100 Notable alumni of St. Petersburg State University

Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov was a Russian poet and author of the fairy-tale poem The Little Humpbacked Horse (Konyok-Gorbunok).

Veniamin Aleksandrovich Kaverin was a Soviet and Russian writer, dramatist and screenwriter associated with the early 1920s movement of the Serapion Brothers.

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev was a Russian Soviet economist and proponent of the New Economic Policy (NEP) best known for the business cycle theory known as Kondratiev waves. Despite being a Soviet citizen, he was not a Marxian economist.

Levon Hakobi Ter-Petrosyan, also known by his initials LTP, is an Armenian politician and historian who served as the first president of Armenia from 1991 until his resignation in 1998.

Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief was a Soviet-American economist known for his research on input–output analysis and how changes in one economic sector may affect other sectors.

Count Akaki Tsereteli, often mononymously known as Akaki, was a prominent Georgian poet and national liberation movement figure.

Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov was an admiral of the fleet of the Soviet Union. Twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, he oversaw the expansion of the Soviet Navy into a global force during the Cold War as its Commander-in-Chief from 1956 to 1985.

Valentin Petrovich Glushko was a Soviet engineer who was program manager of the Soviet space program from 1974 until 1989.

Ilya Valeryevich Kormiltsev was a Russian poet, translator, and publisher. Kormiltsev is most famous for working during the 1980s and the 1990s as a songwriter in Nautilus Pompilius, one of the most popular rock bands in the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. He was also a prominent literary translator and publisher. Since 1997, he translated into Russian many important pieces...

Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician and economist, known for his theory and development of techniques for the optimal allocation of resources. He is regarded as the founder of linear programming. He was the winner of the Stalin Prize in 1949 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975.

Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist, activist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.

Vitaly Valentinovich Bianki was a popular Russian children's writer and a prolific author of books on nature.

Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and ideologist. Dontsov fundamentally influenced the emergence of a radical wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1920s and developed his own brand of radical Ukrainian nationalism. His ideas and writings strongly influenced the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, particularly the Banderite generation.

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He is one of the major figures associated with Russian formalism.

Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician celebrated for his pioneering work in stochastic processes. He extended foundational results—such as the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem—to sequences of dependent random variables, laying the groundwork for what would become known as Markov chains. To illustrate his methods, he analyzed the distribution of vowels and consonants in Alexander...

Juri Lotman was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was elected a member of the British Academy (1977), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1987), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989) and the Estonian Academy of Sciences (1990). He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow...

Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, playwright and journalist. She is most famous for her work on the Leningrad radio during the city's siege, when she became the symbol of the city's resilience.

Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He originated the pioneering theory that the universe is expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed known as the Friedmann equations.

Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician who served as the first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to July 1930.

Andrey Nikolayevich Illarionov is a Russian economist and former senior policy advisor to Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, from April 2000 to December 2005. Since April 2021, he is a senior fellow at the non-governmental organization Center for Security Policy, which is based out of Washington, D.C. in the United States.

Mustafa bek Shokay was a Kazakh social and political activist and ideologue of the Turkestan Autonomy. From 1921, he lived in exile in France.

Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov was the head of NKGB from February to July 1941, and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a leading member of what was later derisively described as the "Beria gang".

Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who served as chairman of the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union, from 1926 to 1934.

Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev was a Russian medievalist, linguist, and an inmate of Gulag. During his lifetime, Likhachev was considered the world's foremost scholar of the Old Russian language and its literature.

George Gamow was a Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Georges Lemaître's Big Bang theory. Gamow discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunneling, invented the liquid drop model (the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus), worked on radioactive decay, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis...

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was a Russian American sociologist and political activist, who contributed to the social cycle theory.

Andrea Pezzi is an Italian TV presenter and entrepreneur. He made his debut as a DJ for Radio Deejay and later became a video jockey for MTV Europe and MTV Italia from 1996 to 2003. Pezzi later moved to RAI and Mediaset to work as a television host.

Dmitry Nikolayevich Kozak is a Russian politician who served as the Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff from January 2020 to September 2025. He previously served as the Vice Prime Minister from 2008 to 2020. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dzhanibekov is a retired Soviet Air Force Major General and a cosmonaut veteran of five orbital missions.

Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician and considered to be the founding father of Russian mathematics.

Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova was a Soviet dissident, Russian politician and ethnographer known for her work to protect ethnic minorities and promote democratic reforms in Russia. She was shot to death in her apartment building in 1998.

Klim Zhukov is a Russian author, vlogger, and historical reenactor. He is a medievalist historian and science fiction author. He is also involved in historical reenactment. He is a bestselling author. In a survey conducted in 2019, he entered the top 10 trust rating in the Russian Internet. He collaborates with Dmitry Puchkov.

Vitaly Leontiyevich Mutko is a Russian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 2016 to 2020.

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest, irreducible structural units.

Alexander Stepanovich Popov was a Russian physicist who was one of the first people to invent a radio receiving device.

Gabriel Józef Narutowicz was a Polish engineer and politician who served as the first president of Poland from 11 December 1922 until his assassination five days after assuming office. He previously served as the minister of public works from 1920 to 1922 and briefly as the minister of foreign affairs in 1922. A non-partisan and an engineer by profession, Narutowicz...

Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum, better known as Julius Martov (Юлий Мартов [ˈmartəf] ), was a Russian Marxist theorist, revolutionary, and a leader of the Mensheviks, the minority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). A close friend and collaborator of Vladimir Lenin in the early years of their revolutionary careers, he became his chief rival after the RSDLP split...

Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the finite-difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002. She authored more than two hundred scientific publications, including six monographs.

Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known by his nom de guerre Garegin Nzhdeh, was an Armenian statesman, military commander and nationalist revolutionary. As a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he was involved in the national liberation struggle and revolutionary activities during the First Balkan War and World War I and became one of the key political and military leaders of the...

Alexei Leonidovich Kudrin is a Russian liberal politician and economist. Previously he served as the Chairman of the Accounts Chamber from 2018 to 2022 and as Minister of Finance from 2000 to 2011. Since 9 December 2022, he has been a corporate development advisor at Yandex.

Mikhail Iosifovich Veller is a Russian writer of Ukrainian Jewish extraction. He holds a dual citizenship of Russia and Estonia.

Mukhtar Omarkhanuli Auezov was a Kazakh writer, a social activist, a Doctor of Philology, and an honored academician of the Soviet Union (1946).

Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.

Dmitry Konstantinovich Kiselyov is a Russian TV presenter and propagandist. In 2013, Kiselyov was appointed by Russian president Vladimir Putin to head Rossiya Segodnya, a Russian state-controlled media group. He also serves as deputy director of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and leading theoretician of Russian nihilism and the Narodniks. He was the dominant intellectual figure of the 1860s revolutionary democratic movement in Russia, despite spending much of his later life in exile to Siberia, and was later highly...

Alexander Ivanovich Bastrykin is a Russian lawyer and official who has served as the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia since 15 January 2011. He served as the First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia and Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office from 2007 to 2011.

Tatyana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya is a Soviet and Russian scientist in the field of neuroscience, psycholinguistics and theory of mind, a Honored Worker of Science (2010). On her initiative in 2000 was first open training specialization "Psycholinguistics" (in General Linguistics Department of St. Petersburg State University Faculty of Philology), Member of the Council on Science and Education under President of the...

Dalia Grybauskaitė is a Lithuanian politician who served as the eighth president of Lithuania from 2009 to 2019. She is the first and so far only woman to hold the position and in 2014 she became the first President of Lithuania to be reelected for a second consecutive term.

Lyudmila Borisovna Narusova is a Russian politician, a Russian Federation Senator, representing Tuva. From 2010 to 2012, she represented Bryansk Oblast in the Federation Council of Russia.

Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov was a Russian revolutionary and political activist who was executed for planning an assassination against Alexander III of Russia. He was the elder brother of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union; his execution pushed his younger brother into activism.

Diana Sergeyevna Arbenina is a Russian singer, musician, poet, and leader of the rock group Nochnye Snaipery.

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, also spelt Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky (Ukrainian: Володимир Іванович Вернадський; 12 March [O.S. 28 February] 1863 – 6 January 1945), was a Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (now...

Alexander Aleksandrovich Alekhine was a Russian and French chess player and the fourth World Chess Champion, a title he held for two reigns.

Sergei Yurievich Yursky was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor, theatre director and screenwriter. His best known film role is Ostap Bender in The Golden Calf (1968)

Viktor Lvovich Korchnoi was a Soviet (before 1976) and Swiss (after 1980) chess grandmaster (GM) and chess writer. He is considered one of the strongest players never to have become World Chess Champion.

Anatoly Eduardovich Serdyukov is a Russian politician and businessman. He was Russia's Minister of Defense from 15 February 2007 to 6 November 2012, and made several major reforms in the Russian military. He has worked as an Industrial Director for Rostec, a state corporation, since October 2015.

Boris Borisovich Grebenshchikov is a prominent member of the generation which is widely considered to be the "founding fathers" of Russian rock music. He is the founder and lead singer of the band Aquarium which has been active since 1972. Grebenshchikov is frequently referred to as BG (Russian: БГ; pronounced "Beh-Geh"), after his initials.

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev was a Soviet and Russian historian, ethnologist, anthropologist and translator. He had a reputation for his highly unorthodox theories of ethnogenesis and historiosophy. He was an exponent of Eurasianism.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and literary critic who worked on the philosophy of language, ethics, and literary theory. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active...

Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov was a Russian poet, writer, critic and publisher, whose deeply compassionate poems about the Russian peasantry made him a hero of liberal and radical circles in the Russian intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century, particularly as represented by Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He is credited with introducing into Russian poetry ternary meters and the technique of dramatic...

Olga Vladimirovna Skabeyeva is a Russian television presenter and political commentator, commonly described as a governmental propagandist. Skabeyeva is also known by the nickname "Iron Doll of Putin's TV", due to her criticism of the Russian opposition. She is known for supporting the Putin regime and Russia's war against Ukraine.

Edita Stanislavovna Piekha is a Soviet and Russian singer and actress of Polish descent. The peak of her popularity in the countries of the former USSR was in the 1960s. Her most famous song is “Our Neighbor”. (Наш сосед) She was given the title Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.

Igor Ivanovich Sechin is a Russian entrepreneur and government official, considered a close ally and "de facto deputy" of Vladimir Putin. He is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rosneft.

Konstantin Lvovich Ernst is a Russian media manager, film producer and TV host. He is currently the CEO of Channel One Russia.

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters have invited comparisons with the American children's author Dr. Seuss. Chukovsky's poems Tarakanische ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone"), Chukokkala, and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean") have been favorites with many generations of Russophone children. Lines from his...

Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian former politician and senior official who served as Secretary of the Security Council from November 1999 to March 2001, as Minister of Defense from March 2001 to February 2007, as Deputy Prime Minister from November 2005 to February 2007, and as First Deputy Prime Minister from February 2007 to May 2008.

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin was a Russian statesman who served as the third prime minister and the interior minister of the Russian Empire from 1906 until his assassination in 1911. Known as the greatest reformer of Russian society and economy, he initiated reforms that caused unprecedented growth of the Russian state, which was halted by his assassination.

Lev Davidovich Landau was a Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. He was considered as one of the last scientists who were universally well-versed and made seminal contributions to all branches of physics. He is credited with laying the foundations of twentieth century condensed matter physics, and is also considered arguably the greatest Soviet...

