His research also gave him entree to American colleagues at Bell Labs and IBM, and set off a small-scale laser race that combined comradeship and sharing between individual scientists with dead-serious Cold War rivalry.

Dr. Alferov would recall with pride that in the race to build a prototype of a laser that worked at room temperature, he and his team in Leningrad beat Bell Labs in New Jersey by a month. Subsequent perfection of heterostructure lasers and heterotransistors based on combined materials made possible today’s world of LED screens, optically read disks and the fiber-optic technology behind cellphones.

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born on March 15, 1930, in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, the painter Marc Chagall’s hometown. His father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was a former dockworker who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and later regaled his two sons with reminiscences of meeting Lenin and Trotsky.

His mother, Anna Vladimirovna Alferov, headed a public organization of housewives, worked as a librarian “and always remained our close friend while bringing us up without discouraging words,” Dr. Alferov wrote in his Nobel autobiographical essay.

Communism lifted his father to the role of itinerant industrial manager, and he moved the family across the Soviet Union as he helped carry out Stalin’s five-year plans for rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. He named his eldest son, Marx, after Karl Marx; Zhores was named after the assassinated French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès.

Marx was 20 when he died at the front during World War II, to be remembered by his younger brother a half-century later at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.