March 4, 1937
Born in Mongolia Yuri Senkevich — a physician, polar explorer, and navigator. TV presenter of the "Travelers' Club."
The ancients rightly asserted: to see what lies beyond the horizon, one must sail. The road is life.
Parents are military doctors: the father was the deputy head of the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad, His mother worked there as a nurse. In Mongolia, they worked as doctors in a Soviet air force unit. His son followed in their footsteps and also chose the medical profession, graduating from the Military Medical Academy.
In my second year, my scientific passion awakened. Sometimes I'd spend the night at the department to observe my mice.
After graduation, he served for two years as the head of a medical station at a military unit near Tver. After transferring to Moscow, he worked at the Institute of Biomedical Problems under the Ministry of Health. He studied the effects of G-forces and weightlessness on the human and animal bodies. He conducted the most dangerous experiments on himself—once, he had to lie in bed for a month, keeping his head several degrees lower than his body.
He headed the cosmonaut training center and almost went into space himself—he was one of three trained doctors. But instead of space, he chose an expedition to Antarctica.
I decided for myself: I still have time to go to space
He spent a year on the expedition, studying life in extreme conditions alongside fellow polar explorers. Thanks to the materials he collected, he later defended his PhD thesis and received a state prize.
The endless snowy plain—a true white silence, almost Jack London-esque. The silence is unbelievable. The only sound is the faint rumble of our diesel engine.
In the 1960s, after a visit Khrushchev в Norway, received an invitation to the expedition from a local archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl. Along with seven other participants, he sailed across the Atlantic in a small papyrus boat. He later recalled how they tied empty plastic containers to themselves at night to prevent drowning in their sleep, and in the evenings drank diluted alcohol: its strength always corresponded to the latitude of the vessel.
During the first expedition, the boat was wrecked, and the crew evacuated. On the second attempt, Sienkiewicz and other navigators reached their goal and proved that the ancient Egyptians could have sailed across the ocean to the shores of the New World—a claim that challenged their claim to the title. Columba as the discoverer of America.
In the late 1970s, he embarked on a third "cruise" with Heyerdahl, who fell deeply in love with the Soviet doctor and called him "either an eldest son or a younger brother." This time, the sailors traveled 7 kilometers in a reed boat across the Indian Ocean. But the expedition was cut short and the ship burned due to revolutions in Africa and NATO military exercises.
Today we burn our proud little vessel in protest against the inhumanity in the world of 1978 to which we returned from the high seas.
(from the expedition participants' address to the UN Secretary-General)
He also traveled within the Union and visited the Arctic.
Like everyone else, I made a “round-the-world” trip in a minute, running around a pole stuck in the ice at the North Pole.
In 1982, as a doctor and journalist, he accompanied the first Soviet climbers to climb Everest. Thanks in large part to him, all 11 people were able to reach the summit and return alive.
Back in the early 1970s, 36-year-old Senkevich was invited to host the program "Travelers' Club," which he hosted for 30 years. His guests included Thor Heyerdahl, the explorer Fedor Konyukhov and the famous explorer of the World Ocean Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
Under his leadership, the program received a TEFI award, several prestigious international awards, and was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest Russian television program.
In 2003, it was closed due to the death of 66-year-old Senkevich – he died in Moscow from heart failure.
His stepson Nikolai Senkevich — the former general director of the NTV television company, who fired Leonid Parfenov, and Vice President of Gazprom.
