Klements, Dmitrii

Born Dec. 15 (27), 1848, in the village of Goriainovka, in what is now Saratov Oblast; died Jan. 8 (21), 1914, in Moscow. Narodnik (Populist), revolutionary figure of 19th-century Russia, ethnologist and archaeologist.

Klements studied at the University of Kazan from 1867 to 1871 and then at the University of St. Petersburg. Beginning in 1871 he was active in the Chaikovskii group (Chaikovtsy). One of the organizers of the “going to the people” movement, he was a member of the Land and Liberty party. In late 1878 and early 1879, he was editor of the journal Zemlia i volia (Land and Liberty). Arrested in 1879, he was exiled to Eastern Siberia in 1881.

Klements began his scholarly and scientific work in Minusinsk. His expeditions to Kuznetskii Alatau, the Saian Mountains, Uriankhai Krai, Mongolia, and Turfan contributed to the study of the geography, geology, ethnology, and archaeology of these regions. He helped create and did work for the Minusinsk and Irkutsk museums and for the newspapers Sibirskaia gazeta and Vostochnoe obozrenie. In the mid-1890’s he returned to St. Petersburg, where he worked, until 1900, in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences. Subsequently he organized the ethnologic section of the Russian Museum, which he directed until 1910. He published his memoirs, Out of the Past, in 1925.