The Encyclopedia of Russian Agriculture

The unique «Complete Encyclopedia of Russian Agriculture…» was published from 1900 to 1912 under the editorship of A.F. Rudzky and Alfred Devrien – the founder of the publishing house of books on natural science, geography and agriculture in 1872 in St. Petersburg. The books were printed in the printing house of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the additional 12th volume was printed in the Senate printing house.

    Alfred Fedorovich Devrien, the publisher

There are about 20 thousand pages, many illustrations, diagrams and tables. The illustrations were created by using phototype and lithography methods from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.

The book block of the encyclopedia is printed on vellum paper. In the production of such paper, a scoop mold with a fabric mesh was used, which did not leave prints on the sheet. A sheet of vellum paper is uniform and looks like thin parchment, which is where the name of the paper comes from. The edge of the book block is round in shape and has a color that imitates marble.

    Alexander Felitsianovich Rudzky, the first editor

The editor of the first five volumes of the encyclopedia, Alexander Felitsianovich Rudzky, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, a professor at the Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg, recalled that the work was extremely painstaking; several people participated in its creation over the course of a year. After Rudzky’s death, the work was continued by Viktor Ivanovich Filipyev, an entomologist and writer; he edited from the VIth to the middle of the Xth volume for 6 years, and also died suddenly.

The last editor of the additional 12th volume “Cars in agriculture. Apple wine and vodka,” Ivan Veniaminovich Sladkovsky was an agronomist scientist, a lecturer at the Agricultural Institute named after I.A. Stebut).

Prince Sergei Petrovich Urusov, as a major expert in the field of horse breeding, the specifics of Russian horse breeds and the conditions for their breeding, wrote articles for this encyclopedia. In 1918, 6 years after the publication of the last volume of the Encyclopedia, Prince Urusov became a victim of the Red Terror. He was brutally killed in the resort town of Pyatigorsk in the night of October 18-19.