Nikolai Kolosovskii

Born Sept. 19 (Oct. 1), 1891, in Nizhny Novgorod, now Gorky; died Nov. 25, 1954, in Moscow. Soviet economic geographer, doctor of geographic sciences, professor (1935).

Kolosovskii graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Transport and Communications in 1916. The organizer of a number of expeditions to study Eastern Siberia, he helped develop the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) project on the economic zoning of the USSR and the first five-year plan for the Soviet national economy; he also worked on the Urals-Kuznetsk project. Kolosovskii directed research on the use of the energy resources of the Angara River, developed a concept of energy production cycles and territorial production complexes, and worked out a new course called Economic Zoning of the USSR. He won the State Prize of the USSR in 1942 for his contribution to the economic development of the Urals during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45).