Grigori Tokaty

Grigory Aleksandrovich Tokaev, known in the West as Grigory Tokaty (1909 to 2003), was a Soviet rocket scientist and politician who later defected to the United Kingdom. From 1938 to 1941 he headed the Aeronautics Laboratory at the Zhukovsky Academy, received his doctorate in technical sciences in 1941 and continued to lecture there, while also serving as acting head of the Department of Aviation at the Moscow Engineering Institute, where one of his tasks was to study the possibility of a medium-range winged rocket. After the German capitulation in 1945 he was sent to Berlin to serve on the Soviet Control Commission. Afraid that his links with an opposition group would be discovered, he crossed into the British sector of Berlin with his family and arrived in Britain in November 1947. He became a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Space Technology at The City University in London from 1967 to 1975, assisted the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, wrote books including Stalin Means War, and died in Surrey, England, aged 94.