Vladimir Stepanovich Sobolev

Born May 17 (30), 1908, in Lugansk, in what is now Voroshilovgrad. Soviet geologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958).

Sobolev graduated from the Leningrad Mining Institute in 1930, after which he worked at the Central Scientific Research Geological Exploration Institute until 1941. He simultaneously taught at the Leningrad Mining Institute from 1931 to 1941 and from 1943 to 1945; he became a professor in 1939. He taught at the University of Irkutsk from 1941 to 1943 and started teaching at the University of L’vov in 1945. Beginning in 1947, he also worked at the Institute of the Geology of Minerals of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in L’vov. In 1958 he became deputy director of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Novosibirsk.

Sobolev’s main works are associated with the study of the magmatic and metamorphic rocks of the Siberian Platform and the Ukraine. In 1940 he proposed that the Siberian Platform and South Africa are similar in geological structure and that diamond-bearing kimberlites are probably found in the northern Siberian Platform. He has made substantial contributions to the development of general minerology, the mineralogy of silicates, theoretical petrology, and the processes of mineral formation, magmatism, and metamorphism.

Sobolev received the State Prize of the USSR in 1950 for the work Introduction to the Mineralogy of Silicates (1949). He was one of the cartographers of maps on the metamorphic facies of the USSR (1966) and Europe (1974) on a scale of 1:2,500,000.

Sobolev is an honorary member of geological societies of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. He became president of the International Mineralogical Association in 1974. He won the Lenin Prize in 1976. Sobolev has been awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.