by Marina KHALIZEVA Academician Nikolai Khlopkin (1923-2012), whose 90th birth anniversary was marked by the scientific community at the end of 2013, is one of the outstanding persons in national atomic shipbuilding. Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of Lenin and State prizes of the USSR, he was one of the people, who determined the modern image of marine nuclear installations. Built with his participation atomic icebreakers, submarines of four generations and surface ships put Russia in the forefront of the countries, which mastered the World Ocean potential. EARLY YEARS OF LIFE After he had left the secondary school with a certificate of merit in Petushki (Vladimir Region) in 1940, Khlopkin entered the Heat Power Engineering Department of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. But his studies were interrupted by an outbreak of the war. After he had passed the first year exams, he together with other students in July of 1941 left for the Dnieper region near Smolensk to dig antitank trenches and construct weapon emplacements. He witnessed there a breakthrough of our defense in the Vyazma direction. He wrote: "We were shocked by ruthless truth of the war which was hard to compare with the prewar notions." He returned to Moscow in the hard October days by one of the last trains. The institute was evacuated to Leninogorsk, the East Kazakhstan Region, where Khlopkin was called up for military service in February of 1942. After he had passed an accelerated course of training at the Tambov Infantry School (Semipalatinsk), he in the rank of lieutenant was sent to the Voronezh front. In battles he got wounded and spent in hospitals 14 months. But at the end of 1943, he returned to the front. In the capacity of deputy chief of staff of the rifle regiment he covered the distance from the town of Shepetovka (Zhitomir Region, Ukraine) to Berlin and left his signature on the walls of the defeated стр. 57 Reichstag. He wrote later: "By t ... Читать далее