ABSTRACT
Many new independent states of the post-Soviet territory published their own classifications. The source system for all these classifications was, to a great extent, Classification and Diagnostics of Soils of USSR (Egorov et al, 1977); however, both the structure and the list of soil groups differed between countries. It depended on several factors. First, the soil cover of every country is different, and the lists of soils are narrower than that of the Soviet classification. Second, each region in the former Soviet Union had a particular school of pedology, and some regional schools had different points of view on soil genesis and classification from those of the main Moscow institutes and universities. Finally, after the fall of the Soviet Union the pedologists of the new independent states tried to accept some novel ideas of the Western classifications, such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Soil Taxonomy (Soil Survey Staff, 1999) and the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) (IUSS Working Group WRB, 2006).
