Boris Rauschenbach: biography and photos

Academician Boris Victorovich Raushenbach is a Soviet and Russian scientist of world renown, one of the founders of cosmonautics in the USSR. Being a physicist, he was not limited to this specialization. Boris Viktorovich belongs to the scientific works in the field of art history, the history of religion, as well as publicistic works on many contemporary issues that have gained great popularity throughout the world. He directed the movement of the Germans in Russia for the revival of nationality.

Biography of the scientist

Boris Rauschenbach was born in Petrograd (St. Petersburg today) on January 18, 1905 in the family of Russian Germans.

After school, the young man got a job at the aviation plant in Leningrad. The specifics of the plant played a role in his future destiny: in 1932 he became a student of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Fleet Engineers, began to get involved in gliding. The hobby led to an acquaintance with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, and in the future also to cooperation with him in the rocket and space fields of Soviet science.

In 1937, Rauschenbach moved to the capital to work in the collective of the Rocket Research Institute, which was headed by Sergei Korolyov. So Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach, photo and whose name subsequently remained a taboo for the public, joined the ranks of the founders of Soviet cosmonautics.

Then there was a job at the defense plant in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg today), where in November 1941 the Rocket Research Institute (RNII) was evacuated.

In the spring of 1942, Rauschenbach was arrested and sent to the camp only for the fact that he was German. In the labor camp, Boris Viktorovich continues to work on the homing anti-aircraft missile, the calculations of his flight. This was noticed by the famous aircraft designer Viktor Bolkhovitinov. Thanks to him in 1945 Rauschenbach was transferred to Nizhny Tagil to the position of a special settler.

In 1948, with the help of the new head of the RNII Mstislav Keldysh, Rauschenbach received the post of the department head at the Research Institute of the Ministry of Aviation Industry.

In 1955, Rauschenbach passes to Sergei Korolev, where he is the first in the world to begin to focus on the orientation and movement of space vehicles.

The Rauschenbach family and its origin

As Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach said, his family appeared in Russia in the 18th century. In 1766, Empress Catherine II organized a campaign to resettle the Germans to Russia. Thanks to this policy, the ancestor of the scientist Karl-Friedrich Rauschenbach and his wife in the Volga region appeared.

The father of the scientist, Victor Yakovlevich (the patronymic came from the name of the grandfather of Jacob), was from the Volga region, the region where a colony for German immigrants was being formed at the time. Educated in Germany, after which he worked as a technical manager at the Skorokhod tannery.

According to the memoirs of Boris Viktorovich, his father was a very kind, forgiving person. When the boy grew up, Victor Yakovlevich in every way brought up in him a sense of pride for German origin. At the same time he did it excellently.

The mother of Rauschenbach, Leontya Friedrichovna (in the Russian way - Feodorovna) Gallik, was from Estonia (the island of Saaremaa), the origin of the Baltic German. I knew four languages - Russian, German, French and Estonian, which further promoted her employment in Russia in a rich family of bonny. After marriage, she becomes a housewife.

Mother was very strict, but fair educator, although by nature - a cheerful, energetic and cheerful person. This she brought up in her children (Boris had sister Karin-Elena) the ability not to lose heart in difficult everyday situations, which in the future helped them. Boris Rauschenbach, whose biography was full of such situations, was able to live worthily his bright life.

Boris Rauschenbach is fifteen years old deprived of his father: he dies at the age of sixty years from heart failure.

My mother died after the war. Mother's loss to her mother was very painful for him, as evidenced by his letters to his sister, whom she had saved.

Personal life

His fate, Vera Mikhailovna, Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach met in Moscow, where he moved in 1937, as the shipbuilding and marine industry in Leningrad did not interest him. At that time, a wave of arrests was rolling around the country, and Rauschenbach-the German could easily find himself in the camps. These factors prompted the young scientist to move to the capital, where no one knew him.

Soon to Boris in the apartment where he lived with his comrades, they settled the girl Vera. Vera Mikhailovna was born in Kramatorsk (Ukraine). I came to Moscow to study. Before settling, she lived with her uncle, who held a high post. However, on May 19 he was arrested, then shot, and the girl was evicted. So Vera was in the apartment where Rauschenbach lived.

Young people were married on the eve of the war, May 24, 1941. According to Rauschenbach himself, their registration was accurately described in Ilf and Petrov's 12 chairs. It was funny ... Since that time they have not parted, even when Boris Viktorovich was in labor camp (his wife often visited).

As Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach believed, personal life developed successfully, despite life's troubles. They have wonderful children and grandchildren. Some people were surprised that, for so many years, Vera Mikhailovna was his only wife.

Path to space

As a scientist, Rauschenbach Boris Viktorovich showed himself at the Leningrad Aviation Plant No. 23, where he was engaged in the construction and testing of gliders. The work contributed to the writing of the first scientific articles, the topic of which was the longitudinal stability of tailless aircraft. The same topic Boris Raushenbach was engaged in and RNII Queen, only now this work related to cruise missiles.

In 1938, the project was closed due to the arrest of the Queen, and Rauschenbach re-directed to air-jet engines, the theory of their combustion.

The Gulag did not become an obstacle for the scientist: in the camp he is working on a self-guided anti-aircraft missile, which in the future helped him to leave the camp, become a special settler and continue his work for the RNII.

In 1948, thanks to the new head of the Rocket Research Institute Mstislav Keldysh, Rauschenbach returned to Moscow, where he was engaged in direct-flow engines in NII-1, namely vibrational combustion and acoustic oscillations in this type of engine.

In 1955, Boris Viktorovich went to work for the Queen, where he as a scientist had a unique opportunity - for the first time in the world to conduct work related to the orientation and movement of vehicles in space. Subsequently, thanks to his work, the Moon was photographed on the far side of the moon by the Soviet spacecraft Luna-3. In 1960, Rauschenbach's merit was awarded the Lenin Prize.

In 1958, Boris Viktorovich defended his doctoral dissertation (Candidate was defended in 1948).

Less than ten years it took the scientist to implement the systems for orienting the flight of interplanetary stations "Venus", "Mars", "Zond", spacecraft in automatic and manual mode.

Rauschenbah Boris Viktorovich, whose biography was firmly connected with the cosmos, also took an active part in the preparation and implementation of the flight of the first cosmonaut of the planet Yuri Gagarin.

In 1966, Boris Viktorovich was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (AN), and twenty years later he became a full member of the Academy of Sciences.

Iconography and Rauschenbach

Somehow the scientist jokingly said that he can not deal with a scientific topic, if more than a dozen other scientists are already working on it. And he, in parallel with work on space, began to be interested in all that contains something new, not yet known, such as art, iconography.

Boris Rauschenbach, whose passion for history was manifested as a child, loved to travel a lot, especially in cities with an ancient history. Gradually, but thoroughly in the scholar began to appear interest in icons. The fact that he was embarrassed by the way of transferring space in them, called "reverse perspective", is illogical and contrary to the known rules of photography.

Interest in the reverse perspective was also associated with the solution of the tasks of docking vehicles in space.

The scientist began to investigate this phenomenon. At the same time, he took into account the work of the eyes and brain. To do this, he had to do a mathematical description of the brain. As a result, Rauschenbach came to the conclusion that all these strange icons are natural and inevitable.

As Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach believed, iconography represents a different reality than that seen by a person due to a certain device of the eyes. As a result, the icon makes us believe that in reality the world is much more perfect and better.

Raushenbach was sure that it was impossible to understand the icons without knowing theology. And he began to study theology, even wrote something in this area, in particular about the Trinity ("The Logic of Trinity").

Road to Orthodoxy

Boris Rauschenbach at baptism in 1915 was recorded by the faith of his father - the Reformed. At that time, about 20% of Russian Germans belonged to this faith.

It should be noted that the Reformed, unlike the Lutherans, do not recognize icons, do not use the sign of the cross. But later the decrees of Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I reformed and Lutherans were united into one church, and Boris went with his mother to the Lutheran church, although there was a Reformed temple in the city. However, for unknown reasons, Rauschenbach did not become a member of the Reformed Church, although respect for her, her image preserved.

The desire for religion Boris Viktorovich felt after the camp. He began to visit the Orthodox church, got the appropriate literature, began to follow the services in the church, but the baptism was only shortly before his death.

Rauschenbach recalled that, with the successful development of his system during the launch of the next spacecraft, he always got up and made the sign of the cross.

During ceremonial receptions in the Kremlin on the occasion of the launch of the first spacecraft, Boris Viktorovich was the only person present who approached invited representatives of the Orthodox Church, which, of course, did not fit into the protocol of the event.

