On August 18, a postcard with a commemorative stamp dedicated to the 150th Birth Anniversary of Lev Berg, a geographer, a biologist, was put into postal circulation in the Geographical Projects of Russia series

Lev Berg (1876–1950) was a Russian and Soviet ichthyologist, a paleontologist, a geographer, and an evolutionist. He was the President of the Geographical Society of the USSR (1940–1950), an Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946), and a holder of the Stalin Prize (1951). He was the father of the theory of nomogenesis.

L. Berg was born in the city of Bendery in the Bessarabia Governorate. From 1885 to 1894, he studied at the 2-nd Gymnasium in Chișinău. In 1898, he successfully graduated from the Natural Sciences Department of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty at Imperial Moscow University. He worked at the Ministry of Agriculture as a fisheries inspector. From 1899 to 1902, he was a fisheries supervisor on the Aral Sea and on the lower reaches of the Syr Darya; from 1903 to 1904, he held the same position on the middle reaches of the Volga.

From 1904 to 1913, he held the position of the Head of the Fish Department at the Zoological Museum of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1909, he was awarded a doctorate in geography for his dissertation The Aral Sea. In 1913, he was a delegate from the Russian Geographical Society to the International Conference on the Study of Tyrolean Glaciers. From 1913 to 1914, he was a professor of ichthyology and hydrology at the Moscow Agricultural Institute. From January of 1917, he was a professor in the Department of Physical Geography at Petrograd State University, later renamed Leningrad State University. From 1918 to 1925, he was a professor of geography at the Geographical Institute in Petrograd (Leningrad). From 1922 to 1934, he headed the Department of Applied Ichthyology at the Institute of Experimental Agronomy. On January 14, 1928, he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1934 to 1950, he headed the Laboratory of Fossil Fish at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1934, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Zoology without defending a thesis. From 1940, he was the President of the Geographical Society of the USSR. On November 30, 1946, he was elected a Full Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1948 to 1950, he held the position of the Chairman of the Ichthyological Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

L. Berg’s papers cover a wide range of fields, from ichthyology and climatology to the landscape science and the history of geography. His scientific legacy includes more than 700 publications. The scientist’s work laid the foundations for modern sciences, such as landscape science, contemporary physical geography, climatology, and paleogeography. His ideas about natural zones and landscapes are still employed in scientific studies and education today.

The main illustration provides a portrait of Lev Berg against a schematic map of Russia’s landscape zones compiled by the scientist, as well as the RGO logo; the commemorative stamp features images that symbolically represent geographical projects.

In addition to the issue of the postcard with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Design Artists: S. Kapranov and M. Podobed.
Quantity: 3.7 thousand postcards.

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