The mind does not understand how the Soviets treated the geologists who discovered the diamonds.

Larisa Popugayeva was in 1937. Daughter of the secretary of the District Committee of the Communist Party shot in Odessa. After this tragedy, his wife, a famous art critic, returned to Leningrad with their daughter, where Larisa graduated from school and entered Leningrad University. Due to her father’s fate, she was not admitted to the Communist Youth organization for a long time, but she was allowed to study. When the war broke out, Larisa was in Moscow, where she took courses for nurses and musicians. During the war, she forgot that she was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”, Larisa eventually became a young communist and later joined the Communist Party.

After the war, she became a geologist (graduated from Leningrad University) and began expeditions. At that time, the main task and goal of the scientists of the USSR was the mining of diamonds.

L. Papugayeva began working as an assistant to the famous geologist Natalia Sarsadskich. N. Sarsadskich was looking for gemstones in the Urals during the war. For many years, the USSR spent huge sums searching for diamonds, but they were unsuccessful. The Amakinskaya expedition worked in the Urals and Siberia, where scientists dug a large number of wells (underground excavations) and washed thousands of cubic meters of sand, but found only a few precious stones.

1954 The situation changed thanks to N. Sarsadskich: this woman, without any data on mining, guided only by intuition, was able to find the so-called kimberlite pipes in the earth’s crust, discovering a mineral pyrope, which is usually found near diamonds . Investigations of this type in the USSR were strictly classified, so they had to work under very difficult conditions. 1950-1952 the geologist walked and sailed in a rubber boat about 1,500 km in Yakutia, collecting data for his study. Subsequently, the samples were examined in the Leningrad laboratories. The method with the mineral pyrope revealed that the samples found already contained diamond grains. There was an urgent need to go to Yakutia and complete the work on the banks of the Daldynė River, from which the most successful samples were brought.

Scientists from Leningrad managed to convince the authorities that the new method was noteworthy, they organized a new expedition. The author of the method, N. Sarsadskich, could not go because he had just had a baby; instead, he appointed a young assistant, L. Popugayev. The woman waited, but in the name of diamonds and science she gave up personal happiness and decided to abort to lead the expedition.

The new method proved successful. They quickly found tubes of kimberlite, which are the medium for the formation of diamonds. L. Popugajeva named the future diamond site “Zarnica” and forged a post at the found site. Nars Sarsadskich, who became the most important and at the same time most hurtful person in this story, told reporters what happened next.

The geologist said: “When L. Popugayeva arrived in Niurba, on an expedition to Amakinskaya (Yakutia) with examples of kimberlites, there was a meeting with superiors from Moscow. They asked to read the message and then, on the pretext that everything related to the diamonds was secret, they simply ripped out all the material, took it to the special compartment and locked it. He then began to persuade her to go on an expedition to Amakinskaya. They spent millions and found nothing, and here is the victory. They pressured her, they promised her, supposedly we would give her a job, we would defend her dissertation, and if she did not agree to approve, she threatened … Finally, she was persuaded by correspondents who reported that the first diamond mine in the USSR was discovered by a Leningrad geologist from the Amakinskaya expedition “.

In fact, Popugayeva was the victim of blackmail and intimidation. It reminded him of his father, the enemy of the people, arrested and even charged with smuggling diamonds. Two months ago, those things broke her and the woman signed a document about the transition to work on the Amakinskja expedition (where she was retroactively accepted). And all the research of the Leningrad scientists was appropriated by competing geologists. The Leningrad colleagues considered it a betrayal, so Popugayeva’s career was ruined. Later he began to distribute gifts, letters of commendation, but the names of the true discoverers, L. Popugayeva and N. Sarsadskich, on the list of winners of the Leningrad Prize in 1957. It was not – others received the award instead. The researchers assigned an order to the true discoverers of the method and the geologist. And then, for many years, no one remembered these women.

L. Popugayev regained the title of first discoverer of the deposit only in 1970, a few years before his death, and N. Sarsadskich, another 20 years later, in 1990.

Currently, these women are named after two large diamonds found in Yakutia. In the place where once L. Popugayeva forged the first sign, a pillar, there is now a huge processing plant, and near the places where the diamonds were found, a monument was built for her in the city of Udachno.