Sergei Chakhotin
His father had previously been a private secretary to Ivan Turgenev, before pursuing a diplomatic career which led to him becoming a consular interpreter in Istanbul.
After graduating from the Third Odessa Gymnasium with a Gold Medal in 1900, Chakhotin enrolled in the Medical Faculty of Moscow University.
Following visits to Odessa, Moscow and Kazan in 1909, Chakhotin returned to Heidelberg where, in 1912, he devised a technique of "cell optical microsurgery", using ultra-violet rays projected through a quartz lens and a narrow opening in a metal disc.
In 1912 he took up a position in St. Petersburg as assistant in the Laboratory of Physiology of the Imperial Academy of Sciences under Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.
[4] In 1915, Chakhotin was involved with the Committee for Military-Technical Assistance (Komitet Voenno-Technicheskoi Pomoschi), which liaised with technical, industrial and scientific experts in order to mobilise them for the war effort.
[5] In emigration, Chakhotin came to the conclusion that opposition to the Bolshevik regime was futile: the émigré intelligentsia should contribute to Russia's economic recovery, promoting the new principles of organization developed in the West in order to "Americanize" Russian industrial production.
At the end of 1931, he and fellow members of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a socialist defence league, waged a "war of graffiti" in Heidelberg, defacing the swastikas on Nazi posters with a single white arrow.
Politically he became involved with the radical wing of the SFIO, in particular with Marceau Pivert and Jean Zyromsky and the Jeunesse Socialiste where he established himself as an authority in anti-fascist propaganda.
In 1939, his key work Le viol des foules par la propaganda politique was published in Paris.
Shortly after the release, it was removed from bookshops by the French police, and was formally banned, with copies being destroyed when the Germans occupied France in 1940.
In early 1944, Chakhotin was invited to assist the Fondation française pour l'étude des problèmes humains under the Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist Alexis Carrel in constructing a scientific data base, and to advise on the application of the biological sciences to the social sciences.
[7][4] In 1954, Chakhotin left France to work once again with Alberico Benedicenti at the Institute of Experimental Pharmacology of the University of Genoa.
In late 1960 he took up a position as Head of the Laboratory of Micro-Beam Surgery of the Institute of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
His brother Stepan (1888–1931) was an accomplished poet and graphic artist in the style of the "World of Art" (Mir iskusstva).
According to his wishes, his ashes were scattered in the island of Corsica which he frequently visited as an amateur painter, and where he and his first wife had taken a belated honeymoon in 1908.
