[2] He studied at the Nizhny Novgorod Institute for Nobles, and then in the Oriental department of Saint Petersburg University, where he majored in Arabo-Persian-Turkic-Tatar languages.

From 1907 he taught Turkic languages at St. Petersburg University, and in 1920 joined Vasily Bartold and Ivan Zarubin in providing Narkomnats with an ethnographic analysis of Turkestan and the Kirgiz steppe.

In 1927 he took part in an Academy of Sciences anthropological expedition to Kazakhstan which studied the life and the language of ethnic Kazakhs in the Altai Mountains.

He continued to live in Leningrad, from where he oversaw studies and planning for the development and expansion of mineral extraction in the Kazakhstan region.

In 1933, under Samoylovich's direction, the Kazakhstan base of the USSR Academy of Sciences held sessions devoted to the development of the Karaganda coal basin and state plans for the creation of the Uralo-Kuznetsk combinate.

In these scientific forums Samoylovich involved leading scientists of the time, such as academicians Alexander Fersman, Ivan Gubkin, and Andrey Arkhangelsky, geologists V. Nehoroshev and N.Kassin, and engineers K. Satpaev and M.

Samoylovich's plans were cut short by the emergence of the Great Purge, which targeted many members of the intelligentsia as alleged "enemies of the people".