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The first academician of Bashkortostan

заварицкий
© Архивы РАН/ unsplash.com

The founder of the new scientific field of petrochemistry, President of the All-Union Mineralogical Society, laureate of the Lenin and two Stalin Prizes, Alexander Zavaritsky, according to the recollections of his colleagues, was a very private person. This was due not only to his high state positions and developments of defense purposes, but also to certain circumstances of his life.

Zavaritsky was born in 1884 into the family of a collegiate assessor. Alexander Nikolayevich never told anyone about his childhood and lineage, wishing to protect his family. As his son later wrote, even his closest people learned about his noble origin only after the scientist's death. And there were reasons for that...

Kin Alexander Nikolaevich descended from the disgraced Polish nobleman, exiled from Galicia to Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Ironically, his ancestors undertook a lot of effort to obtain the title of nobility in Russia, but as a result only suffered from the acquired status. In 1917, after the October revolutionary events, the geologist's parents were arrested, and only the intervention of the people's commissar and a member of the RSDLP Alexander Tsyurupa, who used to rent an outbuilding in the Zavaritskiy house, saved them from death. The family was released on the condition that they give the Soviet authorities all the property - the manor in the center of Ufa and a large estate of 35 versts from the city, where the father of the scientist organized a rural school, trade school and zemstvo hospital.

The described events took place when Alexander Zavaritsky was already a young geologist and worked in St. Petersburg. Nikolai Alexandrovich died a few years later, and his mother moved to her son in the city on the Neva. Not wishing to draw unnecessary attention of the state authorities to his own origins, he preferred to forget how as a child he studied in the most prestigious provincial grammar school in Ufa, in the yard of his parents' huge house he watched the stars through a telescope, and in summer he studied the rocky cliffs and caves near the family country estate.

Заварицкий
© Александр Заварицкий, из архивов семьи

As early as 1902, Zavaritsky entered the Department of Geology at the Mining Institute. His first serious work was devoted to platinum. As a student Alexander Nikolayevich became interested in placers of Tagil district. He got a job as a mine geologist in the Nizhny Tagil Mining District and during the summer he found 17 deposits by himself.

The young man graduated from the institute with a gold medal. By university tradition, his name was put on the marble board of honor for his exceptional academic achievements. By the way, next to Zavaritsky on it is engraved no less important for geology name of Ivan Gubkin, who became the best graduate of the next year.

губкин
© Форпост Северо-Запад

The rectorate invited the young researcher to be an assistant at the Department of Ore Deposits, headed by Karl Bogdanovich, and simultaneously to conduct practical classes at the Department of Petrography, occupied by Eugraf Fedorov. Communication and work with these legendary scientists determined two vectors of all further scientific activity of Zavaritsky - ore and petrographic directions.

For example, in 1911 he led the exploration of iron ore deposits of the Magnitnaya Mountain in the Urals, and simultaneously studied the geology of this area - made a geological map of the mountain and its surroundings. The final report was highly appreciated in professional circles. Zavaritsky was elected first an associate geologist, and then a geologist of the Geological Committee, which was equal to the title of professor.

Because of the world war, the revolutionary events of 1917 and the ensuing devastation, the monograph "Magnitnaya Mountain and its iron ore deposits" was not published until 1927. But this did not change the essence. The results of studies and systematization of already available materials conducted by Zavaritsky in 1929 formed the basis of the construction project of the largest in Europe Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine.

гора Магнитная
© Государственный исторический музей Южного Урала, Панорама строительства Магнитогорского комбината

During World War I, when all geological exploration was aimed at searching for mineral raw materials needed by the industry, Alexander Nikolayevich did much to find and explore deposits of tungsten, chromium, corundum, uranium ores, magnesite and, especially, copper.

In the early twenties, Zavaritsky first evaluated the Baymak area and the whole greenstone volcanic-sedimentary zone as very promising for the search of copper ore. He became one of the first researchers of Komarovo-Zigazin iron-ore, Sibai and Uchalinsk copper-pyrite deposits, on the basis of which all ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy of Bashkiria works today. He was the first to substantiate the connection of pyrite deposits and ore occurrences of the Urals with volcanogenic formations. As a result, the origin hypothesis developed by the scientist allowed to correct searches and led to the discovery of a number of new large deposits.

