Kuznetsov, Nikolai Ivanovich

Born Dec. 5 (17), 1864, in St. Petersburg; died May 22, 1932, in Leningrad. Soviet botanist. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1904).

In 1888, Kuznetsov graduated from the University of St. Petersburg. He was a professor at the University of lur’ev (Tartu; 1895–1915), Tavrida University (1918–21), and the University of Leningrad (from 1921). From 1915 to 1918, Kuznetsov was the director of the Nikita Botanical Gardens. In 1922 he became the head of the geobotanical division of the Central Botanical Gardens in Leningrad.

Kuznetsov’s principal works deal with the flora of the Caucasus, the taxonomy and phylogenetics of flowering plants, and geobotanical cartography. In 1914 he developed a phylogenetic classification system for flowering plants. He founded one of the first Russian botanical journals, Trudy Botanicheskogo sada lur’evskogo universiteta (Proceedings of the Botanical Gardens of the lur’ev University), which was published from 1900 to 1914; between 1915 and 1917 it was published under the title Vestnik Russkoi flory (The Herald of Russian Flora).

(partisan pseudonym, Grachev). Born July 14 (27), 1911, in the village of Zyrianka, in present-day Talitsa Raion, Sverdlovsk Oblast; died Mar. 9, 1944, in the village of Boratin, Brody Raion, L’vov Oblast. Soviet intelligence officer, Hero of the Soviet Union (Nov. 5, 1944). The son of a peasant.

Kuznetsov worked as an engineer in Sverdlovsk. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) he was sent on his personal request behind enemy lines in August 1942 to serve in D. N. Medvedev’s partisan detachment in the Ukraine. Kuznetsov showed extraordinary daring and ingenuity in the fight with the fascist German invaders. Knowing German perfectly, he disguised himself as the German first lieutenant Paul Siebert in the city of Rovno and passed on valuable intelligence information to underground fighters and partisans. He assassinated such prominent Nazis as Funk, chief judge of the Ukraine; Gehl, councillor of the Reichskommissariat of the Ukraine; Gehl’s secretary, Winter; and Bauer, vice-governor of Galicia. At the head of a partisan group, he kidnapped General Ilgen, commander of the punitive troops in the Ukraine. He met a tragic death at the hands of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.

Kuznetsov was awarded two Orders of Lenin. He is buried in L’vov.