Along with his daughter Ekaterina, he is survived by his wife, Nina; another daughter, Elena; a brother, Nikolai; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
He joined the Soviet army in 1954, with plans to become an infantry officer. But his father, who had fought at the front during World War II, objected; as a compromise, they agreed that he would become an engineer. He graduated in 1959 from the Military Academy of Communications in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he excelled in mathematics and physics.
He was offered to work as a fellow at a physics research institute. But as he was preparing to leave school, he was given new orders: to report to the 12th Chief Directorate, the top-secret division of the Soviet Defense Ministry that managed the country’s expanding nuclear arsenal.
He steadily rose through the directorate, combining technical prowess with a keen political sensibility. General Maslin was appointed deputy director in 1989, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and took over the top position in 1992, a few months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Although he reached the mandatory retirement age of the army, 60 years old, in 1997, General Maslin continued to work on nuclear security and decommissioning at the PIR center, advising both the Russian government and its many engineering contractors.
“He was in no way an ideologue,” Rose Gottemoeller, a former Defense Department official who worked with him, said in a telephone interview. “He was just a really solid military professional, totally committed to the mission.”
When the decommissioning project came to an end in the 2000s, General Maslin became convinced that only total nuclear disarmament would prevent nuclear war. He served on the Global Zero Commission, a blue ribbon panel pushing for an end to nuclear weapons, and kept in touch with like-minded advocates in Europe and the United States.
