Do we know anybody who lived long enough to see the fall of Tsarist Russia AND the Soviet Union?

by zwbuckley

There are for example, a number of men who fought the American Revolution and also saw the onset of the Civil War. Do we know of any Russians who lived through all of those incredible transitions?

Aemon12

Tsarist Russia fell in 1917, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. That encompasses 72 years. It is plausible that many individuals witnessed both events. As one example, consider the Soviet physicist Yulii Khariton, often lauded as "the father of the Soviet atomic bomb", who was born in 1904 and died in 1996. He witnessed the Russian revolution first hand as an adolescent, having grown up in the Tsarist Russia capital of Saint Petersburg. He died 7 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, having had a celebrated career as a physicist.

Hargittai, Istvan (2004). Buried Glory: Portraits of Soviet Scientists. London, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kochevnik81

The BBC / PBS co-production documentary "People's Century" from 1998 has a number of interviews with people from Russia in the 1990s who were alive and adults at the time of the 1917 Revolution. One of them, Alexander Briansky, actually participated in the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917. At least from the footage I've seen, they don't ask him what he thinks about the fall of the USSR though.