Peter Yulievich Schmidt (Russian: Пётр Юльевич Шмидт, romanized: Pyotr Yulyevich Shmidt; 23 December 1872, St. Petersburg – 25 November 1949, Leningrad) was a Russian and Soviet zoologist, ichthyologist, and museum curator.
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Career
Peter Yulievich Schmidt attended the gymnasium of KI May before studying at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University, from where he graduated in 1895. He was engaged in the laboratory of Professor V.M. Shimkevich and V.T. Shevyakov. He travelled through Semirechiy from 1899 to 1902. From 1908 to 1910, he participated in the Kamchatka expedition of F. P. Ryabushinsky, where he headed the zoological department. In 1906, he was awarded with a gold medal named after Petr Petrovich Semyonov by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.
From 1906 to 1930, he held the position of a professor at the Agricultural Institute in Leningrad, and from 1914 to 1931, he worked at the Zoological Museum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. From 1930 to 1949, Schmidt was a scientific secretary to the Pacific Committee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
In 1938, he was arrested, along with a group of other employees of the Zoological Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, by the NKVD because they had non-Russian surnames. Schmidt was suspected of espionage for Germany and Japan on the grounds that he had been on scientific missions in Berlin and Tokyo. After interrogation, during which the 66-year-old professor was knocked out, he signed the protocol as required by the NKVD investigators and also confessed to being an Italian spy, as his daughter lived in Italy. Eventually, he was released and was able to continue his scientific activity.