- Hermogenes, Bishop Of Tobolsk And Siberia
Saint martyr Hermogenes, Bishop of Tobolsk and Siberia (born Georgiy Yefremovich Dolganyov (Георгий Ефремович Долганёв)) was a prominent Russian Orthodox religious figure. Influenced by Nicanor, Bishop of Kherson, he chose the Orthodox ministry after finishing the Novorossiysk University. Following his education in Saint Petersburg Theological Seminary in 1892, Dolganyov accepted the name Hermogenes. - Vitus Bering
Vitus Jonassen Bering (also, less correctly, "Behring") (August 1681-December 19, 1741) was a Danish-born navigator in the service of the Russian Navy, a captain-"komandor" known among the Russian sailors as Ivan Ivanovich. He was born in the town of Horsens in Denmark and died at Bering Island, near the Kamchatka Peninsula. After a voyage to the East Indies, he joined the Russian Navy in 1703, … - Vagit Alekperov
Vagit Alekperov is currently a President of the leading Russian oil company LUKOIL. Vagit Alekperov, rated by Forbes magazine as the 48th richest person worldwide with US $12.6 billion of net worth, was born in Baku, one of the earliest centers of the international petroleum industry. His father, who died when Vagit was a boy, worked in the oil fields all his life and inspired Alekperov to follow in his footsteps. He was 18 when he landed his first job in the industry. - George Kennan
George Kennan (February 16, 1845 - 1924) was an American explorer noted for his travels in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of Russia. He was diplomat and historian George F. Kennan's cousin twice removed, with whom he shared his birthday. Kennan was born in Norwalk, Ohio, and was keenly interested in travel from an early age. Family finances, however, meant he began work at the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad Company telegraph office aged twelve. - Piers Vitebsky
Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist and is the Head of Social Science at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, England. Since the 1980s, Vitebsky has carried out fieldwork with the Evens of Siberia, and other peoples of India and Sri Lanka. Vitebsky won the Kiriyama Prize. Vitebsky has also collaborated with a number of documentary films, including: "Siberia: after the shaman"; "Arctic aviators" and "Flightpaths to the gods". - Sergei Rudenko
Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko (January 16, 1885, Kharkov - July 16, 1969, Leningrad) was a prominent Russian/Soviet anthropologist and archaeologist who discovered and excavated the most celebrated of Scythian burials, Pazyryk in Siberia. Rudenko was a follower of Paul Broca's "French School" of anthropology. He participated in the Russian Geographical Societies (IRGO) Map Commission established in 1910. - Sergei Shoigu
Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu is a Russian political figure. Military rank: Army General Shoigu is an ethnic Tuvan. In 1977, he graduated from the Krasnoyarsk Polytechnical Institute with the speciality of construction engineer. He worked in construction for the next decade, advancing from low levels to executive positions. In 1988 he became a minor functionary in the Abakan branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then in Komsomol for a couple of years. - Alexander Khloponin
Alexander Gennadyevich Khloponin was born on March 6, 1965 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Khloponin is the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai in Siberia, Russia. Khloponin has a finance degree and was chairman of the board of the Norilsk Nickel company. In 2000, he became the governor of Taymyr Autonomous Okrug in northern Siberia, holding that position until 2002. Khloponin won the election for governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai against Alexander Uss, … - Esther Hautzig
Esther Hautzig (October 18, 1930) is a Jewish-American writer, best known for her award-winning book "The Endless Steppe" (1968). She was born in the then Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania today). Her happy childhood was rudely interrupted by the advent of World War II and the conquest in 1941 of eastern Poland by Soviet troops. Her entire family was uprooted and deported to Siberia, where Esther spent the next five years in harsh exile. - Vissarion
Sergey Anatolyevitch Torop, known by his followers as Vissarion, is a Russian mystic. He was born January 14, 1961. He founded and heads a religious movement known as the Church of the Last Testament with its head church in the Siberian Taiga in the Minusinsk Depression east of Abakan, in the southern Siberia Kuraginsk district of Krasnoyarsk territory. - Edmund
Edmund Carpenter (born 1922) has taught anthropology for 40 years at the Universities of Toronto, California and Harvard. He began his fieldwork as a boy in 1935 and has since worked in New Guinea, Borneo and Tibet as well as all of the world's Arctic regions. He has made fifteen field trips to the Arctic in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Siberia. In 1951 he spent the winter in an Eskimo sod hut. Carpenter's published works include "Patterns That Connect" (1996, … - Yermak Timofeyevich
Yermak Timofeyevich, Cossack leader and explorer of Siberia. His exploration of Siberia marked the beginning of the expansion of Russia towards this region and its colonization. ("Timofeyevich" is his patronimic, not the last name, so in references it must be looked up at "Yermak" or "Yermak Timofeyevich".) In 1558, the Stroganov merchant family received their first patent for colonizing "the abundant region along the Kama River", … - John Bell
John Bell, Scottish doctor and traveller, was born at Antermony, near Milton of Campsie in Scotland in 1691. He studied medicine in Glasgow and in 1714 set out for St Petersburg, where, through the introduction of a fellow Scot, he was nominated medical attendant to Artemy Petrovich Volynsky, recently appointed to the Persian embassy, with whom he travelled from 1715 to 1718. The next four years he spent in an embassy to China, … - Sheldon Jackson
