Lev Berg, Andrei Grigor
’ev and pre-war theoretical debates in
geography
Lev Berg and Andrei Grigor
’ev, the two geographers who form the
focus of this study, were central to geographical developments in
the Stalin period. In order to understand the signi
ficance of their
activities during the war and its aftermath, it is important to say
something about their backgrounds and the pre-war debates in
which they participated.
Lev Semenovich Berg (1876
e1950) was born in the city of
Bendery in present-day Moldova, the son of a Jewish notary. In 1894
he was admitted to Moscow University where he gravitated to-
wards zoology and geography. After graduation he studied the
lakes and rivers of Central Asia and was awarded a doctorate on
account of his 1908 dissertation on the Aral Sea. In 1916 Berg took
the post of professor at Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) Uni-
versity and later at the Geographical Institute. In view of his
numerous, well-received publications and other activities, he
received many honours and, in 1928, was elected a corresponding
member of the Academy of Sciences (he became a full member in
1946). In 1940, Berg was elected to succeed the recently-arrested
Nikolai Vavilov as president of the All-Union Geographical Soci-
ety, a position he held until his death in 1950.
Andrei Aleksandrovich Grigor
’ev (1883e1968) was born in St
Petersburg, the son of an army of
ficer. Entering St Petersburg Uni-
versity, he later studied in Berlin and then Heidelberg where he
participated in Alfred Hettner
’s geography seminar. Awarded a
doctorate in Heidelberg, Grigor
’ev returned to Russia, working for a
period for the Brokgauz and Efron encyclopedia. He then joined
KEPS and rose to head its geographical section. In 1930 this section
became the Geomorphological Institute which eventually became
the Institute of Geography (IGAN) in Moscow in 1936 with Gri-
gor
’ev as director. Grigor’ev was elected a full member of the
Academy of Sciences in 1939 and remained director of IGAN until
1951. As a fully-
fledged institute of the Academy of Sciences, IGAN
became the USSR
’s principal geographical research institution and
was destined to play a leading role in the wartime activities of the
geographers.
One signi
ficant difference between the contexts in which Soviet
and US geographers worked in the 1930s and 1940s was the for-
mer
’s need to pay heed to the prevailing political ideology
(although the era of McCarthyism in the late 1940s may have had an
analogous effect in the case of the US geographers).
23
In the USSR
ideology stimulated lively debates across the sciences in this
period. In geography the debates focused around the opposed
views of Berg and Grigor
’ev regarding the essence and purpose of
geography, particularly physical geography. As shall be seen, both
positions were bound up with issues of practicality as well as
ideological rectitude.
24
Lev Berg
’s view of geography was first propounded in 1913 and
1915. For Berg, geography should be focused on the study of land-
scapes, naturally occurring biophysical units into which the earth
’s
surface is subdivided and which might easily be discovered in the
field. Here Berg seems to have been influenced by the Russian soil
science school of V.V. Dokuchaev (1846
e1903). However, in his
paper of 1915, Berg also claimed a link to the ideas of the respected
German geographer, Alfred Hettner (1859
e1941). The latter’s neo-
Kantian concept of geography emphasized its chorological char-
acter, and his major work, Geography: its history, substance and
methods, was republished in the USSR as late as 1930.
25
For Berg,
the major advantage of Hettner
’s view was that it endowed geog-
raphy with its own unique object of study, namely the region or
place. In addition, Berg also claimed the practical usefulness of the
landscape approach. Thus, the
first edition of his Landscape-
geographical zones of the USSR was published in 1930 by N.I. Vavi-
lov
’s All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding which was dedicated to
the breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops for agricul-
ture. In the view of Vavilov, Berg
’s comprehensive, geographical
study of the USSR
’s natural zones (biomes) facilitated exactly that
end.
Unfortunately for Berg, however, by the 1930s Hettner was
coming under increasing political attack. He was seen as an anti-
Marxist and, moreover, suspicious foreign scholar whose choro-
logical concept of geography was not only unscienti
fic and partic-
ularistic but abetted notions of environmental determinism. Indeed
the sin of
‘Hettnerism’ was soon being used by Stalinist geogra-
phers as a sinister epithet with which to tar their opponents. And
one of the leading champions of the anti-Hettnerite camp was
Andrei Grigor
’ev. Grigor’ev, as mentioned above, was a former
student of Hettner, but from the late 1920s, whilst still working for
KEPS, he distanced himself more and more from Hettner
’s ideas
and migrated from economic (human) into physical geography.
From the early 1930s, Grigor
’ev began to advocate what he termed
a new approach to geography based on the concept of
‘the single
physical
egeographical process’,
26
a rival to landscape geography.
Grigor
’ev believed that this approach was not only consonant with
the dynamic principles of dialectical materialism, but, focused on
process rather than on the relatively static and conservative
concept of landscape, was more relevant to the growing of
ficial
emphasis on industrialization and nature transformation. Like Berg,
then, Grigor
’ev strove to position geography as an essentially
practical science even prior to the demands of the war, in
fluenced
both by the radical state policies of the 1930s and by longer-term
trends linked to the strategic development of the country
’s natu-
ral resources.
Soviet geographers in the Great Patriotic War
In an article,
‘Geography in the service of the war’, written in 1942,
A.E. Fersman argued that the war had led to a re-evaluation of the
importance of several of the sciences, including geography.
27
Ac-
cording to Fersman, who was clearly trying to boost the wartime
signi
ficance of those sciences falling within his purview, geography,
which before the war had often been regarded as a second-order,
descriptive discipline, now ranked among the sciences playing a
primary role in the solution of
‘the most important and most
dif
ficult problems of the world conflict’. Fersman argued that this
re-evaluation had occurred for two reasons:
firstly because geog-
raphy had now become a science of interconnections, including
those between society and nature, a knowledge of which was vital
in the evaluation of all the complexities of battle
field conditions.
The second reason was that geography was the science dealing with
23
See D. Harvey, Owen Lattimore: a memoir, Antipode 15 (1983) 3
e11. We are grateful to Trevor Barnes for this reference.
24
For more details, see D.J.B. Shaw and J.D. Old
field, Landscape science: a Russian geographical tradition, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (2007)
111
e126; D.J.B. Shaw and J.D. Oldfield, Totalitarianism and geography: L. S. Berg and the defence of an academic discipline in the age of Stalin, Political Geography 27 (2008)
96
e112; D.J.B. Shaw and J.D. Oldfield, Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries among Soviet geographers in the late Stalin era, EuropeeAsia Studies 60 (2008) 1397e1418.
25
A. Hettner, Geogra
fiia: ee istoriia, sushchnost’ i metody, Moscow-Leningrad, 1930.
26
For explanation of this concept, see Shaw and Old
field, Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries (note
24
), 1403.
27
A.E. Fersman, Geogra
fiia na sluzhbe voiny, Voprosy Geografii 128 (1985) 25e30. Fersman’s article is cited by L.S. Abramov, Geografiia voiskam i organizatsiia tyla, in: Nauka
i uchenye Rossii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941
e1945: ocherki, vospominaniia, dokumenty, Moscow, 1996, 71e88 (71).
D.J.B. Shaw, J.D. Old
field / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e10
4
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