Osmolovsky Grigory Evseevich (22 September 1908, Tsaritsyn – 25 August 1976, Riga) — entomologist, professor, member of the All-Union Entomological Society.
In the pre-revolutionary years, Grigory Osmolovsky received a traditional elementary Jewish education. After the Civil War, Osmolovsky’s family moved to Kazan, where in 1926, after graduating from secondary school, he entered the Kazan Institute of Forestry Engineering. In 1930, he completed the full course of study with a specialization in forest protection against pests.
In the early 1930s, he worked as a forester in the Altai region and the Far East. He developed a strong interest in the biology of forest insect pests and methods of controlling them. In 1936, he entered postgraduate studies at the Department of Entomology of the Forestry Academy in Leningrad. His teacher and academic supervisor was the prominent Russian and Soviet entomologist Mikhail Nikolayevich Rimsky-Korsakov.
In 1939, Osmolovsky defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation entitled “Lifestyle, Development, and Harmful Activity of Beetles of the Genus Pissodes (resin weevils)” and subsequently continued working at the Department of Entomology.
In 1941, he completed officer training courses, and from 1942 he fought on the Leningrad Front. At the front, he joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). After the defeat of Nazi forces near Leningrad, he took part in offensive operations to destroy the Baltic enemy group. In 1944, on the territory of Estonia, he was seriously wounded. He was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War and the Order of the Red Star.
After the war, he worked for some time as director of the Sochi Arboretum. In 1947, he returned to Leningrad to continue his scientific work. He became interested in the application of then relatively new physical methods for detecting and eliminating insect pests of wooden structures. While working at the Research Institute of Municipal Services in Leningrad, he conducted studies on the effects of ultra-high-frequency electric currents on wood-destroying insects.
Political repressions in the Leningrad City Council, the Leningrad Party organization, and the city’s municipal services forced him to leave the institute and abandon a nearly completed research project. In 1950, he joined the Department of Agricultural Entomology at the Leningrad Agricultural Institute. At that time, the department was headed by the well-known entomologist Professor Vladimir Nikolayevich Shchegolev. At this department, Grigory Osmolovsky worked until the end of his life—first as an assistant, then as an associate professor, and later as a professor.
He taught courses and continued his scientific research. His main scientific interests focused on the collective behavior of groups of insect pests and of parasitic insects that destroy pests, as well as the factors influencing this behavior and, consequently, the mutual interactions between such insect groups.
In 1964, Grigory Osmolovsky published the article “On the Biology of the Parasitoid Apanteles glomeratus”, in which he demonstrated the existence of mutual influence between insect groups and a correlation between the group behavior of pests and that of their parasites. He applied these methods to forecasting the development and reproduction of insect pests and to determining optimal timing for pest control measures.
In 1968, Osmolovsky defended his Doctor of Sciences dissertation entitled “Theoretical Foundations for Forecasting the Population Size and Harmfulness of Major Vegetable Crop Pests”. Based on his research, he lectured to students and conducted other instructional and laboratory work.
His later research focused on the theory of forecasting insect population dynamics. Grigory Osmolovsky prepared a monograph on this subject, which remained unpublished due to his death. He was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Leningrad.