Back in the heyday of Stalin’s Gulag, there was a very bizarre form of penal institution – the sharashka. Here’s how it worked: The NKVD would arrest a bunch of brilliant scientists and engineers, throw them in an R&D facility surrounded by barbed wire, feed them a starvation diet, and instruct them to invent whatever it was that needed to be invented. Sometimes, just to make things easier logistically, an entire research institute’s staff would be arrested and the building itself surrounded with barbed wire – instant sharashka! These unique think tanks were described in great detail in a book by a young mathematician who had spent some time in a sharashka himself. His name? Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The book? The Gulag Archipelago, of course.

Many of the Soviet Union’s greatest minds slaved away in sharashki for many years. As a rule, those of their discoveries that weren’t deemed to be state secrets were attributed to prominent Soviet scientists – far lesser minds who were not (yet) Enemies of the People. Standing out among the thousands of anonymous inmates of the sharashki are names such as: