Learning About the Soviet State: The Establishment of Soviet Educational Cartography in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview of the development and the establishment of Soviet educational cartography, using the example of school world atlases. Geography, as a compulsory school subject, began to be implemented in the curriculum only after 1934, putting maps right at the centre of the educational process. This triggered the formation of new governmental committees and centralized map production, introducing new approaches to school atlases and new content that was aligned to the newly developed programme. This paper, therefore, examines the changes in the cartographic production and content of school world atlases from the late nineteenth century until 1937 against the context of changes in managing and perceiving the Russian and Soviet spaces.