Iakovlev, Nikolai Nikolaevich

Born Apr. 15 (27), 1870, in Kazan; died June 19, 1966, in Komarovo, Leningrad Oblast. Soviet geologist and paleontologist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1921).

Iakovlev graduated from the Institute of Mines in St. Petersburg in 1893. He worked at the Geological Committee from 1895 to 1961, during which time he served as the institution’s director from 1923 to 1926. He also worked at the Institute of Mines, where he was a professor and head of the paleontology subdepartment from 1900 to 1930. He was one of the founding members of the Russian (later the All-Russian and then All-Union) Paleontological Society (1916) and served as its first chairman (1916–40); from 1940 until his death he was honorary chairman of the society.

Iakovlev worked out the stratigraphy of the Permian deposits of the Donets Coal Basin and substantiated them paleontologi-cally. He conducted stratigraphic studies and prospected for minerals in the Timan Ridge, the Ural Mountains, the Baltic Region, the Volga Region, and Transcaucasia. He carried out the first pa-leoecological studies of Russian invertebrates, chiefly brachio-pods, tetracorals, and Crinoidea. Iakovlev wrote a paleontology textbook (fascs. 1–2, 1910–11) that went through five editions.

Iakovlev was awarded the A. P. Karpinskii Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1948). He was also awarded three Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.

Born 1886 in Moscow; died Nov. 16, 1918, on the Olekma River; buried in Olekminsk, Yakut ASSR. A leader of the struggle for Soviet power in Siberia. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

Iakovlev was the son of a worker. He studied at Moscow University from 1905 to 1907 and took part in the armed uprising of December 1905. He conducted party work in St. Petersburg and Baku, and in 1910 he helped reestablish the Moscow committee of the RSDLP. Iakovlev emigrated in 1911, but in 1913 he was sent to Moscow by the Central-Committee of the RSDLP to organize the newspaper Nash put’. Beginning in late 1913 he served a sentence in the Narym Exile, a place of political exile in Siberia.

Called into the army in 1916, Iakovlev carried out revolutionary work in the garrison of Tomsk. He became the chairman of the Tomsk soviet in August 1917, and in December 1917 he served as chairman of the Western Siberian regional committee of soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies (based in Omsk). In March 1918 he became chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets. After the temporary fall of Soviet power in Siberia, Iakovlev went to the taiga with a group of Soviet officials; there he was captured and shot by White Guards.