A history of Soviet spectroscopy is given, with special emphasis on various areas indicating the earliest workers in each specialty and their principal successors; for example, the work of Rozhdestvenskii (anomalous dispersion); Fok (self-consistant field calculations), Terenin (photochemistry, atomic beams), Mandelstam (combination scattering), Vavilov (luminescence, quantum properties of light), Cerenkov (radiation), Chaika (atomic lifetimes), Gross (excitons), and Volkenstein (molecular vibrations).