Petr Nikiforovich Konstantinov

Born June 23 (July 5), 1877, in Pushkarskaia Sloboda, Krapivna District, now in Tula Oblast; died Oct. 30, 1959, in Moscow. Soviet plant grower and breeder. Academician of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1935).

Konstantinov graduated from the Moscow Surveying Institute in 1906. From 1913 to 1929 he worked at the Krasnyi Kut Agricultural Experimental Station (director from 1920 to 1929), where he personally and jointly with other breeders developed 18 varieties of cereals and perennial grasses which were distributed in many parts of the USSR. The best-known varieties include the durum spring wheats Melianopus 69 and Gordeiforme 189 and the soft spring wheat Eritrospermum 841. From 1929 to 1937 he was head of the department of plant growing, genetics, breeding, and experimental methods of the Kuibyshev Agricultural Institute, where he organized a breeding station that became an independent institution, the KineP Breeding Station, in 1933. Konstantinov was a professor at the All-Union Academy of Socialist Agriculture from 1936 and at the K. A. Timiriazev Moscow Agricultural Academy from 1938. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1943. Konstantinov was awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, a medal, and gold medals of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.