Yefremov, Mykola

Yefremov, Mykola [Єфремов, Микола; Jefremov; aka Efremov, Nicholas], b 7 May 1904 in Stanytsia Myshkovska, Oblast of the Don Cossack Host, d 13 September 1962 in New York, New York State, USA. Geologist and mineralogist; full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1949. After graduating from the Don Polytechnical Institute in Novocherkassk in 1929, he completed graduate studies at the Leningrad Mining Institute in 1938. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia where he worked as a geologist-prospector (1930–3). Then he taught at Rostov-na-Donu University (1935–8, 1941–3) and the Institute of Geology in Moscow (1938–9) and worked as a mineralogist at the Lviv Scientific Natural Studies Museum (1943–5; see Natural Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). He emigrated from Ukraine after the Second World War and taught at the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) University in Munich (1945–8) and the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute (1945–51). He was a senior fellow in various research programs on the study of the USSR in the United States and in 1958 he joined the faculty of the Middlebury College Institute of Soviet Studies.

Yefremov researched various aspects of geology in Northern Caucasia and the Mariupol region and studied the iron-ore deposits of the Taman Peninsula and Kerch Peninsula. He discovered 12 new minerals, one of which, yefremovite, was named after him. He wrote numerous works on economic geology, geochemistry, crystallochemistry, mineralogy, the processing technology of mineral raw materials, and agrochemistry.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]