Yulii Khariton  Yulii Borisovich Khariton (Russian: Юлий Борисович Харитон, 27 February 1904 – 19 December 1996) was a Russian physicist credited as a leading scientist in the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program. Since the initiation of the atomic bomb project by Joseph Stalin in 1943, Khariton was the "chief Nuclear weapon designer" and remained associated with the Soviet program for nearly four decades. In honour of the centennial of his birthday in 2004, his image appeared on a Russian postal stamp by the Russian government. Yulii Borisovich Khariton was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire to an ethnic middle class Russian Jewish family, on 27 February 1904. His father, Boris Osipovich Khariton, was a political journalist, an editor, and a publisher, who had attained a law degree from Kiev University in Ukraine. 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. After the Russian revolution dismantled the Tsarist autocracy in 1917, Boris Khariton had clashes with the Bolsheviks as he was at odds with Vladimir Lenin's Soviet ideology. His father was exiled to 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. 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. Yulii's mother, Mirra Yakovlevna Burovskaya, was a theatre actress who performed at the Moscow Art Theatre. She left Russia in 1910 due to an illness that had to be treated at the European resort. Yulii was six years old when his mother left him and was taken care by an Estonian woman, hired by his father while in exile in Latvia. Yulii's mother never returned to Russia and divorced his father, only to marry her psychiatrist, Dr. Max Eitingon. Having lived in Germany, Mirra moved to Tel Aviv in Palestine in 1933, where she remained until her death.. She is buried in Jerusalem. Yulii was forbidden to contact his parents after he had started classified work in the Soviet Union.