He was born in the town of
Mogilev in the
Russian Empire, in what is now
Belarus. His father was a descendant of
Baltic German settlers in
Courland, while his mother was a
Latvian. In 1912 and 1913, while in university, he published a number of mathematical works on
group theory which laid foundation for
Krull–Schmidt theorem. In 1913, Schmidt married
Vera Yanitskaia and graduated from the
Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev, where he worked as a
privat-docent starting from 1916. In 1918 he became a member of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Internationalists) which was later dissolved in to the
Russian Communist Party. After the
October Revolution of 1917, he was a board member at several
People's Commissariats (
narkomats)such as
Narkomprod from 1918 to 1920 (
Narodnyi Komissariat Prodovolstviya, or People's Commissariat for Supplies),
People's Commissariat for Finance from 1921 to 1922 (
Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, or People's Commissariat for Finances). Schmidt was one of the chief proponents of developing the higher education system, publishing, and science in
Soviet Russia. He worked at
Narkompros (People's Commissariat for Education), the State Scientific Board at the
Council of People's Commissars of the
USSR, and the
Communist Academy. He was Chair of the
Foreign Literature Committee from October 1921. Following the
Litkens Commission Schmidt was also employed as the director of the State Publishing House (
Gosizdat) from 1921 to 1924, and chief editor of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia from 1924 to 1941. From 1923 he was a professor at the
Second Moscow State University and later at the
Moscow State University, and from 1930 to 1932, Schmidt was the head of the Arctic Institute. During this time he coined the term for the
double bond rule that relates to allylic and similar systems. From 1932 to 1939, he was appointed head of
Glavsevmorput' (
Glavnoe upravlenie Severnogo Morskogo Puti) – an establishment that oversaw all commercial operations on the
Northern Sea Route. From 1939 to 1942, Schmidt became a
vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he organized the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics (he was its director until 1949). Otto Schmidt was a founder of the Moscow Algebra School, which he directed for many years. In the mid-1940s, Schmidt suggested a new
cosmogonical hypothesis on the formation of the
Earth and other
planets of the
Solar System, which he continued to develop together with a group of Soviet scientists until his death.
Arctic Schmidt was an explorer of the Arctic. In 1929 and 1930, he led expeditions on the
steam icebreaker Georgy Sedov, establishing the first scientific research station on the
Franz Josef Land, exploring the northwestern parts of the
Kara Sea and western coasts of
Severnaya Zemlya, and discovering a few islands. In 1932, Schmidt's expedition on the steam icebreaker
Sibiryakov with
Captain Vladimir Voronin made a non-stop voyage from
Arkhangelsk to the
Pacific Ocean without wintering for the
first time in history. (left) and
Mikhail Vodopyanov (right) in 1938 From 1933 to 1934, Schmidt led the voyage of the
steamship Cheliuskin, also with
Captain Vladimir Voronin, along the Northern Sea Route. In 1937, he supervised an
airborne expedition that established a
drift-ice station "
North Pole-1". In 1938, he was in charge of evacuating its personnel from the ice. Otto Schmidt was a member of the
Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a
deputy of the
Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the first
convocation (1938–1946). ==Legacy==