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the Transbaikal Cossack army in 1919. After
Kolchak's defeat, Semenov took over power in
Siberia and the Far East, but was defeated by the
Red Army in 1920. He fled Russia in September
1921 and spent the next two decades in Korea,
Japan, and northern China. In September 1945
he was abducted by Soviet spies in Manchuria,
tried, and hanged.
made him one of its foreign members in 1958.
Semenov's most influential works,
Chemical
Kinetics and Chain Reactions
(1934) and
Some Prob-
lems of Chemical Kinetics and Reactivity
(1954),
were translated into English only a few years
after their publication in the Soviet Union.
Semenov Tian-Shansky, Petr Petrovich
(1827-1914)
geographer and statistician
A leading member in the Russian Geographical
Society and its virtual director from 1873,
Semenov Tian-Shanskii was one of the driving
forces behind the numerous scientific expeditions
to Central Asia carried out by prominent schol-
ars like Przhevalsky, Potanin,
KROPOTKIN
, and
Komarov. He was educated at the universities of
St. Petersburg and Berlin, and first made his rep-
utation through extensive travels in Turkestan.
There he studied the Tien Shan mountain range
(hence the “Tian-Shansky” usually appended to
his name), collected valuable mineralogical,
botanical, and anthropological material, and
proved that its origins were not volcanic. As a
leading Russian scholar of his day, Semenov
Tian-Shansky played an active role in the com-
missions that prepared the emancipation of the
serfs in 1861 and the military reforms of 1874. As
director of the Central Statistical Committee
(1864-75), he organized the first Russian statis-
tical congress in 1870, which laid the foundations
for the influential
ZEMSTVO
movement. As chair-
man of the committee's successor, the Statistical
Council (1875-97), he supervised Russia's first
modern census in 1897. He became an honorary
member of the
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
in 1873 and
a member of the Council of State in 1897. Among
his numerous publications, two that stand out are
the
Geographical and Statistical Dictionary of the Rus-
sian Empire,
published in five volumes (1863-85),
and
Russia, Full Geographical Description of Our
Fatherland,
which he edited with V. I. Lamansky
and published in 19 volumes (1899-1914). Less
known among his many scholarly activities was
his love for Flemish and Dutch art, which he col-
Semenov, Nikolai Nikolaevich
(1896-1986)
physical chemist and physicist
A distinguished scientist who contributed to the
field of chemical kinetics, Semenov was the first
Soviet citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Semenov was born in the Volga River town of
Saratov and graduated from St. Petersburg Uni-
versity in 1917 with degrees in physics and
mathematics. After a brief stay in the Siberian
town of Tomsk, Semenov returned to St. Peters-
burg, soon to be known as Leningrad, in 1920.
From 1920 until 1928 he worked at the
Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. In 1931,
the same year in which Semenov was elected a
full member of the USSR
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
,
the Physico-Technical Institute was converted
into the Institute of Chemical Physics of the
USSR Academy of Sciences. Semenov was
appointed its first director, a position he held
until his death in 1986. Semenov's worldwide
reputation rests on his research in chemical
kinetics, particularly in the field that studies
chemical reactions. He postulated that in a spe-
cial type of reaction known as a branched chem-
ical reaction the highly reactive molecules
known as free radicals could create explosions
that not only perpetuated themselves but also
occurred at ever faster intervals. For his research
he was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in chem-
istry, in conjunction with the British chemist
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, whose work paral-
leled that of Semenov. The Soviet government in
turn decorated Semenov with the Order of
Lenin seven times and the Order of the Red Ban-
ner of Labor, while the British Royal Society
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