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Freedom in Equation: repressed or murdered Ukrainian scientists

The heroes of the exhibition are scientists from Ukraine, who had all the qualities needed for a Nobel Prize. While success is never guaranteed, they were talented, persistent, and brilliant. Yet, years of suppression — from Soviet-era repressions to russia’s invasion of independent Ukraine — prevented them from realizing their full potential.

Volodymyr Kolkunov

At the end of the 19th century, the territory of modern Ukraine was struck by severe droughts and dust storms. During those same years, the future crop breeder Volodymyr Kolkunov studied law in Kyiv. The hunger and suffering caused by the droughts affected him so profoundly that he wrote poems about it. Ultimately, he never became a lawyer or a poet but instead became one of the finest agriculturists of his time.

Kolkunov studied agronomy in Kyiv and began working on adapting plants to arid conditions. While still a student, he achieved his first results on the causes of grain crop resilience. He focused primarily on plant structure, anatomy, and cell characteristics. Kolkunov selected plants with smaller cells that were less prone to losing significant amounts of water through evaporation. In this way, he improved the properties of clover, peas, beets, and other critical agricultural plants.

From his student years, Volodymyr Kolkunov held an active civic stance: he protested harmful educational reforms and participated in social and professional movements. When the revolution of 1917 began, he did not hide his views that did not support the Bolsheviks. "...Nothing will come of your cooperation and collectivization...," Kolkunov wrote in one of his articles. He considered collectivization a new form of serfdom. He was detained several times, but the exact reasons and charges remain unknown. Although Kolkunov managed to survive, he had to leave Ukraine and ended his scientific career.

Vasyl Kladko

Vasyl Kladko was 65 in 2022 when he was killed. Since the late Soviet era, he had studied solid-state physics, worked with semiconductors and X-ray optics, and investigated X-ray interactions. His most significant scientific achievements related to various cases of X-ray scattering. Vasyl served as the deputy director at the Institute of Semiconductor Physics.

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vasyl returned to the village of Vorzel near Bucha to evacuate his family. While his loved ones managed to escape, Vasyl was at home when Russian forces occupied the area. Russian soldiers shot him dead in his yard.

The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine wrote about Vasyl Kladko: “He contributed significantly to developing the physical and physical-technical foundations of semiconductor nanostructure formation. He had ambitious plans for reviving the electronic industry in Ukraine.”

Valentyna Radzymovska

Valentyna Radzymovska studied the influence of acid-alkaline balance on living cells, the general pathology of tuberculosis, and children's physiology. Her doctoral dissertation examined cell survival outside the body under varying acidic conditions, laying the foundation for future work in artificial insemination and virus research.

During the 1921 famine in Ukraine, she developed an electrode to measure the acidity of isolated animal cells. Her extensive experiments, involving over 1,200 dishes of cultured rabbit cells, led to publications in leading German and British scientific journals.

Radzymovska worked on tuberculosis when the disease was hugely widespread in the early 20th century. She studied tissue changes caused by tuberculosis and explored rehabilitation methods in an era before antibiotics.

In 1923, she published "Children of the Revolution," a comprehensive study on malnutrition's impact on child development. Based on over 27,000 anthropometric measurements of 6,845 children during the 1922 famine, this work highlighted the severe consequences of social upheaval on children's health.

However, the Soviet regime halted Radzymovska's career. In 1930, she was arrested by the Soviet State Political Directorate during the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine trial (a court trial considered one of the fabricated show trials in the Soviet Union). Although later released, she was dismissed from her research positions. She recovered some of her roles in the mid-1930s and became a physiology professor at the Melitopol Educational Institute from 1939 to 1941.

During World War II, Radzymovska remained in Ukraine under German occupation, holding positions at the Kyiv Clinical Medicine Institute and Lviv University. In 1943, she fled to Germany where she continued her scientific work despite the challenges of displacement and political turmoil until illness made it impossible.

Lev Shubnikov

Although Lev Shubnikov was born and educated in Russian Saint Petersburg, he spent most of his career in Ukrainian Kharkiv, where he pioneered low-temperature physics.

Early in his career, Shubnikov worked at the Laboratory in Leiden, The Netherlands, where, together with Dutch physicist Wander de Haas, he discovered the phenomenon of oscillations in the electron gas in the changing magnetic field. His discoveries are now used in quantum research and for studying two-dimensional materials like graphene. While working at one of the top research institutes in his field, Shubnikov collaborated with leading physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, and Max Planck.

After achieving significant success abroad, Shubnikov returned to the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv. He established and headed a cryogenic laboratory there, achieving remarkable results: he obtained liquid hydrogen and helium, discovered the intermediate state in superconductors in a magnetic field, and worked extensively with magnetic fields in general. Shubnikov was also among the first to detect antiferromagnetism. French scientist Louis Néel was later recognized with a Nobel Prize for his significant contributions to understanding its properties.

Shubnikov never had the chance to explore antiferromagnetism in greater detail. In 1937, he was arrested during Stalin's purges, falsely accused of espionage, and executed shortly after. All of Shubnikov's later papers were published without crediting his authorship.

