Lev (Chaim Leiba) Yakovlevich Sternberg (May 4, 1861, Zhitomir, Ukraine - August 14, 1927, Dudergof, now Mozhaiskii, Russia) was a Ukrainian ethnographer who from 1889 to 1897 studied the Nivkhs (Gilyaks), Oroks, and Ainu on Sakhalin and in Siberia for the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. He was active in Jewish social movements and a devoted Marxist. Sternberg majored in physics and mathematics at Enters Petersburg University. He later majored in law at Enters Novorossiisk University. He was an early Marxist activist joining Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will) and edited the marxist publication Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (The Narodnaya Volya Herald). He was arrested by Russian authorities April 27, 1886 for participation in The People's Will which was labeled an anti-tsarist terrorist organization spending three years in an Odessa jail. Lev Sternberg was then exiled to the Sakhalin Penal Colony for a ten year prison sentence. He was deported at Odessa on the boat Peterburg on March 19, 1889 arriving in Port Aleksandrovsk, Sakhalin May 19, 1889. Sternberg agitated authorities due to his activism in prisoners' and indigenous peoples rights. Authorities sent him to the remote community of Viakhtu, 100 km north of the Port Aleksandrovsk where he first began his ethnographic fieldwork on the Nivkhs, Oroks, and Ainu. He would return home but be put under house arrest for the first few years. Lev Sternberg was an important Russian figure in the then new field of anthropology. Sternberg, with the help of Vladimir Bogoraz organized the fist Russian ethnography center at Saint Petersburg State University after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

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