Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German-born naturalist and explorer who contributed to the fields of biology, zoology, and ethnography. He participated in the Great Northern Expedition (1733–1743) and his observations of the natural world helped the exploration and documentation of the flora and fauna of the North Pacific region.
Peter Simon Pallas FRS FRSE was a Prussian zoologist, botanist, ethnographer, explorer, geographer, geologist, natural historian, and taxonomist. He studied natural sciences at various universities in early modern Germany and worked primarily in the Russian Empire between 1767 and 1810.
Johann Georg Gmelin was a German naturalist, botanist and geographer.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. He wrote poetry in Ukrainian and prose in Russian.
Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky was a Russian geographer and a renowned explorer of Central and East Asia. Although he never reached his ultimate goal, the city of Lhasa in Tibet, he still travelled through regions then unknown to Westerners, such as northern Tibet, Amdo and Dzungaria. He contributed substantially to European knowledge of Central Asian geography.
Alexander Georg von Bunge was a Russian botanist. He is best remembered for scientific expeditions into Asia and especially Siberia.
Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky was a composer of secular and liturgical music, and a conductor and opera singer, who worked at the Saint Petersburg Court Chapel in the Russian Empire, but who also spent much of his career in Italy. He made an important contribution in the music of Ukraine. Together with Artemy Vedel and Dmitry Bortniansky, both of whom have cited him as an influence, Berezovsky is considered by musicologists as one of the three great composers of 18th-century Ukrainian classical music, and one of Russia's first composers.
Nicholai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay was a Russian explorer of Ukrainian origin. He worked as an ethnologist, anthropologist and biologist who became famous as one of the earliest scientists to settle among and study indigenous people of New Guinea "who had never seen a European".
Khara-Khoto, also known as Heishuicheng or Heishui City, is an abandoned city in the Ejin Banner of Alxa League in western Inner Mongolia, China, near the Juyan Lake Basin. Built in 1032, the city thrived under the rule of the Tangut-led Western Xia dynasty. It has been identified as the city of Etzina, which appears in The Travels of Marco Polo, and Ejin Banner is named after this city.
The Rumyantsev Museum evolved from the personal library and historical collection of Count Nikolay Rumyantsev (1754–1826). Its origin was in St. Petersburg in the Rumyantsev house or mansion, building number 44 on the English Embankment overlooking river Neva. After Nikolay died in 1826, his brother Sergei converted the house into a museum. It was opened to the general public in 1831, initially for one day a week, and the remaining days were for study.
Richard Otto Maack was a Russian naturalist, geographer, and anthropologist. He is most known for his exploration of the Russian Far East and Siberia, particularly the Ussuri and Amur River valleys. He wrote some of the first scientific descriptions of the natural history of remote Siberia and collected many biological specimens, many of which were original type specimens of previously unknown species.
Lepidopterology is a branch of entomology concerning the scientific study of moths and the two superfamilies of butterflies. Someone who studies in this field is a lepidopterist or, archaically, an aurelian.
Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt was an ethnic German physician, naturalist and geographer who lived in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later in the Russian Empire. He was among the first to conduct a scientific exploration of Siberia, which led to the unearthing of the first fossil mammoth.
Valentin Lvovich Bianchi was a Russian ornithologist. He is honoured in the common and scientific names of Bianchi's warbler, described by Ernst Hartert.
The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, formerly the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is a research institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia that houses various collections of manuscripts and early printed material in Asian languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Tangut.
Susman Kiselgof was a Russian-Jewish folksong collector and pedagogue associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. Like his contemporary Joel Engel, he conducted fieldwork in the Russian Empire to collect Jewish religious and secular music. Materials he collected were used in the compositions of such figures as Joseph Achron, Lev Pulver, and Alexander Krein.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Knipovich was a Russian and Soviet ichthyologist, marine zoologist and oceanographer, notable as the founder of fisheries research in the Russian North.
Maria Vasilievna Pavlova was a Ukrainian who became a paleontologist and academician in Moscow during the Russian Empire and Soviet era. She is known for her research on the fossils of and the naming of hoofed-mammals of the Tertiary period. She was a professor at Moscow State University. She also made great efforts to establish the Museum of Paleontology at the university. In 1926, the museum was named after her and her second husband, Alexei Petrovich Pavlov, a geologist, paleontologist, and academician who made a significant contribution in the field of stratigraphy.
Nicolai Ivanovich Kravchenko (1867–1941) was a battle painter, journalist and writer from the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
Theodor Eduard Pleske was a Russian entomologist and ornithologist who worked at the museum of zoology at St. Petersburg.
