Boris Sergeevich Petropavlovskii
Petropavlovskii, Boris Sergeevich
Born May 14 (26), 1898, in Kursk; died Nov. 6, 1933, in Leningrad. One of the organizers and directors of work on rocketry in the USSR. Member of the CPSU from 1920.
Petropavlovskii graduated from the Suvorov Military School in Warsaw in 1915 and then completed the accelerated course of the Konstantinov Artillery School in Petrograd. From 1918 to 1919 he was secretary of the Novyi Torzhok district executive committee of the soviet of workers’ and peasants’ deputies. Petropavlovskii joined the Red Army in 1919. He fought in battles with the White Guards on the Southern and Western fronts and battles to liberate Transcaucasia and Middle Asia. In 1929 he graduated from the F. E. Dzerzhinskii Technical Military Academy in Leningrad and was sent to the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, which he headed in 1930 and 1931. Petropavlovskii made an important contribution to the development of rocket projectiles for Katiusha systems. A crater on the far side of the moon has been named after him.