A special session of the Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (UFN) Editorial Board (UFN's oral issue) celebrating the 90th anniversary of the journal and the 50th anniversary of its English version (first under the title Soviet Physics–Uspekhi and then under the current title Physics–Uspekhi) took place on November 19, 2008 in the conference hall of the P N Lebedev Physical Institute (FIAN) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The following reports were presented at the session:

(1) Ginzburg V L (P N Lebedev Physical Institute, RAS, Moscow), Aksent'eva M S (Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, RAS, Moscow) "On the history of UFN (introductory talk)";

(2) Dremin I M (P N Lebedev Physical Institute, RAS, Moscow) "The physics of the Large Hadron Collider";

(3) Shirkov D V (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Moscow region) "Pair correlations and spontaneous symmetry breaking";

(4) Smirnov B M (Institute for High Temperatures, RAS, Moscow) "Modeling of gas-discharge plasma";

(5) Sadovskii M V (Institute of Electrophysics, RAS Ural Branch, Ekaterinburg) "High-temperature superconductivity in iron-based layered compounds";

(6) Aleksandrov E B (All-Russian Research Center, S I Vavilov State Optical Institute, St. Petersburg) Physical limits in the metrology of a magnetic field by atomic spectroscopy techniques";

(7) Maksimov E G (P N Lebedev Physical Institute, RAS, Moscow) "Microscopic studies of the nature of the ferroelectric transition";

(8) Fortov V E (Institute for High Energy Density, RAS, Moscow) "Extreme states of matter".

Articles based on reports 1–4 and 6–8 are published below in this special issue of the Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk journal devoted to the jubilees of the Russian and English versions of the journal.