Graduation date: 2008Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov (1711 – 1755) was a successful early Russian naturalist whose professional and social destinies were linked to eighteenth-century Russia's nascent but growing naturalist tradition. During his own time Krasheninnikov bridged the gap that existed in Russia between a distinctly European scientific practice and a tradition of Russian military expansion. He, like many of his contemporaries, was engaged in a process of accommodation between European scientific practices and Russian social and political traditions. This study attempts to address the general theme of the relation between science and culture through the life and work of Krasheninnikov. It argues that the adoption of scientific practices (in the guise of natural history) in eighteenth-century Russia was characterized not by a unidirectional importation of scientific practice nor by the westernization of the practitioners, but by a diffuse and sometimes idiosyncratic process of appropriation as Russian men of science sought to integrate European scientific practice into preexisting Russian historical, social, and political structures.