Fedorovsky, Nikolay Mikhaylovich (1886–1956) belonged to the generation of Russian scholars who came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and received their education on the eve of the revolution.
Like many young intellectuals in Russia at the time, Fedorovsky was an active sympathizer with the revolutionaries. In Nizhny Novgorod he worked as a lecturer at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, headed the provincial committee of the Bolshevik Party, and was one of the initiators of the founding of Lobachevsky University.
Later, in Moscow, N. F. Fedorovsky became one of the founders of the Mining Academy, from which several specialized institutes subsequently grew. N. M. Fedorovsky was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and awarded the degree of Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences. He made many contributions to Soviet science and was well known abroad. He actively promoted the publication of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and the Technical Encyclopedia.
In 1937, like many Russian scholars, N. F. Fedorovsky was slandered and sentenced to 15 years "for aiding German counter-intelligence."
First in Vorkuta and then in Norilsk, he taught at a mining and metallurgy technical college and worked in a prison camp on the construction of a copper-smelting plant. Shortly before his death, N. F. Fedorovsky was rehabilitated.
In 1975, geologists in Buryatia and Kazakhstan discovered a new mineral, which was named in honor of N. M. Fedorovsky — fedorovskite.