Kirilov, Ivan Kirillovich

Born 1689; died 1737. Russian geographer and cartographer.

Kirilov graduated from the Moscow Navigation School in 1707 or 1708. In 1712 he began working in the Senate. Beginning in the early 1720’s he directed the work on topographical surveying of Russia. He was the author of the first systematic economic and geographic description of Russia, The Flourishing Condition of the All-Russian State (1727). In 1734 he published the first printing of the atlas of Russia he had conceived (Atlas of the All-Russian Empire). In 1734–37 he led an expedition whose aim was the construction of Orenburg and a system of fortifications on the Bashkir border.