Under Count Alexander Stroganov, who managed the library during the first decade of the 19th century, the Rossica project was inaugurated, a vast collection of foreign books touching on Russia.
His unfinished Flora Rossica, a description of all the plants in the Russian Empire, dedicates one page to Prunus fruticosa, a shrub found in campis Isetensibus, "in the plains of the Iset;" that is, the Siberian steppe.