- Date Of Birth: February 21, 1937
- Date Of Death: April 3, 2020
- State: Colorado
Alexander A. Gurshtein (February 21, 1937- April 3, 2020), Ph.D., passed away in his home in Grand Junction, CO last week. He is survived by his wife, Olga Vorobieva; three children, Kirill, Ksenya, and Michael; four granddaughters, and three great-grandchildren.
Alex was born in Moscow, Russia during the height of the Stalinist purges, and his early years were shaped by the privations of World War II and the loss of his father in that war, as well as the anti-Semitism that he, like thousands of Soviet Jews, experienced firsthand when finishing school and entering university in the mid-1950s.
The son of a notable literary critic and translator, Alex always had literary ambitions. Even in the years of his work for the space program, he wrote numerous popular science articles for Soviet newspapers, magazines, and radio on the topics of astronomy and space exploration. One of his proudest moments was sneaking into national print a quote from poet Maximilian Voloshin, whose poetry was banned and censored by Soviet authorities. In 1973, he published The Eternal Secrets of the Sky, a book on the history of astronomy for young adults that had two subsequent editions and a total print run of 400,000. Around 1980, while on temporary professional hiatus, Alex spent his time researching and writing a historical novel about the founding of the Paris observatory. He published that book as The Stars of Paris in 2016.
In 1981, he began a new professional chapter at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology. Since the early 1990s, he turned his attention to the earliest history of the Western Zodiac. He saw as the most significant scientific accomplishment of his career the theory of the origin and development of the Zodiac that he elaborated in numerous Russian and English language articles and set down in its most complete form in The Puzzle of the Western Zodiac: Its Wisdom and Evolutionary Leaps. A Painful Ascent to the Truth (2017).
Alex was a creative polymath who followed his many curiosities. He saw through the publication of at least two board games in the USSR. He also deeply loved the history of Moscow—the simplest of walks around his central Moscow neighborhood would turn into a fascinating excursion.
