Their names are in the history of the Institute

In memory of an engineer and a man

On 25 June, at the entrance to the IBR-2 reactor building, the opening of the square named after the outstanding specialist in the field of reactor technology, the first chief engineer of the IBR-2 pulsed reactor Vladimir D.Ananiev was held. He worked in FLNP for almost 60 years - from 1959 to 2017. The representatives of JINR Directorate, FLNP Directorate, the FLNP staff and colleagues from Moscow gathered at the ceremony in front of the entrance to the IBR-2 building.

Opening the ceremony, FLNP Director Egor Lychagin said, "Today is a wonderful occasion to perpetuate the memory of a person that made a great contribution to the development of the Laboratory, without which FLNP would not be what it is today. Vladimir Dmitrievich Ananiev would have turned 90 this year and we decided to coincide the opening of the square with the 65th anniversary of the launch of the first IBR reactor. On the eve, Evgeny Shabalin more than once recalled Vladimir Ananiev speaking at the seminar dedicated to this date."

"I would like to warmly congratulate everyone on this wonderful event on behalf of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries and Directorate," JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov addressed the participants. "It was precisely by the decision of the checkpoint, adopted unanimously and warmly supported by the staff of the Institute that the square was named after V.D.Ananiev." G.V.Trubnikov recalled the initiative of the first director of JINR D.I.Blokhintsev to build a pulsed reactor - a globally unique physical device, about the merits of the Laboratory, about the path of V.D.Ananiev - from the Chief Engineer of the IBR-2 project, the Chief Engineer of the reactor and since 1986 - the Chief Engineer of FLNP. He also shared his personal memories: "Working in the Service of the Chief Engineer, I had the good fortune to communicate with Vladimir Dmitrievich, to draw experience. I saw him until his very last days cycling to work. This is the attractiveness of Dubna for the young: here you can meet on the embankment or in the store and easily talk to an academician or a leading engineer. Vladimir Dmitrievich was a prominent representative of this amazing scientific Dubna. Many thanks to everyone who works for the benefit of FLNP and the Institute!"

"Today is a very important day for me and our family," V.D.Ananieva's daughter Anna Vladimirovna said. "I am very grateful to Directorate of the Institute and the Laboratory, to everyone who took part in this wonderful holiday. Thank you for your appreciation of my father's work, for him it was the meaning of life. Special thanks to Evgeny Shabalin for loyalty to friendship with my father. He was always next to Vladimir Dmitrievich and was his ally. Thank you all for the memory."

Evgeny Shabalin thanked all those who came and said, "I came to the Laboratory three weeks later than Volodya and he was a year and three months older than me, so I was in the role of a younger brother. He taught me life, I did not immediately understand it but I perceived it completely normal. He and I had a different attitude to the reactor development strategy, but this is the case when plus and minus gave a plus. I constantly generated different ideas, sometimes, stupid ones and Volodya always soberly evaluated them, easily weeding out everything unnecessary. He was appointed Chief Engineer of the IBR-2 project at the age of 31! His main features were reliability, thoroughness, work without risk. This manifested itself in the fact that he was forced to follow various prescriptions but after an incident, his attitude changed slightly." On a hike in Altai in 1973, Ananiev was on duty in the kitchen and cooked millet porridge for everyone strictly in accordance with the indicated proportions. As a result, it was impossible to stick a spoon into a bucket of porridge, it could only be cut with a knife.

Egor Lychagin presented the colleagues from NIKIET (Moscow) as follows - our friends that were lucky enough or perhaps, had to work with FLNP all their lives, to be deeply involved in the IBR-2 project. "We at NIKIET all support this decision on the name of the square, Vladimir Dmitrievich completely deserves it," I.T.Tretyakov approved the decision of his colleagues. "I regard my cooperation with him from the late 1980s - early 1990s as a great success. People that meet in our lives leave different traces in the soul. From communicating with Vladimir Dmitrievich, I got the impression that I work with a person and an engineer with a capital letter that knows how and loves to work. He could direct a heated argument in a positive track, to the right decision. Colleagues of our age at NIKIET recall him as an exemplary chief engineer of a research reactor. In my opinion, he is the Chief Engineer with the unsurpassed authority of everyone I know. And such a commemorative plaque about Vladimir Dmitrievich was already in my heart." "I have known Vladimir Dmitrievich for a long time, since the early 1970s," V.D.Sizarev recalled. "We began to cooperate on the reliability and durability of the movable reactor reflector. For me, V.D.Ananiev was an idol: he possessed encyclopedic knowledge, he graduated from school with a gold medal, the Moscow Power Engineering Institute - with honors. A thermophysicist by profession, he took on our strength tasks and met them, he had a very developed intuition. Vladimir Dmitrievich was a fan of his business and a surprisingly modest person, did not fight for titles. By the number of publications, in my opinion, he had material for two doctoral theses.

He was talented in everything, even in arranging the country house. He behaved equally, communicating with academicians and ordinary employees. It's great that they installed a board with a bas-relief, the area should not be faceless, maybe it's worth creating a monument? You have a sculptural group at the laboratory building."

Viktor Aksenov worked with V.D.Ananiev during the modernization of the IBR-2 reactor. "Indeed, today is a holiday for us - to remember an outstanding engineer. In the last decade of the last century, we were engaged in the design and development of essentially a new reactor - IBR-2M. Then, he was no longer afraid to go beyond the established instructions, there was already an understanding that otherwise, it was impossible to achieve progress. I happened to work in three institutes with research reactors - FLNP, SRC "Kurchatov Institute", PNPI, far from the last in this topic, yet I have never met a more qualified engineer, a deeper personality. In memory of him, the name of the square is the right thing to do. It is necessary to bring schoolchildren here and to talk about our friend - Vladimir Dmitrievich Ananiev."

Olga TARANTINA,
photo by Igor LAPENKO