Suchanskai?a? dolina.

This photograph is part of a collection from the family archive of prominent geologist Mikhail Alekseevich Pavlov (1884-1938). Pavlov was born near Ekaterinburg and completed his schooling at the Nikolai Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo (present-day Pushkin) in 1905. He went on to study geology at Saint Petersburg University and participated in many field expeditions. While still a student, Pavlov took part in the attempted expedition to the North Pole in 1912-14, which was led by the Arctic explorer Georgii Iakovlevich Sedov (1877-1914). Along with his school and university friend Vladimir Iul'evich Vize (1886-1954), who served as the expedition's geographer, Pavlov collected a large body of scientific data on the northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. After finishing his education, Pavlov worked as a geologist and teacher of geology. He devoted most of his career to the geology of the Far East, working as an employee of the Far East Geological Committee (Dal'geolkom) in 1919-31. Pavlov was arrested in 1931 and in 1938 was executed after exhaustion prevented him from reporting for work in the labor camp where he was a prisoner. Such a fate was typical for representatives of the Russian intelligentsia in Stalinist Russia. Many photographs in this collection were taken by Pavlov himself, while others are unattributed. The photographs date from approximately 1875-1929. They depict Pavlov's geological expeditions in Siberia and the Far East, expedition participants, views of nature, Pavlov during his school and university years, and his family members in various years. The collection is preserved in the V.K. Arseniev Primorsky State Associated Museum in Vladivostok, Russia and was digitized for the Meeting of Frontiers digital library project in the early 2000s.