Leonid Ivanovich Lutugin

Born Feb. 21 (Mar. 4), 1864, in St. Petersburg; died Aug. 17 (30), 1915, in Kol’chugino, present-day Leninsk-Kuznetskii, in Kemerovo Oblast; buried in Petrograd. Russian geologist; one of the first specialists in the geology of Russian coal basins.

In 1889, Lutugin graduated from the Institute of Mines in St. Petersburg and in 1897 became a professor at the institute. For more than 20 years he participated in the studies of the Donbas being conducted by the Geological Committee (he directed the research between 1898 and 1915) and together with his students was the first to construct a section of the coal-bearing stratum of the Donbas, determining its thickness and the number of coal seams. He developed methods for detailed geological surveying of areas. At the international exhibition in Turin, Lutugin was awarded a gold medal for the comprehensive geological map of the Donbas that he compiled in 1911 on a scale of 1:126,000. In the last years of his life Lutugin worked in the Kuznetsk, Cheliabinsk, and other coal basins, laying the foundations of modern concepts of their geological structure. While studying the conditions of the formation of coal deposits, Lutugin interpreted the repetitious changes of the coal measure strata as the result of oscillatory movements of the earth’s crust and established the relationship between coal quality and the degree of metamorphism. He founded a school of coal geologists (P. I. Stepanov, V. I. lavorskii, A. A. Gapeev).

Lutugin was one of the progressive figures of the bourgeois intelligentsia. He was vice-president of the Free Economic Society and a member of the Russian Technical Society. He was elected to the State Duma.

A city in the Donbas and a coal seam in the Kuznetsk Basin have been named after Lutugin.