Rev. Sheldon Jackson (1834-1909) was a Presbyterian missionary in the Western United States in the 19th century. He is particularly known for his missionary work in Alaska, where he was also a political leader. He was born in Mineville, New York in 1834. He graduated from Union College in 1855, and from the Presbyterian Church's Princeton Theological Seminary in 1858. He became an ordained Presbyterian minister and soon began his extensive missionary career. - Gata Kamsky
The American Grandmaster Gata Kamsky is traveling to Elista, Russia on May 25th to play candidate matches in his second run for the world chess championship. The previous one ended with Anatoly Karpov defending his title in a match against Kamsky back in 1996 at the very same place of Elista. Maybe the Kalmyk steppe will bring him better luck this time. We'll keep you updated. In the meantime, here are few facts from his rich biography. - Leonhard Seppala
Leonhard Seppala was a Norwegian of Kven descent. Born in Skibotn and growing up on the nearby island of Skjervøy, he eventually emigrated to Alaska during the Nome gold rush of 1900 and, in 1913, inherited a team of imported Chukchi huskies, later to be known as Siberian dogs or Siberian Huskies. Those dogs, owned by the mining company that employed Seppala, had originally been scheduled to take explorer Roald Amundsen to the North Pole, … - Angelo D'Arrigo
Angelo d'Arrigo (April 3 1961 - March 26, 2006) was an Italian aviator who held a number of world records in the field of flight, principally with microlights and hang gliders, with or without motors. He has been referred to as the "Human Condor". D'Arrigo was born in Catania, Sicily. - Peter Simon Pallas
Peter Simon Pallas was a German zoologist and botanist who worked in Russia. Pallas was born in Berlin, the son of a Professor of Surgery. He studied with private tutors and took an interest in natural history, later attending the University of Halle and the University of Göttingen. In 1760, he moved to the University of Leiden and passed his doctor's degree at the age of nineteen. He travelled throughout the Netherlands and to London, … - Ravil Geniatulin
Ravil Faritovich Geniatulin (born December 20, 1955) is the Governor of Chita Oblast, Russia, an office he has held since February 1, 1996. He has been a member of the Federation Council of Russia since 1996. In 2004, Geniatulin was re-elected with more than 60 percent of the vote cast. He is an ethnic Tatar. - Willem Barents
Willem Barents (Dutch: Barentsz; born ?1550 on Terschelling, West Frisian Islands, Netherlands; died June 201597 on the Barents sea, near Novaya Zemlya, Russia) was a Dutch navigator and explorer, a leader of early expeditions to the far north. In 1594 he left Amsterdam with two ships to search for the Northeast passage north of Siberia and on to eastern Asia. He reached the west coast of Novaya Zemlya, and followed it northward, … - Alexander Sokurov
Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov is a Russian filmmaker from St Petersburg who has been hailed as successor to renowned director Andrei Tarkovsky. His movies are said to represent an ultimate challenge in contemporary intellectual film making. Sokurov was born in Siberia in the officer's family on June 14, 1951. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. - Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (June 12, 1937), was a Soviet military commander, chief of the Red Army (1925-1928), was one of the most prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s. - Yakov Yurovsky
Yakov (Yankel) Mikhailovich Yurovsky (in Tomsk, Siberia, Russia - before 2 August 1938 in Moscow) is best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last emperor Tsar Nicholas and his family after the Russian Revolution of 1917. - Georg Wilhelm Steller
Georg Wilhelm Steller (March 10, 1709 - November 14, 1746) was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and present-day Alaska. Steller was born in Windsheim, near Nuremberg and studied at the University of Wittenberg. He then traveled to Russia to work at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, arriving in November 1734. Steller was appointed as naturalist on Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition, … - Dominick Arduin
Dominick Arduin (1961-2004) was a Frenchwoman who disappeared in her attempt to ski to the North Pole. In 1988 Arduin moved to Finland. For 15 years she worked as a guide in Finnish Lapland and received dual citizenship. She said that she had grown up in the Alps, that she had been orphaned at an early age, had recovered from cancer and had been the only child aside from a dead sister. Arduin reached the Magnetic North Pole in the spring 2001. - Irina Pantaeva
Irina Pantaeva was born 12 October 1972 in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia, Siberia, Soviet Union. She is 6 ft (1.83 m) tall and is ethnically Buryatian. Irina is currently a supermodel and an actress (appearing in such movies as "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Celebrity, Zoolander" and "People I Know" as well as the TV show "3rd Rock from the Sun" playing "Gabriella", and onstage in the off-Broadway play Jewtopia). - Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Dmitri Hvorostovsky (born October 16, 1962), is a top baritone opera singer from Russia. Hvorostovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. He studied at the Krasnoyarsk School of Arts under Jekatherina Yofel and made his debut at Krasnoyarsk Opera House, in the role of Monterone in "Rigoletto". He went on to win First Prize at both the Russian Glinka Competition in 1987 and the Toulouse Singing Competition in 1988. - Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard (1879 - May 30, 1962), a Swiss citizen, was the French tutor for the five children of Tsar Nicholas II from 1905 to 1918. Years after the Imperial Family was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, Gilliard wrote a book "Thirteen Years at the Russian Court," about his time with the family. - Nikolai Getman
