Popov, Mikhail Grigorevich

Born Apr. 5 (17), 1893, in Vol’sk, in present-day Saratov Oblast; died Dec. 18, 1955, in Leningrad. Soviet botanist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1945). Popov, who graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1917, taught at the universities of Saratov and Tashkent from 1917 to 1927. Between 1927 and 1940 he worked at the All-Union Institute of Horticulture, the Kazakhstan branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the Batumi Botanical Garden. Popov was a professor at the universities of Samarkand (1940–44), Kiev (1944–45), and L’vov (1945–48). He headed a sector of the Sakhalin branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1948 to 1950, and he became the head of the laboratory of the academy’s Eastern Siberian branch in 1950. Popov’s principal works were on the phylogeny, taxonomy, and historical geography of flowering plants. He also extensively studied the flora of Middle Asia, Kazakhstan, the Carpathians, Siberia, and the Far East. He developed a theory on the role of hybridization in plant evolution.