In the next decade Migdal made important progress in quantum chromodynamics by introducing a novel form of the renormalization group (now called Migdal-Kadanoff bond-moving approximation), and by deriving (with Yu. Makeenko) the equation for the Wilson loops. The so-called Migdal program was a precursor and provided an impetus to the Shifman-Vainshtein-Zakharov sum rule method (SVZ sum rules) in QCD which presently plays a basic role in the calculations of hadronic properties. Later he found exact solution of quantum gravity in two dimensions (with V. Kazakov and D. Gross), starting the topic of matrix models of topological field theories which occupied the physics community for a number of years.