Famous Russian Geographers

Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin was a passionate advocate of anarcho-communism. He was also an activist, revolutionary, economist, and sociologist. He was arrested and imprisoned for his activism in 1874. However, he managed to escape and lived in exile for over 40 years in different countries across Europe. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917. 

Wladimir Köppen was a Russian-German meteorologist, geographer, botanist, and climatologist. He is best remembered for publishing the Köppen climate classification system, which is used even today. Wladimir Köppen made important contributions to many branches of science. He is also credited with coining the term aerology.

Nikolay Przhevalsky was a Russian imperial geographer. A renowned explorer of Central and East Asia, he traveled through regions then unknown to the West. He is credited to have made a substantial contribution to European knowledge of Central Asian geography. However, despite his attempts, he could never reach his ultimate goal, the holy city of Lhasa in Tibet.

Russian ecologist, geomorphologist, and soil scientist Vasily Dokuchaev initially taught at the University of St. Petersburg and was later associated with the Novo-Aleksandr Institute of Agriculture and Forestry. He developed a soil classification system that explained the 5 factors for soil formation. The city of Dokuchaievsk in Ukraine is named after him.

Russian geographer and zoologist Lev Berg served the Soviet Geographical Society as its president and laid down his own theory of evolution, nomogenesis, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory. Remembered for his pioneering research on limnology and ichthyology, he also contributed to the domain of zoogeography.

German-Russian explorer, geographer, and navigator Friedrich Benjamin von Lütke, better known as Fyodor Litke, was mostly reputed for his Arctic explorations. He was associated with St. Petersburg’s Russian Academy of Science and Paris’s French Academy of Science. He contributed immensely to the documented geography of Alaska.