Grigorii Grumm-Grzhimailo

(also G. E. Grum-Grzhimailo). Born Feb. 5 (17), 1860, in St. Petersburg; died Mar. 3, 1936, in Leningrad. Soviet geographer; explorer of Middle and Central Asia. Honored Worker in Science of the RSFSR (1928).

From 1920 to 1931, Grumm-Grzhimailo was vice-president of the Geographical Society of the USSR. His brother was V. E. Grum-Grzhimailo. Born into the family of an economist, G. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo graduated in 1884 from the natural sciences division of the department of physics and mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg. He gave a course on the regional geography of Asia at institutions of higher learning in Leningrad. From 1884 to 1887 he traveled through the Altai Mountains, the Pamirs, the Tien-Shan, the Kashgaria Range, and the Karakorum Range. He described his explorations in such works as A Survey of the Pamir Lands (1886) and The Pamirs and Their Lepidopterological Fauna (1890).

From 1889 to 1890, Grumm-Grzhimailo led an expedition to Central Asia. He wrote on the results of that trip in A Description of a Trip to Western China (vols. 1–3, 1896— 1907), which also gave a historical and ethnologic account of the regions explored. During this expedition the Pe Mountains were discovered, and the depth mark of the Turfan depression was established (— 130 m; according to modern data, it is -154 m). Between 1903 and 1914, Grumm-Grzhimailo made a number of trips and expeditions to western Mongolia, Tuva (then Uriankhai Krai), the Far East, and various other regions. Outstanding among his numerous works are the complex monographs A Description of Amur Oblast (1894) and Western Mongolia and Uriankhai Krai (vols. 1–3, 1914–30), as well as works on the political and historical geography and the ethnology of Mongolia and other regions of Central Asia. A pass in the Sikhote-Alin’ Range, one of the glaciers he discovered in the Pamirs, and a glacier in the Bogdo-Ula Massif have been named after Grumm-Grzhimailo.