An extensive list of scientific directions underlines the diversity of the scientist's interests. As an expert on ore deposits and one of the best Russian petrographers Zavaritsky was often invited for consultations by various mining enterprises. He was widely known not only in our country but also abroad.

In particular, in 1926 he was invited to Madrid to participate in the XIV International Geological Congress, where he made a detailed report on copper ore deposits in the Urals region. The presentation was a great success, but when he returned home, his apartment was searched, and many working papers were confiscated. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were interested in his personality, only not as a hereditary nobleman, but as a prominent scientist, organizer and head of the Soviet geology.

According to biographers, he was under constant surveillance while working in the Urals. In addition, he was married to the sister of an "enemy of the people" - one of the largest experts in the exploitation of surface deposits of minerals, head of the mining project and construction of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine Boris Petrovich Bogolyubov, arrested by the OGPU and then convicted "for sabotage".

Probably saved Zavaritsky from repression by frequent expeditions and a "closed lifestyle," which he chose for himself after the events of 1917.

As wrote the mathematician and academician Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov: "He was a controversial person: in communication haughty, but in science as majestic. He had an extraordinary depth of thought. Those who were in his company always felt his superiority, causing a depressing sense of inferiority in inconspicuous people, lost close to the giant. This man was under the power of steep turns in science, such as the justification of deep-focus earthquakes, new hypotheses of the origin of pecmatites, the genesis of pyrite ores and others."

In 1925 Alexander Nikolayevich became a professor at the Mining Institute. For the first time in Russian he developed and read a course on sedimentary petrography. At the same time, his pedagogical activity did not interfere with his continued geological research.

Zavaritsky's name is associated with the development of a new field of research - volcanism. The result of his expeditions to Kamchatka was the first comprehensive description of an active volcano in Russian literature - Avacha - its geological structure, history, composition of gases, minerals and rocks changed by gases. The scientist was convinced that the study of volcano-tectonic Kamchatka-Kurile arc is of paramount importance for understanding the history of development of the Earth's crust. This topic captivated Zavaritsky so deeply that he first headed the Kamchatka volcanological station, and since 1944, he organized the Laboratory of Volcanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

In 1939 Alexander Nikolayevich was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences. In the same year he headed the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Academy of Sciences. From the first days of the Great Patriotic War it was Zavaritsky who was responsible for extensive geological research throughout the country to identify copper, molybdenum, niobium and other strategic resources, rebuilding exploration for the needs of defense.

Академия Наук
© Общественное достояние

The scientist's research covered a number of geological disciplines - general geology, tectonics, petrography, crystallography, volcanology, meteoritics and mineralogy. For five years he was president of the All-Union Mineralogical Society. There was no group of rocks that he did not study. The geologist traveled the entire territory of the USSR with expeditions - he conducted research in the Caucasus, the Urals and Kamchatka, in Kazakhstan and Armenia. As part of his scientific activities he often went abroad, visited China, Spain and Italy.

And yet, the most significant trace he left in petrology, applying the data and methods of physical chemistry to resolve theoretical issues. Developing the physical and chemical direction of petrography, he proposed and developed a method of rational recalculation and geometric representation of chemical analyses of rocks in the form of vector diagrams. This allowed with great clarity and precision to express the main features of the chemistry of rocks. This method stands incomparably above all the methods of foreign petrographers and was considered basic for several generations of geologists.

заварицкий
© Александр Заварицкий

In 1944, Zavaritsky published his fundamental work "Introduction to Petrochemistry of Erupted Rocks", which marked the birth of a new field of petrology. It was appreciated and awarded the Stalin Prize. A second Stalin Prize was awarded to the scientist for his research of the territory of Kazakhstan.

Alexander Zavaritsky made his last expedition to the Urals in the sixty-ninth year of his life. On the way back he got seriously ill and died during the surgery on July 23, 1952. Today the outstanding geologist is reminded of many sites on the map named after him - two volcanoes on Kamchatka, rocks on Franz Josef Land, a lava tube in Krasnoyarsk Territory, a glacier on the Kuril Islands and streets in Ufa, Magnitogorsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. A mineral and the Institute of Geology and Geochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences are named after him.

Заварицкий
© Вулкан Заварицкого, Снимок с МКС NASA