: xlii : xii [4][5] His father worked for the newspaper Rech, the main organ of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and was a well known figure in the political circles of Russia.

[5] After the Russian revolution dismantled the Tsarist autocracy in 1917, Boris Khariton had clashes with the Bolsheviks due to his opposition to Vladimir Lenin's Soviet ideology.

: xlii [4] His father was exiled to the Baltic states from Russia in 1922 at the age of forty six along with professors and journalists on one of the so-called Philosophers' ships, subsequently working for an emigrant newspaper in Latvia.

[6] His father, Boris Khariton, remained there until Latvia's annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940 and, at the age of sixty-four, was then arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to seven years of forced labour in a Gulag, where he died.

: xliii [4] In Saint Petersburg, he went to attend a trade school which he completed at the age of fifteen and found work at a local mechanical workshop where he learned how to operate various machinery as a machinist.

: xliii [4] Khariton's talent was recognised by Semyonov who supported his research project in investigations of the light-emitting ability of phosphorus combined with oxygen, and reported the results in both the German and Russian languages.

: xliv [4] In 1926, Khariton completed his degree in physics from the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute and ended his research project as he prepared for his first foreign trip to England.

In May 1945, as part of a team of physicists sent to Berlin to investigate Nazi atomic bomb research, Khariton found 100 tonnes of uranium oxide, which was transported back to Moscow; this reduced development time for domestic plutonium production.

";[10] he spoke for scientists when they changed their focus to a two-stage nuclear device with initial compression from 1954 (the RDS-37) and supported requests not to detonate the RDS-220 (the largest-ever bomb) because of the calculated number of deaths due to radioactive fallout.

The second Installation under Yevgeny Zababakhin had fewer, and there had been awkward professional relations; it was comically referred to as "Egypt" by politicians, with obvious comparative implications with KB-11: the dining room at KB-11 was termed 'the synagogue.