The basic avenue of scientific activity of V.V.Boldyrev and of the scientific school that he has created is studying of the reactivity of solid matter with the aim to find out the ways to control chemical reactions that run in the solid state. During the research in this field that have made V.V.Boldyrev popular all over the world, a correlation has been revealed between the nature of a disordering effect in crystals on the rate of chemical reactions and the features of the reaction mechanism; the concept of localization and autolocalization of a process has been introduced, and the role of various factors in chemical reactions in the solid state has been shown. Given the mechanism of a reaction, the discovered phenomenon of the feedback has made it possible to project effective procedures to control chemical reactions in the solid phase, by means of generating or, on the contrary, by destructing the defects, through varying the methods to produce solid matter and the methods of its preliminary treatment. The found approach has also allowed solving the inverse problem: based on the effect that specific kinds of defects in crystals have on the reactivity of solid matter, conclusions can be drawn on the features of the reaction mechanism.

Important conclusions have been also made regarding the feedback mechanism during a reaction progress. To update the view that was active previously that a process is controlled by the catalytic effect of a solid product, a more correct concept has been created that made allowance not only for the catalytic effect of the product, but also for alternative forms of the feedback (generation of a stress at the phase boundary, shift in the electron-hole equilibrium, etc.).