Academy of Sciences, of the Commission for the Study of Natural
Productive Forces (KEPS) with a brief to engage in the systematic
survey of the country
’s resource base as a wartime defensive
measure.
13
KEPS had a positive impact on the status of pre-
revolutionary professional geography and would go on to facili-
tate the institutional advancement of the discipline during the early
Soviet period. The commission was chaired by the eminent
mineralogist and biogeochemist, V.I. Vernadskii, who was close to
the geographers, and several geographers served as members,
including both Berg and Grigor
’ev. This wartime experience fur-
nished the geographers with an appreciation of how their skills
might be used for military ends. As Grigor
’ev’s recent biographer,
T.D. Aleksandrova, has written:
‘[Grigor’ev] often said that war did
not
find the geographers unprepared. Undoubtedly, there spoke his
experience in the 1914
e1918 war in the KEPS commission’.
14
Furthermore, it provided the basis for purposeful collaboration
between the state and natural scientists in areas of natural resource
exploration, assessment and evaluation, which would continue, in
various guises, until the Second World War. The resulting expertise
and systems of operation would prove invaluable during the early
years of the War as the Soviet economy reordered itself in response
to the German invasion.
The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 naturally
changed the entire political context within which the geographers
and other scientists operated, though the impact on science was not
immediate. The Bolsheviks were modernizers, quickly recognizing
the importance of science and their dependence on scientists
educated under the old regime. The scientists were soon bene
fit-
ting in consequence. In geography, for example, the new govern-
ment established a specialized Geographical Institute in Petrograd/
Leningrad (in 1918), whose second rector was the prominent
mineralogist A.E. Fersman (a secretary of KEPS from 1915).
15
Its
major purpose was to train specialized geographers and to expand
expeditionary and survey work in science.
16
In 1925 the institute
was transformed into the Geography Faculty of Leningrad State
University. Meanwhile, and re
flecting the Bolshevik emphasis on
applied science in general, many new scienti
fic research institutes
were established in universities, government ministries and other
organizations.
Until the late 1920s Soviet science remained a modi
fied version
of pre-1917 science, but now fully dependent on state resourcing
with the abolition of private funding (and in that sense
‘national-
ized
’). It also remained open to foreign, especially German, in-
fluences.
17
The First World War and the new priorities of the Soviet
regime had led to a renewed emphasis on the applied nature of
Soviet geography, but had not changed its essential nature.
18
All this
was to change fundamentally in the next few years. Over the period
between 1929 and the mid-1930s Joseph Stalin, who had by now
fully consolidated his dictatorship over the Communist Party and
over society as a whole, inaugurated what became known as
‘The
Great Turn
’ involving the complete centralization of economic ac-
tivity in the command economy, the collectivization of agriculture,
and a thoroughgoing cultural revolution. For science the changes
were profound. Essentially, in Krementsov
’s words, as a result of
the
‘Great Turn’, ‘Stalinist science [became] Big Science, a gigantic
centralized system with thousands of institutions and hundreds of
thousands of scientists
’ e in fact the world’s first example of Big
Science, centrally funded and politically controlled, oriented to-
wards the government
’s priorities, and subject to planning like the
rest of the economy.
19
In other words, whilst the First World War
and the Revolution had merely placed new emphasis on geog-
raphy
’s applied side, science now became central to the Bolsheviks’
determination to build a new, socialist society. In the mid-1930s
Stalin unleashed the Great Terror, directed at those who failed to
conform or who fell out of favour for one reason or another. In the
purged institutions (which included the Academy of Sciences,
especially after 1929) many scientists were demoted or sacked,
many arrested, and many disappeared into the camps. Among the
geographers and their associates the most prominent victim was
the major geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, friend of Berg and president of
the Geographical Society between 1931 and 1940.
20
Vavilov was
arrested in 1940 as a result of his rivalry with the scienti
fic fraud-
ster, Tro
fim Lysenko, and perished in prison in Saratov in 1943.
Geography, of course, was very much affected by these events.
Thus geographers were now ordered to conform to of
ficial re-
quirements in teaching and research and to direct their activities
towards applied science.
21
However, after the
‘Great Turn’, uni-
versities were to be primarily responsible for teaching whilst much
research was henceforth to be undertaken by more specialized
bodies, particularly the Academy of Sciences. On the basis of the
practical signi
ficance and achievements of KEPS during the First
World War, the Academy was able to argue for the establishment of
a series of specialized research institutes devoted to working for
Soviet development. Among these was the Institute of Geography.
However, since the evolution of this institute was very much bound
up with the career of Andrei Grigor
’ev, its consideration will be left
to the next section.
It is important to stress, therefore, that pressures on Soviet ge-
ographers to demonstrate their scienti
fic rigour and ability to
contribute to national goals long predated the war. As a result of the
Revolution and especially of Stalin
’s ‘Great Turn’, the entire context
in which Soviet geographers operated was very different from that
in the West. Indeed, since the Soviet command economy has often
been compared to the wartime economies of Western capitalist
states, it could be asserted that, in the 1930s, Soviet geographers
found themselves plunged into what amounted to wartime emer-
gency conditions long before the war itself broke out.
22
13
See A.V. Kol
’tsov, Sozdanie i deiatel’nosti Komissii po izucheniiu estestvennykh proizvoditel’nykh sil Rossii, 1915e1930, St Petersburg, 1999; A. Kojevnikov, The Great War, the
Russian Civil War, and the invention of Big Science, Science in Context 15 (2002) 239
e275.
14
T.D. Aleksandrova, Akademik Andrei Aleksandrovich Grigor
’ev: zhizn’ i nauchnoe tvorchestvo, Moscow, 2011, 217.
15
Otchet o deiatel
’nosti Komissii po izucheniiu estestvennykh proizvoditel’nykh sil Rossii sostoiashchei pri Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk za 1916 god, Petrograd, 1917, 35.
16
Geogra
ficheskii Institut. Geografiia, ee prakticheskie zadach i znachenie dlia gosudarstvennogo stroitel’stva, Petrograd, 1922.
17
Krementsov, Stalinist Science (note
10
), 13
e30.
18
For more on how Soviet science changed after 1917, see: L.R. Graham, The formation of Soviet research institutes: a combination of revolutionary innovation and in-
ternational borrowing, Social Studies of Science 5 (1975) 303
e329; M.B. Adams, Science, ideology and structure, the Kol’tsov Institute, 1900e1970, in: L.L. Lubrano, S.G.
Solomon (Eds), The Social Context of Soviet Science, Boulder, 1980, 173
e204.
19
Krementsov, Stalinist Science (note
10
), 3.
20
See Krementsov, Stalinist Science (note
10
); D. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, New York, 1970; P. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, New York, 2008; V.D. Esakov, Nikolai
Ivanovich Vavilov: stranitsy biogra
fii, Moscow, 2008.
21
L.S. Berg, Dostizheniia Sovetskoi geogra
fii (1917e1947), Leningrad, 1948. Although not specifically discussed by Berg, geographers in the 1930s served on the State Planning
Committee (GOSPLAN), the Committee for the Investigation of the Productive Forces of the USSR (SOPS), and on other major state planning bodies.
22
See, for example, A. Nove, The Soviet Economic System, London, 1977, 365.
D.J.B. Shaw, J.D. Old
field / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e10
3
Please cite this article in press as: Shaw DJB, Old
field JD, Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941e1945: Lev Berg and Andrei
Grigor
’ev, Journal of Historical Geography (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.06.002