/ N. O. Virchenko// Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine [Electronic resource] / editors: I. M. Dzyuba, A. I. Zhukovsky, M. G. Zheleznyak [and others]; NAS of Ukraine, National Research School. – Kyiv: Institute of Encyclopedic Research of NAS of Ukraine, 2010. – Access mode: https://esu.com.ua/article-15652 .