Geography and Great Victory: A Story from Military Life of Quiet Academic Geography

Abstract

The contribution of geographers in the military-geographical provision of the army and the rear is shown from the analysis of “The list of works of the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, made during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)”; archival materials (maps, descriptions, and reports of 1941–1945), handed over to the Museum of the history of the Institute in 2014 with the participation of the author; and numerous publications in the geographical editions to the 40th and the 50th anniversaries of the Great Victory. Quantitative and qualitative estimations of cartographic and reference materials prepared in the Institute of Geography during the Great Patriotic War are presented. Inter alia, direct participation of I.P. Gerasimov and K.K. Markov in these works is mapped. It is supposed that due to the refusal from the ideological struggle with Alfred Hettner’s direction in geography in war years, the national geography returned to regional studies, landscape approach, and sectoral-statistic approach in economic geography. All this helped to quickly generate the required for the front and the rear military mapping and reference materials, including maps: landscapes of the territories of the fronts and the rear, trafficability, distribution of population, productive forces, natural resources, the mobilization potential of the territories, and etc. It is shown that each of scientific directions of the Institute of Geography during the War received its innovative development in the postwar years.