Pavel Stepanov

Born June 4 (16), 1880, in Tara, in what is now Omsk Oblast; died Aug. 26, 1947, in Moscow. Soviet geologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939).

Stepanov graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1907, and under the direction of Professor L. I. Lutugin he worked on the Geological Committee. In the years 1919–26 he gave a course on coal and nonmetalliferous deposits at the Leningrad Institute of Mines. Stepanov was one of the founders of the Academician F. N. Chernyshev Geological Museum and was the museum’s director from 1926 to 1947. In 1939 he became director of the coal group at the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Stepanov’s research dealt mainly with the geology of coal and nometalliferous deposits. He initiated geological prospecting work that led to an extension of the boundaries of the Donbas (Greater Donbas). Having explained the regularities governing the spatial distribution of coal basins, he went on to develop the conception of benches and major zones of coal accumulations. Stepanov compiled many detailed geological maps on the Donbas. He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1943) and two Orders of Lenin.