Grigory Kramarov

He was an early promoter of the idea of space flight in the Soviet Union, actively advancing the concept from the 1920s.

Involved in the 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg, Kramarov was arrested and eventually fled Russia, living for a time in San Francisco.

[1] Involved in the 1917 October Revolution, he was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) and took part in the civil war.

Kramarov was strongly involved in the promotion of rocketry and space travel in the Soviet Union, and was a founder and the chairman of the Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel in 1924.

In later years, he wrote two books on the early history of space exploration in Russia, "The World's First Society of Interplanetary Flight" and "The Dawn of Cosmonautics" (1965).