Volodymyr Pravdych-Neminsky

Pravdych-Neminsky registered the first brain cortex potentials from an intact dog’s skull in 1913. He called the new technique ‘electrocerebrography’ and published his results in mainstream German journals. The term ‘EEG’ was coined by Hans Berger 16 years later in 1929, while all the waves Neminsky had shown in the dog brain were the same.

Unfortunately, Pravdych-Neminsky couldn’t defend his priority. In 1929, he was arrested by the Soviet repressive machine under false pretenses. He lost 20 years of productive research because he was considered an anti-Soviet enemy everywhere he worked. Only in 1949 was he was partly rehabilitated and he continued his scientific work for a few years until his death.

Mykhailo Kravchuk

Mykhailo Kravchuk worked in many fields, with his most outstanding achievements in in probability theory, differential equations, and mathematical statistics. Kravchuk generalized Hermite polynomials, which are now used in mathematical physics and quantum mechanics, and applied the method of moments to specific solutions of differential equations. His work attracted the interest of John Vincent Atanasoff, who created the world's first electronic digital computer.

However, Kravchuk was far from confined to purely academic research: he made immense efforts toward developing Ukrainian mathematics. He was one of the first scholars to teach mathematics in the Ukrainian language, starting in the early 20th century when Ukraine was under the occupation of the Russian Empire and later the USSR. Kravchuk was a pioneer in creating Ukrainian mathematical terminology and scientific language.

People like Mykhailo Kravchuk didn't have a happy fate in the USSR. A year after Atanasoff became acquainted with the Ukrainian mathematician's work, Kravchuk was arrested and never returned to teaching or science. Falsely accused of "nationalism" and "espionage," he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Russia's Far East. There, in Kolyma, 10,000 kilometers from home, in one of the harshest camps, Mykhailo Kravchuk died just three years after his arrest.

Bijan Sharapov

Neurophysiology was Bijan's greatest passion. He studied the TRPV1 protein, which plays a key role in pain sensation — a discovery for which David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian earned the Nobel Prize in 2021.

In addition to his scientific work, Bijan was a prolific science communicator. He conducted hundreds of tours for children at the popular science museum, as well as gave dozens of lectures during science fairs and festivals. However, Russian aggression disrupted Bijan's dedication to science.

Following Russia's invasion of the Donetsk region and Crimea in 2014, he voluntarily joined the military. “I was born in Tajikistan. But everything I am, this land granted me,” he said in an interview. Bijan firmly believed that if Ukrainians did not defend their country immediately, they would lose it. Thus, in 2014–2015, he fought as part of a Ukrainian battalion. He returned to the military when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. In the spring of 2022, Bijan Sharapov was killed in action in the Kharkiv Oblast.

Hanna Zakrevska

Hanna Zakrevska became the first Ukrainian woman to earn a doctorate in geological sciences. She researched the lands of Ukrainian Polissia and the forest steppe, conducted paleontological studies in the region, and explored oil deposits in these areas. Hanna Zakrevska described the only complete skeleton of a female Mammuthus trogontherii in the world, which is now preserved in the museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences in Ukraine.
Stalin's purges got her as well. In 1938, Zakrevska was falsely accused of participating in a Ukrainian nationalist organization and engaging in subversive activities. After months of interrogations and imprisonment, she was released. During World War II, she emigrated to Canada, where, according to scarce reports in the press, she worked "in the medical field."

Liudmyla Shevtsova

Liudmyla Shevtsova dedicated decades to hydrobiology, taught ecology, and worked at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Beginning her career during the Soviet era, she defended her doctoral dissertation at a historic turning point in 1991, when Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union.

Lyudmyla studied the animals inhabiting the bottoms of canals and irrigation systems, primarily in the south of Ukraine. Among her contributions was the development of methods to combat mollusks that settle in irrigation systems.

On January 2, 2024, Russia launched 99 missiles at Ukraine. One of them killed Lyudmyla Shevtsova. Her students remember her as “an excellent teacher” who “not only imparted knowledge but also shaped ecologists into true scientists and defenders of nature.”

Hryhoriy Levytsky

For many decades, classical genetics was considered a pseudoscience and politically incorrect profession in the Soviet Union. Specialists in this field were persecuted, arrested, and repressed simply for staying true to their principles.

Despite this, some Ukrainian scientists managed to contribute to global genetics. Among them was cytogeneticist and botanist Hryhoriy Levytsky. He developed the term “karyotype” and made significant efforts in systematizing chromosomes, studying their evolution and mutations. Levytsky was one of the first to analyze mutations caused by ionizing radiation in plants, which paved the way for further research. In 1946, the Nobel Prize was awarded to American scientist Hermann Muller for his studies on the mutagenic effects of X-ray radiation.

When Muller delivered his Nobel speech, Hryhoriy Levytsky was already dead. In 1933, he was first arrested during a campaign against geneticists. Due to the efforts of the local and global scientific communities, he was released after a year of exile. Still, in 1937, he was arrested again — though once more released relatively quickly. His third arrest in 1941 proved too much for Levytsky, and he died after a year of imprisonment.