Because of recent progress in the development of quasistationary toroidal mag netic confinement systems, especially tokamaks, these systems are at the center of research on controlled thermonuclear fusion. Tokamaks were proposed and first built at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In the 1960s the basic features of plasma behavior in toroidal magnetic confinement systems were investigated in ex periments on the first tokamaks and the possibility of obtaining effective confine ment in them was demonstrated. The successes of this first stage led to a rapid ex pansion in tokamak research...