Igor Vasilivich Kurchatov. Historical portrait of the Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Vasilivich Kurchatov (1903-1960). Kurchatov led the work on the USSR's first atomic bomb (1949), hydrogen bomb (1953) and the world's first nuclear power plant (1954). In the 1930s he had supervised the construction of what was then the world's largest cyclotron particle accelerator. He was a member of the legislative body of the USSR from 1949.