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)
Document Version
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
Publisher Rights Statement:
Eligibility for repository : checked 18/11/2014
General rights
Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the
copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes
permitted by law.
•Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication.
•Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private
study or non-commercial research.
•User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?)
•Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain.
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document.
When citing, please reference the published version.
Take down policy
While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been
uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact UBIRA@lists.bham.ac.uk providing details and we will remove access to
the work immediately and investigate.
Download date: 18. Jul. 2018
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