2 Roubles I. V. Kurchatov

Igor Kurchatov directed the Soviet atomic bomb project from 1943 onward, delivering the USSR's first successful nuclear test at Semipalatinsk in August 1949 — roughly four years after Hiroshima, far faster than American intelligence had predicted. This coin was issued on the centenary of his birth. The Bank of Russia's commemorative rouble series of the early 2000s regularly honored figures of Soviet science, and Kurchatov appeared alongside several contemporaries in the same programme. He died in 1960 of a stroke, aged 57, likely the cumulative result of years of unshielded radiation exposure during the weapons programme.