George fled to Germany and influenced by his uncle Volodymyr Kistiakivskyi, a pioneer in electrochemistry, studied physics and chemistry.
At the age of fifteen, he became interested in birds and insects and worked as an assistant at the Zoological Museum of the Kyiv Academy of Sciences.
Discovering that his wife had, during the war, sold off his parents' apartment including antique paintings to Germans, along with loss of his manuscripts, he divorced her.
In the 1960s the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev was in diplomatic talks with the United States of America and a delegation of American scholars including George Kistiakowsky were due to visit.
After boarding a ship at Odesa, he was told that his documents were not in order and the KGB stopped him from travel, and believed that he was going to defect.
In 1981, under Leonid Brezhnev, the travel restrictions were removed and Oleksandr visited his brother in the United States for three weeks during which time he was also able to meet the ornithologist Ernst Mayr.