[2] In 1937, he was executed during the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute Affair on the basis of falsified charges as part of the Great Purge.

[3] In 1926, at the recommendation of Abram Ioffe,[3] he was sent to the Leiden cryogenic laboratory of Wander Johannes de Haas in the Netherlands; he worked there until 1930.

[3] In 1930, Shubnikov returned to Kharkiv to work at the National Scientific Center Ukraine Institute of Physics and Technology (UPTI) led by his advisor.

This research led J. N. Rjabinin and Shubnikov to discovery of type-II superconductivity in 1935 in single crystal lead-thallium (PbTl) and in and lead-indium (Pb-In) alloys in 1937.

[6] From 1932 to 1936, antiferromagnetism, a new magnetic phase of matter, was independently discovered by Louis Néel in France working under Pierre Weiss, and by Shubnikov, Trapeznikova and Lev Landau in the Soviet Union.

During the Stalin epoch, at the height of the Great Purge in 1937, the NKVD launched the UPTI Affair on the basis of allegations of antistate activities, and Shubnikov was arrested on 6 August 1937.

In the Soviet Union, the Shubnikov superconductivity papers were rediscovered in post-1957 by theoretical physicist Alexei Abrikosov who was looking for data to compare with his theory.

John Bardeen and Raymond W. Schmitt, leading 1963 International Conference on the Science of Superconductivity at Colgate University, said: "our theoretical understanding of type II superconductors is due mainly to Landau, [Vitaly] Ginzburg, Abrikosov, and [Lev] Gor'kov, and that the first definitive experiments were carried out as early as 1937 by Shubnikov".

[6] Similarly in 2004, Ginzburg said:[6] Shubnikov and his students and colleagues accomplished a lot within only a few years, and I should specially mention his studies of superconducting alloys and the factual discovery of type II superconductors...

[citation needed] On Shubnikov birth centenary in 2001, a special issue of the Russian journal Low Temperature Physics was devoted to his work (1937 was chosen as his death date).