Omsk Regional Office

Russian Russian Geographical Society Omsk Regional Branch was established on the initiative of Governor-General of Western Siberia Nikolai Gennadyevich Kaznakov on July 12 (June 30, old style), 1877 with the original name of the West Siberian Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.

For almost a century and a half of the Department's activity, thousands of its members have conducted hundreds of expeditions across the Asian part of Russia and the USSR, Central Asia. Scientific schools of hydraulic engineers, botanists, archaeologists, culturologists, ethnographers, soil scientists, foresters, hygienists, infectious disease specialists were established, the first scientific and cultural institutions in Western Siberia were opened: the meteorological service, the regional museum of local lore (of 180 thousand exhibits of which more than 100 thousand were collected by members of the Department), the emergency medical care system, the state archive, in to a large extent, the statistics service.