Nicholas Poppe

Nicholas N. Poppe (Russian: Никола́й (Ни́колас) Никола́евич Поппе; July 27, 1897 – August 8, 1991) was an important Russian linguist.

He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications.

Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the larger Altaic language family to which, in the view of many linguists, the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as less strong than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.

Nicholas Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service. Poppe was born in Yantai, Shandong, China, on July 27, 1897.

Poppe’s boyhood and youth were marked by wars: the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Later, he experienced Stalin's Great Purge and the Second World War.

Poppe began teaching at the Institute for Modern Oriental Languages in 1920 at the age of 23. Three years later, in 1923, he began teaching at the University of Leningrad. In 1931, he was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1933, at the age of 36, he was elected as the youngest associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

During World War II Poppe lived in the Caucasus, in a region which was overtaken by the Germans. Poppe served as a translator between the local population and the German invaders. When the Germans withdrew he and his family also took the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. In 1943 Poppe moved with his family to Berlin. There, Poppe began working at the SS-affiliated Wannsee Institut, a research institute that studied the politics and economics of the Soviet Union. After the war, he spent several years underground in hiding from the Soviets. In 1949, he managed to emigrate to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at the University of Washington. He continued teaching there up to his retirement in 1968.

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