Viktor Sochava

Born June 7 (20), 1905, in the settlement of Pargolovo, in present-day Leningrad Oblast. Soviet geobotanist and geographer. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1968; corresponding member, from 1958).

In 1924, Sochava graduated from Leningrad Agricultural Institute. From 1931 to 1936 and again from 1943 to 1964 he worked at the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; beginning in 1950 he headed the institute’s laboratory. Between 1935 and 1938 he headed a department at the Arctic Institute. Sochava taught at Leningrad State University from 1938 to 1958 (professor, from 1944) and at the Hertzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad from 1939 to 1950. Since 1959 he has been director of the Institute of Geography of Siberia and the Far East at the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Irkutsk.

Sochava’s principal works deal with geobotany, classification of landscapes and vegetation, natural regionalization, geosystems (1963, 1967), methods of stationary geographic work, and problems of studying the taiga. Sochava proposed fundamental theories on geobotanical mapping and map classification. He was the editor in chief, as well as the author of a number of chapters, of Vegetational Cover of the USSR: Explanatory Text to the Geobotanical Map of the USSR, Scale 1:4,000,000 (vols. 1-2,1956).

Sochava was awarded the V. L. Komarov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1950. He has also received two Orders of Lenin and various medals.