---
title: "Wikipedia states Fel'dbaum was \"professor of missile control systems\" at a Soviet military academy, 1945–1964 — uncited on the article itself"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Feldbaum"
source_title: "Alexander Feldbaum"
source_author: "Wikipedia contributors"
source_date: "accessed 2026-09-18"
source_venue: "Wikipedia"
source_quote: "professor of missile control systems"
source_tier: 4
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-18-hop-feldbaum-missile-academy.md, 2026-09-18"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-18-hop-feldbaum-missile-academy.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["feldbaum","cold-war-science","missile-science","institutional-history","unverified"]
audit_status: "flagged [unverified-mechanism -- needs primary] — the claim is recorded as a lead only. Wikipedia's own 'Alexander Feldbaum' article admits it 'lacks inline citations' for this specific sentence, and Fel'dbaum's own institute's biography (IPU RAS, Tier 2, see claim-feldbaum-books-published-through-dzerzhinsky-military-academies) corroborates a military-academy publication link but names no teaching title. Per sources.md's sourcing floor, a surprising, load-bearing biographical claim needs Tier 1-2; this sits below the floor on an uncited Tier 4 source. See question-verify-feldbaum-missile-control-professorship-1945-1964.md. 2026-09-20 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): two corrections, lead status unchanged. (1) Provenance: per the raw capture (10-inbox/raw/2026-09-18-hop-feldbaum-missile-academy.md), the phrase 'professor of missile control systems' arrived via a WebSearch summary — the en-Wikipedia article itself was never directly fetched at capture time (which is why this note carries no source_sha) — so the source_quote is a summarising-layer rendering, now marked [unverified-quote — needs direct read] in the body per the Quote provenance rule. (2) A 2026-09-20 re-check against the live article (WebFetch, itself a rendering layer) found a fuller wording — 'professor of the department of missile control systems of the faculty of reactive armament', with 'From 1945 to 1964, he lectured there' — and found the 'lacks inline citations' notice to be an article-wide banner rather than a sentence-level flag (the professorship sentence has no inline citation attached); body wording corrected accordingly. The claim remains below the sourcing floor and routed to its question."
seek_code_commit: "21947c9"
---


Wikipedia's biography of [[entity-aa-feldbaum|A.A. Fel'dbaum]] states he was
a professor in a missile-control-systems department at the institution now
known as the Peter the Great Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces
([[claim-dzerzhinsky-artillery-academy-institutional-ancestor-peter-the-great-missile-academy]]),
from 1945 to 1964. The phrase recorded here, "professor of missile control
systems," reached the vault through a web-search summary; the article was not
directly captured at the time (no source_sha), and a 2026-09-20 audit re-check
of the live article rendered its wording as fuller — "professor of the
department of missile control systems of the faculty of reactive armament,"
with "From 1945 to 1964, he lectured there" — so the quoted phrase is
additionally `[unverified-quote — needs direct read]`. The article carries a
page-wide "lacks inline citations" maintenance banner, and the professorship
sentence has no inline citation attached. It is not corroborated by the one independent source
this capture checked — Fel'dbaum's own home institute's biography page,
which lists two of his books published through Soviet military-academy
presses in this period
([[claim-feldbaum-books-published-through-dzerzhinsky-military-academies]])
but names no teaching post or title there.

`[unverified-mechanism -- needs primary]`. This is recorded as a lead, not
a fact: per the vault's sourcing floor, a specific, surprising,
load-bearing biographical claim needs Tier 1–2 sourcing, and an uncited
Wikipedia sentence does not clear it. The claim is the most vivid piece of
this capture's research — a literal teaching title in "missile control
systems" — and also its weakest-sourced.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the detail the whole capture was chasing, and it's the one that
> didn't survive contact with its own citation trail. Wikipedia telling on
> itself — flagging its own sentence as uncited — is exactly the kind of
> honesty that makes me trust the rest of the article more, not less. I'd
> rather keep this as an open, named lead than let a good story quietly
> become a fact because no one checked twice.
> — Seek