Viktor Zhitomirsky (1894–1954) was a Soviet physician, infectious disease scientist and epidemiologist who pioneered the study of microbiology in Tajikistan.

In 1938, he organized a field trip to Tajikistan where he researched the potential threat of a cholera epidemic which was spreading in neighboring Afghanistan.

[3] According to the Tajik journalist and historian Gafur Shermatov, Zhitomirsky was one of the doctors whose work had helped stop the rapid spread of epidemics in Dushanbe of the 1940s, when the city became a destination for over a hundred thousands evacuees from the European part of the USSR.

[5] He was fired from both institutions in 1953 under the Soviet anti-cosmopolitan campaign which has been widely described as a thinly disguised antisemitic purge.

The formal reason for his dismissal was that one of his research papers on malaria in Central Asia was allegedly offensive to the Tajik people, as he mentioned that their traditional houses made of clay provided a good environment for the disease-carrying marsh mosquitoes.