Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945: Lev Berg and Andrei Grigor'ev
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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 geography ’s applied side, science now became central to the Bol- sheviks
’ 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 Sci- ences, 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 fraudster, Trofim Lysenko, and perished in prison in Sar- atov 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 geographers 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 econ- omy 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 amoun- ted to wartime emergency conditions long before the war itself broke out. 22 13
’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
’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 47 (2015) 40e49 42
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