It must have been in the late 1980s that I heard for the fi rst time from my colleagues at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics about an extremely smart and competent Russian female plasma physicist with whom everybody wanted to collaborate. Her name was Nataly Blagoveshchenskaya and she was from Leningrad. I met sympathetic Nataly for the fi rst time at the 12th EISCAT International Workshop that we organized in Kiruna in 2005. I especially remember the discussions we had in the sauna, to which I invited all the participating female scientists after the meeting. We were sweating inside the dark sauna on the high benches, hitting ourselves with the soft birch whisks, meanwhile dipping in the cold lake, and then sitting outside in a wooden-fi red hot tub admiring the twilight sun for hours. All these rituals were very familiar for Nataly from the banya at her own dacha, outside Sankt Petersburg.
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