Pyotr Ivanovich Nikitin

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Pyotr Ivanovich Nikitin ( Russian Пётр Иванович Никитин ; * 1912 ; † 2000 ) was a Russian physicist and officer who worked in Germany after the end of World War II as an employee of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) on the reconstruction and redesign of the universities in the SBZ and GDR was involved. In his book Between Dogma and Common Sense , he described what he did.

Life

From 1932 to 1937 Nikitin studied theoretical mechanics at the physical-mathematical faculty of Leningrad University. In 1941 Nikitin received his doctorate with the topic The Movement of a Material Point in the Environment of an Inhomogeneous Compressed Spheroid . He was supervised by Professor M. Subbotin and Professor W. Ambarzumjan, astrophysicists and later President of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Some of the results were later used to calculate the orbits of satellites. From 1940 to 1941 Nikitin was a lecturer for the chair of theoretical mechanics at the Institute of Military Mechanics in Leningrad. In 1940 Nikitin took part in the first all-union meeting of higher education employees in the Kremlin. In the course of his studies he had also learned German and French. Nikitin was already at the front in 1939 and was drafted into the Soviet army at the beginning of the war in 1941, initially as the commander of an anti-aircraft artillery control unit. He had acquired the necessary knowledge during his studies at the chair for military training at the university, where he also received the rank of lieutenant. In 1942 he was wounded and transferred to a hospital in the Urals. After his recovery he got into the political department of the Seventh Department of the 33rd Army and with this as far as Germany.

In April 1945 he was taken over into the political administration of the First Belarusian Front, but was soon delegated to work for the Berliner Rundfunk in Berlin-Charlottenburg. There he met Professor Zolotuchin, head of the SMAD's Department of Popular Education, who was rector of the Leningrad University before the war and whom he knew from his studies. Solotuchin took Nikitin into his department.

From 1945 to 1949 Nikitin was head of the department for universities and scientific institutions of the SMAD and then until 1952 employee of the apparatus of the political advisor of the Soviet control commission . Since the public education department of the SMAD did not have any concepts prepared in advance, it had to draw up concepts for individual questions on site after analyzing the problem and discussing it with the rectors of the universities concerned and the management of the German Central Administration for Public Education (DZVVB). Fundamental questions were agreed with the management of the SMAD.

Nikitin was also a member of the Allied Education Committee of the Allied Control Council in Germany from August 1945 to March 1948 .

In 1953 he became the deputy director of the new Institute for Scientific Information of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. There he took over the management of the information department, the task of which was the primary processing of the literature arriving at the institute: reviewing incoming literature, assigning it to the editorial offices of the department and filming the articles. In addition, he soon headed the laboratory for the mechanization of information processes , which soon received what was then the most advanced data processing system in the Soviet Union. From around 1955 the institute was renamed the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (AIWUTI). In 1956 the institute was able to publish 400,000 papers on scientific papers out of 12,000 scientific papers from journals and books.

From 1958 to 1962 he was head of the scientific information department of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in Vienna. During this time, the former Foreign Minister Molotov became the official representative of the USSR at the IAEA and thus Nikitin's superior. Due to the secret service affair around Colonel Penkowski , Nikitin, who worked again at AIWUTI in 1962, had to break off all relations with foreign countries and was therefore no longer able to work for the IAEA.

In 1963 he was appointed professor of computer science and head of the chair of scientific information at the Leningrad Humanities University and stayed there until his retirement in 1987. During this time he was also dean of the faculty of computer science, which also included the chairs of documentalism and automation Information processes belonged. Nikitin wrote several monographs and textbooks on computer science. He died in February 2000.

Nikitin's son Andrej P. Nikitin was born in 1952 and attended the Otto Grotewohl School in Moscow, a special school in which extended German lessons were given and the students studied German culture in depth. He studied economic geography abroad in Moscow from 1969 to 1974 and did his doctorate on the activities of the SMAD at the universities of eastern Germany. At the end of the seventies he did his military service in Germany as a military interpreter. A. Nikitin became an employee of the Ministry of National Education, where he dealt with organizational problems of international cooperation. At the suggestion of his father, he began to study SMAD documents from 1945 to 1949. After working in the archives of the Russian Federation, he died in 1996.

Publications

  • Pyotr I. Nikitin: Between dogma and common sense. How I “Sovietized” the universities in the German occupation zone. Memories of the Sector Head of Universities and Science of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany , (Edition Education and Science; 6), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-003174-3 .

literature

  • Short biography of Pjotr ​​and Andrej Nikitin , in: Manfred Heinemann (Hrsg.): University officers and the reconstruction of higher education in Germany 1945–1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, pp. 75ff., ISBN 3-05-002851-3 .
  • Jan Foitzik (edit.): SMAD-Handbuch , Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 676, ISBN 978-3-486-58696-1 . (Short biography)
  • Interview with Pjotr ​​I. Nikitin , in: Manfred Heinemann (Ed.): University officers and the reconstruction of the higher education system in Germany 1945–1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, pp. 75ff., ISBN 3-05-002851-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Manfred Heinemann: University officers and the reconstruction of the higher education system in Germany 1945-1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 77, ISBN 3-05-002851-3
  2. ^ Manfred Heinemann: University officers and the reconstruction of the higher education system in Germany 1945-1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 76, ISBN 3-05-002851-3
  3. ^ Manfred Heinemann: University officers and the reconstruction of the higher education system in Germany 1945-1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 81, ISBN 3-05-002851-3
  4. ↑ Pyotr I. Nikitin: Between dogma and common sense. How I “Sovietized” the universities in the German occupation zone. Memories of the Sector Head of Universities and Science of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany , (Edition Education and Science; 6), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, p. 242ff., ISBN 3-05-003174-3
  5. ↑ Pyotr I. Nikitin: Between dogma and common sense. How I “Sovietized” the universities in the German occupation zone. Memories of the Sector Head of Universities and Science of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany , (Edition Education and Science; 6), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, p. 245, ISBN 3-05-003174-3
  6. ↑ Pyotr I. Nikitin: Between dogma and common sense. How I “Sovietized” the universities in the German occupation zone. Memories of the Sector Head of Universities and Science of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany , (Edition Education and Science; 6), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, p. 262, ISBN 3-05-003174-3
  7. ^ Manfred Heinemann: University officers and the reconstruction of the higher education system in Germany 1945-1949. The Soviet zone of occupation. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 170, ISBN 3-05-002851-3

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Nikitin, Pyotr Ivanovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Никитин, Пётр Иванович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet officer and employee of the SMAD
DATE OF BIRTH 1912
DATE OF DEATH 2000