Vladimir Sukachev

Born May 26 (June 7), 1880, in the village of Aleksandrovka, Kharkov Province; died Feb. 9, 1967, in Moscow. Soviet botanist, forest specialist, and geographer. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943; corresponding member, 1920). Hero of Socialist Labor (1965). Member of the CPSU from 1937. Student of I. P. Borodin and G. F. Morozov.

Upon graduation from the Institute of Forestry in St. Petersburg in 1902, Sukachev was retained as a teacher by the institute’s subdepartment of botany. From 1919 to 1941 he headed the subdepartment of dendrology and plant systematics, which he himself had established at the institute. From 1941 to 1943 he was head of the subdepartment of biological sciences at the Urals Forestry Institute in Sverdlovsk. In 1944, Sukachev moved to Moscow. That year he organized the Institute of Forestry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now the V. N. Sukachev Institute of Forestry and Timber of the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR at Krasnoiarsk); he was director of the institute until 1959. Sukachev also organized a laboratory of forestry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1959 and a laboratory of biogeocenology at the Botanical Institute in 1965. He was a professor at the Moscow Timber Technology Institute from 1944 to 1948 and at Moscow State University from 1946 to 1953. At the latter university he headed the subdepartment of botanical geography.

Sukachev was the founder of biogeocenology. He was also among the first to study phytocoenoses—their structure, classification, dynamics, and interaction with the environment and animal population. Closely connected to his research in phytocoenology was his work on dendrology, grassland science, paleobotany, and stratigraphy. His works dealing with swamp science, dendrology, geobotany, and plant systematics, as well as his experiments on the forms of natural selection, have found wide practical application.

Sukachev was president of the Moscow Society of Naturalists from 1955 to 1967 and a founding member (1915) of the All-Russian Botanical Society (now the All-Union Botanical Society; from 1946, president; from 1964, honorary president). He was also a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1959) and a corresponding member of the Czechoslovakian Agricultural Academy (1927). Sukachev was awarded three Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals. He also was a recipient of the N. M. Przheval’skii, P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, and V. V. Dokuchaev gold medals.