Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945: Lev Berg and Andrei Grigor'ev



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Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War,



1941–1945 : Lev Berg and Andrei Grigor'ev

Shaw, Denis; Oldfield, Jonathan



DOI:

10.1016/j.jhg.2014.06.002



License:

Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)



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Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record



Citation for published version (Harvard):

Shaw, DJ & Oldfield, J 2015, 'Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945 : Lev Berg and Andrei

Grigor'ev' Journal of Historical Geography, vol 47, pp. 40-49. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2014.06.002

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal



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Feature: European Geographers and World War II

Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941

e1945: Lev Berg

and Andrei Grigor

’ev

Denis J.B. Shaw



*

and Jonathan D. Old

field

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK



Abstract

The signi

ficance of the Second World War for Soviet geography was somewhat different from that in much of the West. In the USSR, as a result of the 1917

Russian Revolution and, more particularly, of Joseph Stalin

’s ‘Great Turn’ implemented in 1929e1933, geographers were faced with pronounced political

and economic challenges of a kind which arguably only confronted most Western geographers with the onset of war. It is therefore impossible to un-

derstand the impact of the war for Soviet geography without taking into account this broader context, including events during the turbulent post-war

years. The paper will focus on the experiences of two prominent geographers who played a major role in the developments of the era including their

responses to the revolutionary circumstances occurring from the late 1920s, their activities and experiences during the war, and the debates and con

flicts


they engaged in during the post-war crisis. Some of the more signi

ficant contrasts with geographical developments in Western countries during these

years will be emphasized.

Ó 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

).

Keywords: Soviet geography; Andrei Grigor



’ev; Lev Berg; USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Geography; Stalin era

Towards the end of January, 1947, just three years after the lifting of

the German blockade of the city by Soviet forces, some 600 or so

geographers and other delegates, plus guests, gathered in Lenin-

grad for the Second All-Union Geographical Congress. Surprisingly

enough, in view of their recent experiences of war, the Congress

delegates seem to have had relatively little to say about the war

itself, at least if the published Congress reports are anything to go

by.

1

However, one senior delegate, namely Academician Andrei



Grigor

’ev, Director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of

Geography (IGAN), did so indirectly in his presentation entitled

‘The contemporary tasks of Soviet geography’.

2

On page 124 of his



report, Grigor

’ev refers to the now much-cited paper by Edward

Ackerman,

‘Geographic training, wartime research, and immediate

professional objectives

’ which had been published in the Annals of

the Association of American Geographers for 1945.

3

As is well known,



in this paper Ackerman dwelt on the wartime experiences of US

geographers, especially those working in the Of

fice of Strategic

Services (OSS) in Washington DC. According to Ackerman,

‘Wartime

experience has highlighted a number of

flaws in theoretical

approach and in past methods of training men (sic) for the pro-

fession

’.

4



Among those

flaws, Ackerman pointed in particular to US

geographers

’ unfamiliarity with foreign geographical literature, an

almost universal ignorance of foreign languages, bibliographic

ineptness, a general lack of systematic specialisms, and their focus

on a regional geographical method which emphasized an unsci-

enti


fic holism. By contrast, argued Grigor’ev, it is these very prob-

lems with which Soviet geographers had been grappling for the

previous

fifteen years. In his view, the Soviet adoption of dialectical

materialism had led to a systematic study of the earth

’s many


environmental and social processes and to a scienti

fic emphasis on

the

‘dynamic development of individual territories and of the earth



as a whole

’.

5



Had they known of this claim, Western geographers

* Corresponding author. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.

E-mail address:

D.J.B.Shaw@bham.ac.uk

.

1

Trudy Vtorogo Geogra



ficheskogo s’ezda, Vols. 1e2, Moscow, 1948.

2

A.A. Grigor



’ev, Sovremennye zadachi Sovetskoi geografii, Trudy Vtorogo s’ezda, Vol. 1, 122e134.

3

E.A. Ackerman, Geographic training, wartime research, and immediate professional objectives, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 35 (1945) 121



e143.

4

Ackerman, Geographic training (note



3

), 122.


5

Grigor


’ev, Sovremennye (note

2

), 125.



Contents lists available at

ScienceDirect

Journal of Historical Geography

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r. c om / l oc a t e / j h g

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.06.002

0305-7488/

Ó 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

).

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

Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1

e10



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