[en] Important milestones on the way to the tokamak fusion reactor are recapitulated. Soviet tokamak research concentrated at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, the A.F. Ioffe Institute in Leningrad and the Physical-Technical Institute in Sukhumi successfully provides necessary scientific and technological data for reactor design. Achievments include, the successful operation of the first tokamak with superconducting windings (T-7) and the gyrotron set for microwave plasma heating in the T-10 tokamak. The following problems have intensively been studied: Various methods of additional plasma heating, heat and particle transport, and impurity control. The efficiency of electron-cyclotron resonance heating was demonstrated. In the Joule heating regime, both the heat conduction and diffusion rates are anomalously high, but the electron heat conduction rate decreases with increasing plasma density. Progress in impurity control makes it possible to obtain a plasma with effective charge approaching unity. (J.U.)