During his lifetime, Alexandrov was the recipient of many honors, civil citations, and state awards for this work and was also the director of the Kurchatov Institute and the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1975 until 1986.
[1] At the age of 16, he became a cadet and fought in the Army of Wrangel as a machine gunner, and was awarded three Crosses of St. George.
During the evacuation of remnants of the White Guard army from Crimea to Turkey, Alexandrov refused to leave and preferred to stay.
At Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute, he developed a statistical theory of strength and doctoral dissertation - "Relaxation in Polymers" (1941).
[4] From the spring of 1931, he worked at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, where he became a candidate, and then a professor of physical and mathematical sciences.
Alexandrov became prominent during World War II, when he devised in collaboration with Igor Kurchatov a method of demagnetizing ships to protect them from German naval mines, known as the LPTI system.
On the initiative of Alexandrov, power plants for the nuclear icebreakers Lenin, Arktika, and Sibir were developed.
This provided a wide front for fundamental research in the physics of low temperatures, as well as on the technical use of superconductivity.
[9] Described by colleagues as a brilliant scientist and organizer, he was deeply affected by the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history.
"The accident subsequently prompted the Soviet Government to review and suspend the ambitious nuclear power program.