Soviet geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945: Lev Berg and Andrei Grigor'ev
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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
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 ’.
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
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 o c 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/ ). Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 40 e49 would no doubt have been tempted to dismiss it as an example of crude, Cold War propaganda. Part of the purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of Grigor ’ev’s assertion. Ackerman ’s paper has also been cited by Trevor Barnes in the latter ’s much more recent work on American geographers’ wartime experiences in the OSS, using a variety of sources. 6 Barnes ’ thesis is that American geography was ultimately changed by the experi- ence of war: ‘Approaches to war now shaped geographical thought ’.
Many of the wartime de ficiencies identified by Acker- man, de ficiencies particularly pertaining to the human side of the discipline, were eventually met, if not always resolved, by geogra- phers adopting the more rigorous and scienti fic methodologies recommended in Ackerman ’s paper. In time this helped give rise to the Quantitative Revolution. Again, in discussing the wartime work and experiences of Soviet geographers, the paper will query the extent to which Barnes ’ thesis might also be said to apply to the USSR.
This paper is informed by a variety of recent literature. In particular, the broad literature on the history, sociology and geog- raphies of science is important as underlining one of the central points of this paper, which is that the development of science, rather than being sui generis, is in fact very much shaped by the social, political and cultural context in which it occurs. 8 That being the case, the development of geography in Russia and the USSR, and the effects of the war on that development, are unlikely to have been the same as in the USA. 9 Also important for this paper is the recent literature on Stalinism and, in particular, on the relationship between science and politics under Stalin. 10 Here the key point is that an earlier generation of Western scholars, hampered by a lack of access to Soviet sources, and no doubt often in fluenced by Cold War attitudes, tended to stress the sharp differences between the comparative freedom of Western scientists operating in ‘demo-
cratic ’ societies, and the lack of freedom of Soviet scientists subject to ‘totalitarian’ controls and political diktat. By contrast, more recent scholarship has stressed the often subtle and two-way relationship which existed between Soviet scientists and the Sta- linist state, with the former often seeking patrons among Party and state of
ficials, and political ideology being a flexible rather than rigid instrument of control. In this way, and following Krementsov, we might say that the development of Soviet geography, whilst perhaps appearing ‘strange’ by Western standards, was by no means entirely alien to geography ’s development in the West. 11 In order to open up the experiences of Soviet geographers during the Second World War, the paper focuses in particular on the activities of two in fluential Soviet geographers, the aforemen- tioned Andrei Grigor ’ev, and one of his main professional rivals, Lev Berg. Both geographers played key roles in the intellectual and institutional development of Soviet geography and an overview of their respective contributions is provided below. More speci fically, the often antagonistic relationship between the two academics and their differing experiences during the war years provide us with an opportunity to assess, at least in part, the nature of the war ’s in- fluence on the method and practice of Soviet geography. This paper is based partly on the published books and periodical literature produced by Soviet geographers during the period be- tween the early 1930s and the early 1950s (coinciding largely with the Stalin era), supplemented by more recent research by Russian scholars. The present writers have undertaken some work in Russian archives, which are generally more accessible than they were in Soviet times (though military archives remain dif ficult to
access) but are conscious of the fact that much more remains to be done before a full picture of the wartime activities of the Soviet geographers and their consequences can be painted. Geography in Russia and the USSR: pre-war developments In keeping with the general thesis that science has the potential to develop differently in different places, something must be said about the particularities of geography ’s development in Russia and the USSR before an account of the wartime experiences of Soviet geographers can be given. Professional geography in Russia can be said to date from 1884 when a government decree ordered geography departments or chairs (kafedry) to be established in the Russian universities. Over the next few years a series of departments appeared, often led by scholars trained in the natural sciences. The developing character of geography in Russia was shaped not only by German and European in fluences but also by Russia’s own geographical tradition which arguably reached back to the founding of the Academy of Sciences by Peter the Great in 1725. 12 The Academy ’s expeditionary work, supplemented by that of other government and scienti fic bodies like the Russian Geographical Society established in 1845, was designed to explore, survey and map the remote corners of the Russian empire, and to record the natural resources to be found there. This helped endow Russian geography with at least three speci
fic characteristics as it began to emerge from the 1880s: an emphasis on fieldwork and exploration, a bias towards the physical rather than the human side of the discipline (and consequently geography ’s growing proximity to cognate sciences like geology, soil science and meteorology), and the signi ficant role played by the state as re flected in the importance frequently (but not always) accorded to the applied and policy-oriented aspects of research. The importance of the state to Russian science (and to other areas of Russian life) no doubt re flected in part an official con- sciousness of Russian backwardness relative to other European states and a general determination from the time of Peter to speed Russian development along European lines. It was also related to the sheer size of the Russian empire and the state ’s need for detailed knowledge of its territory. Strategic concerns were to the fore with the establishment in 1915, under the auspices of the 6 T.J. Barnes, Geographical intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the Of fice of Strategic Services, 1941e45, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 149 e168. 7
6 ), 163.
8 See, for example, T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti fic Revolutions, Chicago, enlarged edition 1970; D.N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise, Oxford, 1992, especially 1 e31; J. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Cambridge, 1998; D.N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scienti fic Knowledge, Chicago, 2003. 9 For a discussion of the Russian and Soviet case, see L. Mazurkiewicz, Human Geography in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, London, 1992. 10 See, for example: L. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, Cambridge, 1993; D.R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev, Berkeley, 1999; N. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, Princeton, 1997; E. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton, 2006; A. Kojevnikov, The phenomenon of Soviet science, Osiris 23 (2008) 115 e135; S.G. Solomon, Circulation of knowledge and the Russian locale, Kritika 9 (2008) 9e26. 11 Krementsov, Stalinist Science (note 10 ), 287.
12 D.J.M. Hooson, The development of geography in pre-Soviet Russia, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58 (1968) 250 e272; Mazurkiewicz, Human (note 9 ), 15 e35; D.J.B. Shaw, Geographical practice and its significance in Peter the Great’s Russia, Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996) 160e176. D.J.B. Shaw, J.D. Old field / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 40e49 41
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