Raushenbakh Boris Viktorovich, whose books and articles were widely disseminated, did not share in them the existing systems of cognition of the world - religious and scientific. He believed that their synthesis was ripe.

In 1987, in the journal Kommunist, Academician Rauschenbach published an article dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus. In it, the scientist pointed out the significance of this event for the Russian state. The August issue of the Communist was immediately sold out, even in the booth of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Several years later, another work of the academician - "The Logic of Trinity" - was published. The article caused a certain reaction, the echoes of which have been heard so far.

Rauschenbach about the Trinity

Boris Rauschenbach about the Trinity had his own opinion, which he cites in the book "The Logic of the Three". In his opinion, the church in its teaching gave an impeccably correct solution to the problem facing it - the expression of God simultaneously in the form of both a triad and a monad.

The scientist draws attention to the fact that the modern presentation of the foundations of the Orthodox faith looks like a departure from the creed, for it says that in the Trinity every face is God. This is also what prayers say.

Boris Rauschenbach, whose "logic of trinity" is an attempt to understand the discussion of Fr Floriski and E. N. Trubetskoi about the triune unity of God, approaches this from the standpoint of science. It should be noted that even under the Soviet regime, the scientist begins to be interested in theological themes, despite the militant atheism prevailing in those years.

He is interested in whether it is impossible to directly accept the concepts of the creed that Father Florensky quotes, but to bind them to a certain logical model. If this proves possible, the person will believe in God, and not in existing absurdities, though not without some logic.

Surprisingly, Rauschenbach found a mathematical model that explains the logic of the symbol of faith, its trinitarian dogma. This model was a vector and its three components in a three-dimensional coordinate system.

The task was solved: the doctrine of trinity (Trinity) began to correspond to formal logic. This event can be compared to a bomb explosion. Of course, the "Logic of the Trinity" is fundamental, but it has not put an end to the knowledge of God, since God-knowledge is inherently infinite.

A citizen of his country

Raushenbakh Boris Viktorovich, books whose articles were often permeated with alarm for the fate of their country and the world, could not calmly watch what was happening around him. Today's poverty of the Russian people, the poverty of science caused him pain and inner indignation. He did not understand the lack of funds from the state to finance education, science, while in the country there was an open enrichment of a certain category of people.

Gaidar's "shock therapy" for Boris Viktorovich, the highest professional of science, art, economics, has become an example of the lack of professionalism in the country's leadership. Rauschenbach believed that Russia must find a way out of the impasse, which is the least painful for Russians.

"Dark thoughts" by Rauschenbach

In his last article "Dark thoughts" Boris Rauschenbach reflects on the future of all mankind, showing himself as not only a citizen of Russia, but also a citizen of the whole planet Earth.

The very title of the article speaks about the nature of these reflections. In it, Rauschenbach separates the concept of democracy from the democratic chatter that prevails in the modern world. And for Russia, he does not make exceptions.

The author draws attention to the fact that all the greatest crimes were committed under democratic slogans, while democratic chatterboxes often did not understand by their stupidity, that they represent the interests of forces far from the people.

In his work, the academician proposes to return to traditional human values, namely, the family, the community. He believes that the duties of people must be higher than their rights. Rauschenbach believed that only this way would save mankind from doom. The other is not given. In addition, the scientist believes that the government of the whole planet should be created, whose policy will be tough, but highly professional.

All of the last century, according to Rauschenbach, humanity moved in the opposite direction, remaking itself and nature. And, unfortunately, there are very few people who are able to open their eyes to people's mistakes of the past and the present, which so far do not see the end.

Conclusion

Boris Rauschenbach passed away on March 27, 2001. His grave is on the Novodevichy Cemetery.

The scientist died on the Feodorovskaya Icon of the Mother of God. The funeral was held in the Nikolo-Kuznetsk temple. This was the will of an outstanding Soviet and Russian scientist.

In his person, humanity lost one of its geniuses, a citizen of the planet Earth.

On the value of the scientist's contribution to the science and culture of Russia, his titles and awards are spoken. Rauschenbach was a full member of three academies (RAS, International Academy of Astronautics and Tsiolkovsky Academy of Cosmonautics). He was awarded the Lenin and Demidov Prizes, as well as the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Supervised the Scientific Council "History of World Culture" of the Russian Academy of Sciences.