Vitaly Ginzburg and high temperature superconductivity: Personal reminiscences

This article is an attempt to give Western readers, as well as young researchers in Russia, a glance at the atmosphere in one of the leading physics institutions in the USSR from 1977–1988, through the eye of a graduate student and later a posdoc in the theory group led by Vitaly Ginzburg, arguably the most enthusiatic proponent of high-temperature superconductivity before the discovery of Bednorz and Muller. This is a very personal narration, wherein the events of my own life and career are inevitably intertwined with scientific events and with my reminiscences of great Russian physicists whom I had the pleasure to meet with while working in the “High-Temperature Superconductivity Section” at the Lebedev Institute within the aforementioned 12 years.