Marina Dmitrievna Kurchatova

KURCHATOVA Marina Dmitrievna, née Sinelnikova, was a member of the cultural and scientific community surrounding Soviet physics in the first half of the twentieth century, an employee of Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and an early contributor to the preservation of Igor Kurchatov's memorial house.

Marina Sinelnikova was born in Pavlograd, in the former Yekaterinoslav Governorate, into the family of a zemstvo doctor. She completed secondary school and received musical training. Her younger brother, Kirill Sinelnikov, later became a prominent experimental physicist. The family suffered major losses during the Russian Civil War. Following the deaths of their parents, Marina and Kirill found themselves in Simferopol. Marina worked for a consumers' cooperative and subsequently in a department of the Crimean republic's labour administration to support herself and her brother. These experiences formed part of her life before marriage.

Through Kirill, a student at the Crimean university, Marina met Igor Kurchatov. The two young physicists were friends and worked in the university laboratory; their professional paths would continue to cross. Marina and Igor married in 1927. In the following decades, their lives were shaped by Leningrad, scientific travel and, eventually, the Moscow centre of atomic research. Surviving letters between the spouses reveal everyday concerns and the long separations experienced during the war.

Marina's activities extended beyond the household. Documents of the Soviet atomic programme identify her as head of the library of Laboratory No. 2 in 1944. Maintaining scientific books and reference materials was part of the everyday infrastructure of an institution facing complex new research problems. She also retained an interest in music, literature and cultural life.

In November 1946 the couple moved into a specially built house on the laboratory grounds in Moscow's Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo district. Igor called it the 'Forester's Cottage'. The house served as a family home, a place of rest and an informal meeting point for scientists. Members of the atomic project and visiting foreign researchers were received there, and discussion of scientific questions often continued outside the laboratory. Contemporary recollections describe Marina's care for visitors and the domestic atmosphere that made the house an important meeting place for the scientific community.

After Igor Kurchatov's death, Marina remained in the house. Together with his brother Boris, she began arranging a memorial display, gradually preserving the scientist's study and the library-billiard room as exhibition spaces. Before the building had the official status of a museum, she occasionally showed these rooms to visitors, including guests of the institute. Marina died in 1969, and the Kurchatov memorial house opened to the public in January 1970.

Marina's surviving correspondence with her husband and brother has been reproduced in published collections of documents on Soviet atomic science. Her biography illuminates this history through library work, family relationships, cultural life and the deliberate preservation of scientific memory, rather than exclusively through research achievements and state decisions.