Vera Baltz

Vera Aleksandrovna Balts, also published as Baltz (1866 to 1943), was a Russian geologist and soil scientist, one of the first women soil scientists in Russia and the Soviet Union. Born in Saint Petersburg and educated at the Tenishevsky School, she became interested in biology and soil science and worked at the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and the V. V. Dokuchaev Central Museum of Soil, and in the 1920s became director of the Museum of Soil Science. She specialized in soil structure, engineering geology and road construction and attended several international conferences of soil scientists in the late 1920s. Arrested in December 1930, she was sentenced to five years of forced labor at the Solovki camp, where she kept working as a soil scientist and took part in the Academy's studies of tundra and peat bogs near Arkhangelsk. Released in 1933 because of her age, she was kept under restrictions and the Soviet government suppressed her work, and she died of myocarditis brought on by starvation in 1943 at the age of 76.