Marina Leonidovna Kravets is a Russian actress radio moderator and singer. She is the only permanent female participant of the Russian television show Comedy Club.

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov is a Russian and former Soviet chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, ⁣and politician. He was the 12th World Chess Champion from 1975 to 1985, a three-time FIDE World Champion (1993, 1996, 1998), twice World Chess champion as a member of the USSR team (1985, 1989), a six-time winner of Chess Olympiads as a member of the...

Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed Iron Felix (Russian: Железный Феликс), was a Soviet revolutionary and politician of Polish origin. From 1917 until his death in 1926, he led the first three Soviet secret police organizations, the Cheka, the GPU and the OGPU, establishing state security organs for the Bolshevik government. He was a key architect of the Red Terror and de-Cossackization.

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was a Russian lawyer and revolutionary who led the Russian Provisional Government and the short-lived Russian Republic for three months from late July to early November 1917 (N.S.).

Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, also referred to as Maria Faassen, is a Russian pediatric endocrinologist. She is the elder child of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Olga Igorevna Buzova is a Russian media personality and singer. She is regarded as one of the most successful Russian contemporary entertainers.

Anastasia Vyacheslavovna Ivleeva, better known as Nastya Ivleeva (Настя Ивлеева), is a Russian television presenter, actress and blogger. She also hosted the Ukrainian TV show Oryol i Reshka on the channels Inter and Friday!.

Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak was a Russian politician and legal scholar, a co-author of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg.

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was the most well-known Russian lyrical poet during the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs. Pavlov also conducted significant research on the physiology of digestion, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.

Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Ocheretnaya, is a Russian linguist who served as the First Lady of Russia from 2000 to 2008 and from 2012 to 2014, while married to her then-husband, Vladimir Putin, the current president and former prime minister of Russia.

Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova is a Russian scientist, manager, and former acrobatic dancer. She is the second daughter of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. As the Bolsheviks' founder, Lenin led the October Revolution, which established the world's first communist state and...

Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is a Russian politician and lawyer who has served as deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia since 2020.

Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism.

Pavel Valeryevich Durov is a technology entrepreneur. He is best known as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Telegram.

Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician and geometer who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman resigned from his research post in Steklov Institute of Mathematics and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, owing to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field....

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012. He has been described as the de facto leader of Russia since 2000.

Sergey Mikhailovich Mironov is a Russian politician. He served as Chairman of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, from 2001 to 2011. He leads the faction A Just Russia in the State Duma.

Ivan Antonovich Yefremov, sometimes Efremov (Russian: Ива́н Анто́нович (Анти́пович) Ефре́мов; 23 April 1908 – 5 October 1972) was a Soviet paleontologist, science-fiction author and social thinker. He founded taphonomy, the study of fossilization patterns.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet...

Ksenia Anatolyevna Sobchak is a Russian journalist, media manager, television personality, and former politician. She is the younger daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg and one of Vladimir Putin's mentors, and Senator Lyudmila Narusova. Sobchak became known to the wider public as the host of the TNT reality show Dom-2. She later became an...

German Oskarovich Gref is a Russian politician and banker. He was the Minister of Economics and Trade of Russia from May 2000 to September 2007. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West.

Antanas Smetona was a Lithuanian intellectual, journalist, and politician. He served as the first president of Lithuania from 1919 to 1920 and later as the authoritarian head of state from 1926 until the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940. Referred to as the "Leader of the Nation" during his presidency, Smetona is recognised as one of the most important Lithuanian...

Nicholas or Nicholai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay was a Russian explorer and scientist. He worked as an ethnologist, anthropologist and biologist. He became famous as one of the earliest scientists to settle among and study indigenous people of New Guinea "who had never seen a European".

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin was a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was one of the prominent 19th-century composers known as "The Five", a group dedicated to producing a "uniquely Russian" kind of classical music. Borodin is known best for his symphonies, his two string quartets, the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia and his opera...

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school.

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.