Alexey Feodosyevich Vangenheim

Alexey Feodosyevich Vangenheim was a Russian hydrometeorologist, organizer and the first head of the USSR Weather Bureau. He was born in the village of Krapivna in the Chernigov Governorate. In 1906 he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University, and in 1909 — from the Moscow Agricultural Institute.

From 1911 to 1913 Vangenheim organized the hydrometeorological service on the Caspian Sea in the city of Petrovsk-Port (now Makhachkala). During the First World War he headed the meteorological service of the South-Eastern Front and wrote "A Short Course in Gas Meteorology." After the revolution he organized a local history museum in the town of Dmitriev in the Kursk Governorate (since 1999 it has borne Vangenheim's name).

From 1923 to 1926 Vangenheim worked at the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. He then moved to Moscow, where he served as deputy head of Glavnauka of the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR and headed the State Geophysical Institute. From 1928 he was a professor at Moscow University. Vangenheim became the organizer and first head of the unified Hydrometeorological Service of the USSR (1929–1934). In early 1934 he was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary sabotage in the Hydrometeorological Service of the USSR, sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, and served his sentence in the Solovetsky special-purpose camp. He was executed. He was rehabilitated in 1956.