Igor Vsevolodovich Mojeiko, who, as Kir Bulychev was one of Russia's leading SF authors for almost forty years, died early in the morning of Sept 5. He had been suffering from hypertension and diabetes for a long time and had survived a massive heart attack in 1987, following which he had given up smoking and alcohol.

Igor Mojeiko was born in Moscow on October 4, 1934, the son of Vsevolod Mojeiko, a lawyer, and Maria Stepanovna Bulycheva, a former military officer turned industrial chemist. Both parents had hidden their real family backgrounds to avoid discrimination or potential liquidation for possessing 'objectively criminal' social backgrounds [Stalin's great advance in jurisprudence was the 'objective theory of guilty,' whereby one was not responsible for one's purely subjective, individual crimes, but for the crimes of one's social class.] His mother was the adopted daughter of a Czarist military officer who died shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, and his grandfather's family were mostly academics, lawyers, and business people. His grandfather survived only because the new Soviet Army needed skilled accountants, and his father hid his background and recreated himself as a 'worker'; most of Igor Mojeiko's relatives on the male side were murdered outright or forced into suicide.

Following his parents' divorce he was raised by his mother and stepfather Yakov Bokinik, the father of his half-sister Natasha, also an industrial chemist, who was killed at the end of the second world war while in command of the USSR's chemical warfare program in the Baltic. During the war the family was evacuated from Moscow, and Igor's mother ran a school for parachute troops.

Igor Mojeiko described himself as both a "victim and beneficiary" of Stalinism. The father of one school friend was liquidated and she was sent at the age of 12 to a camp. After the war Maria Bulycheva and her children lived in Academy of Sciences housing where, at the diner table, he once overheard Prezent, one of Lysenko's lieutenants, describe how they had fooled the leadership of the country into supporting 'vernalization,' a totally worthless procedure which helped wreck Russian agriculture even further.

At this age he was determined to become a paleontologist or archaeologist. His younger sister became a physicist and ran her own laboratory, but he was convinced by the Komsomol (Young Communist League) that English translators were needed, and he graduated as a translator, in short order married Kira Soshinskaya, and was sent as a translator to Burma where the USSR was building a technical institute.

Igor Mojeiko's introduction to SF came in the form of a birthday present from his mother, a collection of scientific adventures by Ivan Efremov (author of Andromeda, Heart of the Serpent, etc.); his introduction to western SF came in Burma in the 1950s, which was then a recently decolonized independent state where a British expatriate's bookshop in Rangoon received Galaxy and Astounding every month. It was there that he encountered 1984 and Brave New World, as well as Asimov, Clark, Pohl, and others. Bulychev's stay in Burma was limited by the defection to the US of Aleksander Kaznacheev, which heightened security and which brought him under suspicion. Kaznacheev later published a book, Inside A Soviet Embassy, which Igor described as 'rather borning' but which provided the then starved field of Soviet Studies with vast amounts of data in Soviet social interactions.. Igor said later he was grateful to Kaznacheev for not mentioning in the book that the two of them had spent the night before the defection celebrating their mutual birthday drinking. His contract was not renewed and in 1959 he returned home to enrol as a graduate student in South-East Asian studies at the USSR-s Academy of Sciences Institute of Eastern Studies.

Igor Mojeiko's experiences in Burma led to working at Vokrug Sveta [Around the World], the Russian equivalent of National Geographic (except it published SF as well.) It was there that the need to replace an American SF story that was not passed by the censors for which the magazine's cover had already been printed led to his first story, "How the Dinosaurs Died Out."

Thereafter, Igor Mojeiko maintained a triple career: academic (eventually receiving his doktorskaya stepen- or P.hd.), simultaneous translator and interpreter for academic conferences (eg., various Pugwash meetings) and, using the pseudonym Kir Bulychev, writer on the side. The possession of a full time job meant he did not have to join the USSR's Union of Writers, and was not subject to its discipline, and when a Soviet SF writer had to be sent to the US in regard to the Macmillian Soviet Science Fiction Series in the 1980s he was chosen because he was not a Union member, and VAAP did not need to get the Union's permission to get him an exit visa. Nor did he join the Communist Party. As he put it: "They killed almost everyone I might ever have been related to."

Igor Mojeiko became a full-time/part time writer in the 1960s with The Last War, General Bandula's Sword, and the first of the Alice stories "The Little Girl Nothing Ever Happens To." To this he added the Gusliar tales. Only some of his early SF is published in Half A Life, Gusliar Wonders, and Earth and Elsewhere from Macmillian. His output includes hundreds of shorter pieces, a series of space opera-s dealing with Doctor Pavlish ("A Law For Dragons," etc.), the Andrew Bruce, Agent of Space stories, and the more recent Galactic Police adventures. In the 1980s he teamed with a number of directors to produce movies, TV serials, and animated films, including "The Secret of the Third Planet." It was this animated cartoon which 'outed' him to his academic colleagues when he won the State Prize for the screenplay. The English dubbed versions has the voices of Kisten Dunst and Jim Belushi. "By thorny paths to the Stars" was shown abroad in full with subtitles but the dubbed version was cut in half and renamed "Humanoid Woman." His last film was "The Witches' Cave," filmed in Czechoslovakia; he had been scheduled to play the part of Konrad but this was stopped by his heart attack. In the 1960s he had a bit role in the Russian film "The Hockey Players."

To most Russians he is best known for the Alice stories, which detail the adventures of a little girl in the 2080s; something like five million copies of the more than a dozen Alice books are in print. One of the Alice books, Sto let tomu nazad [A Hundred Years Ago Tomorrow] was filmed as a TV serial "Guests From The Future."

Igor Mojeiko looked at the collapse of communism and the fall of the USSR with hope. He viewed himself as a loyal Russian (although in the minds of many Russian nationalists he was an "inorodetz," or foreigner; Mojeiko is a Lithuanian surname, and his ancestry was Russian, German, and Scottish.) who objected to the political and economic system which ruled his country, although he only faced arrest once in the 1960s, from a crackdown on private collectors who possessed gold coins, called "The Numismatists' Affair (an incident, by the way, which is virtually unknown in the West.)" He avoided a long prison stretch only because he collected civilian and military medals, which were made from bronze, and when they made the obligatory 'obysk' or search of his apartment he had already hidden all of the stories he had written which would have led to his arrest and his becoming a cause celeb like Sinyavsky and Daniel. In later years, he was able to publish many of them (one, Osechka-67 [Misfire-67] written after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, was eventually filmed: in it, on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, Brezhnev orders a re-enactment of the taking of the Winter Palace now the Hermitage Museum, ordering the Museum's staff to portray the Winter Palace's defenders and local factory workers the revolutionaries. Out of fear the art treasures will be damaged the defenders drive off the revolutionaries and the actor who portrays Kerensky calls for the surrender of the Bolshevik authorities in Moscow. This was broadcast on the night of the attempted communist coup against Gorbachev) , and wrote that he was surprised at how inoffensive, in retrospect, they were. He was not at all pleased by the turns post Soviet Russia had taken in terms of the rise of mysticism, the Russian Mafia, and the war in Chechnya, nor was he overly fond of American post-Cold War triumphalism.

From the early nineties onward he spent his summers working in London. He visited the US twice, once to Chicago in the 1980s, and he was at the 2001 Worldcon in Philadelphia. He had been a guest at numerous conventions in Europe. His awards include the Aelita. As his translator I published two books, Those Who Survive and Alice: The Girl From Earth^. A third book, a collection of Gusliar and other short stories, is in the works.