Victor Vereshchagin Biography

Tourne of the Valdai district of the Novgorod province in the family of a priest. After graduating from the Novgorod Theological Seminary, he passed the exterior exams for a certificate of maturity and in the city worked for some time as a translator in the book publishing house “Knowledge”. After the revolution, he headed the Botanical Department of the Altai provincial workshops of visual aids, worked as a teacher in the 4th Soviet school, at a rabfak, in pedagogical and agricultural technical schools, and at higher pedagogical courses.

In February, he served a link in the Krasnoyarsk reserve "Polves", where he continued to engage in scientific work. After returning, he worked at the Museum of Local Lore. Vereshchagin was awarded the degree of candidate of biological sciences without the defense of the candidate dissertation. In addition to the main work, he paid a lot of attention to social activities: he was an active member of the “Society of Lovers of the Altai Research”, the organizer of the First Altai Local Lore conference, a member of the Congress of the “Society for the Study of Siberia and its Productive Forces”.

He gave a lot of effort to create a botanical department in the local history museum. Back in his student years, he was in the “Little Botanics” circle, the founders and members of which were professors Dolong Damnitsyn, Beketov, Voronin. For about 30 years, Viktor Ivanovich was a correspondent of herbarium of Tomsk University, supplying duplicates of the plants he collected. Viktor Ivanovich Vereshchagin is the author of 36 printed works, including about 10 of them are of scientific significance.

He was awarded the title of honorary member of the Altai branch of the Russian Geographical Society. During work in a real school at the summer holidays with groups of high school students, he regularly went to botanical expeditions to Mountain and Rudny Altai, to Kolyan, to the Privkskoye Plate. He organized 17 large excursions with scientific purposes in Altai.

In fact, he is the founder of children's tourism in Altai. Vereshchagin traveled a total of about a km of path, mainly along mountain riding paths. In addition, he took out schoolchildren to the Caucasus, where a huge way was also made. During expeditions, Viktor Ivanovich collected about two thousand species of plants, including 50 species of new species of previously unknown to science.

The richest collections of insects and minerals were collected, valuable information about tape bora, virgin steppes, peat bogs and swamps. Botanical collections collected by Vereshchagin entered the University of Tomsk, the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, the Siberian Agricultural Academy. But the main materials were transferred to the Altai Museum of Local Lore.

He published about 40 works on Mountain Altai. For outstanding work in the field of botanists, Soviet scientists called the name of V. Vereshchagin 8 species of new plants and 2 species of insects.