Nikolai Getman, an artist, was born in 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and died in Orel, Russia, in 2004. He was a prisoner from 1946 to 1953 in forced labor camps in Siberia and Kolyma, where he survived as a result of his ability to sketch for the propaganda requirements of the authorities. He is remembered as one of few artists who has recorded the horrors of the Gulag in the form of paintings (see also drawings by Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya). - Vadim Repin
Vadim Repin (born Novosibirsk, Western Siberia, 31 August 1971) is a Russian violinist. In his youth Repin studied with Zakhar Bron and was revered throughout Russia as a child prodigy. At the age of 17, he became the youngest winner of the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels, the world's premier violin competition. Vadim Repin played under such leading conductors as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Charles Dutoit, Michael Tilson Thomas, … - Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (–) was a Russian novelist best known as the author of "Oblomov" (1859). He was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk); his father was a wealthy grain merchant. After graduating from Moscow University in 1834 Goncharov served for thirty years as a minor government official. In 1847, Goncharov's first novel, "Obyknovennaia istoriia" (usually translated into English as "A Common Story"), … - Robert Hall
Robert Hall (1867-1949) was a founding member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) in 1901, and served as its President 1912-1913. He made an expedition to Siberia, via Japan and Korea from 1903, with R. E. Trebilcock, to discover the hitherto unknown breeding grounds of various species of waders. His published works include "A Key to the Birds of Australia and Tasmania" (1899), and "Australian Bird Maps" (1922). - Inessa Armand
Inessa Armand was a French-born Communist who spent most of her life in Russia. She was rumored to have had an affair with Vladimir Lenin. She was born in Paris as the daughter of Théodore Stéphane, an opera singer, and Nathalie Wild, a comedienne. Her father died when she was only five and she was brought up by an aunt living in Moscow. At the age of nineteen she married Alexander Armand, the son of a wealthy Russian textile manufacturer. - Clemens Forell
Lt. Clemens Forell was a German POW, who, after WWII, was sentenced to the Siberian Gulag in Russia for 25 years. During this time, he escaped and traveled all the way from the Soviet GULAG lead mines at Cape Deschev (East Cape), Siberia, to Iran. After interrogation by Iranian police, who suspected him of being a Soviet spy, he was identified by his uncle. He arrived home in Munich in December 1952 3 years and 2 months after escaping. - Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (July 12, 1828 - October 17, 1889) was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, critic, and socialist (seen by some as a utopian socialist). He was the leader of the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s, and was an influence on Vladimir Lenin and Emma Goldman. The son of a priest, Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov in 1828, and stayed there till 1846. After graduating from Saint Petersburg University in 1850, … - Olga Kharitidi
Olga Kharitidi is a Russian doctor and psychiatrist who emigrated to Minneapolis, Minnesota where she lives and works. She was born in Siberia and worked for some years in a Soviet mental hospital. She travelled in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Siberia to discover secrets of healing and magic which she believes can help the world if the material is presented in the right way. - Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 - March 14 1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist, muralist, social activist, photographer and teacher. He is best known for his works of Social realism, his leftist political views, and his series of lectures published as "The Shape of Content". He was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shahn. His father was exiled to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, … - Demidov
The Demidovs were probably the richest Russian people after the Tsar in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their progenitor, Demid Antufiev, was a free blacksmith from Tula, where their family necropolis is preserved as a museum. His son Nikita Demidov (March 26, 1656 - November 17, 1725) made his fortune by his skill in the manufacture of weapons, and established an iron foundry for the government. Peter the Great, with whom he was a favorite, … - Vladimir Arsenyev
Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev (1872-1930) was a Russian explorer of the Far East who recounted his travels in a series of books ("По Уссурийскому Краю" (1921), "Дерсу Узала" (1923)), telling of his military journeys to the Ussuri basin with Dersu Uzala, a native trapper, from 1902 to 1907. He was the first to describe numerous species of Siberian flora. Arsenyev’s family home in Vladivostok has been made into a museum. - Yegor Ligachev
Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev is a Russian politician, who was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Originally a protege of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ligachev became a potential challenger to his leadership. Ligachev had been first secretary of the party in Tomsk, Siberia when he was discovered by Yuri Andropov and brought to Moscow to become head of the Central Committee's Department for Organizational Party Work.
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