Russian Geographical Society

Founded August 1845

In Russian high schools, all subjects continue through eleventh grade, the final grade before graduation. Only geography terminates after tenth grade, giving the general impression that it is of secondary importance. This seems to be a longstanding view. Even in The Minor («Недоросль»), an eighteenth-century classic comedy by Denis Fonvizin, Mrs. Simpleton (mother of the title character, Mitrofan) seems utterly confounded when asked whether her son is studying geography. The work is full of “speaking names” that make it crystal clear what each character represents.

In the nineteenth century, however, geography held a place of honor among the sciences. Great geographic discoveries didn’t end with Columbus. The world had yet to be thoroughly studied, and there were still enormous unexplored stretches in Africa, Asia, and South America. The vast Russian Empire had also not yet been fully “discovered.” Back then, geographic societies enjoyed tremendous authority. It was not only scholars that attended their meetings; the tales of travels recounted there drew students and journalists, society ladies and schoolboys, as well as politicians, of course. Adventurers, colonialists, missionaries, and traders all paid close attention to what could be learned from geographers. For them, geography was an exceptionally important science.

The Russian Geographical Society (rgo.ru) was established 175 years ago, in August 1845. At the time, Russia already sprawled from Finland to the Caucasus, from Warsaw to the Far East, and it was still expanding. The following decades would bring the founding of Vladivostok and advances by Russian troops into Central Asia. As the empire incorporated new lands by force, it was also forever altering itself, bringing about a historic interaction of cultures, languages, and customs that continues to shape Russia to this day.

The empire was suddenly neighbors with China, with which it would now have to negotiate borders, and the Russian navy found itself in the Pacific. Complicated political entanglements arose in the Balkans and the Caucasus, on the country’s western and southern borders. As politicians were trying to resolve these conflicts and the military was working to capture new lands, geographers, completely separately from these efforts, were studying these places, or, as Fyodor Litke (born Friedrich Lütke), a sailor, Arctic explorer, and an early president of the Geographical Society put it, “to cultivate Russian geography.”

Expeditions set out in all directions, to the Far North and the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, the Ussuri taiga, and the boundless steppe stretching toward Lake Baikal. Geographers left their homes for years at a time, trading the comforts of their libraries for travel on horseback, by camel, by ship or canoe, or by hiking up mountains or through dense forests, all with the goal of mapping the course of the Amur River or the oases of Karakum.

We can understand why geographers went to such lengths in the name of science, but why did Platon Golubkov, a Moscow merchant originally from Kostroma, take such an interest in the Geographical Society and contribute enormous sums to support the mapping of Central Asia, of all places? What was it about Asia? Golubkov had made his fortune collecting liquor taxes for the state and through gold mining in Siberia, but he saw trade with Asia as being of exceptional importance for Russia.

And why did another merchant, Stepan Solovyov, donate an entire half-pood (about 18 pounds) of gold to support a geographic expedition to Siberia? Of course, he was hoping to discover new deposits, but there were other ways. Why did he feel compelled to sponsor geographers trudging across the Siberian taiga?

For geographers, exploring uncharted territories was their job as scientists, but why did yet another mine owner, Mikhail Sidorov of Arkhangelsk, in addition to mining gold and trading with numerous countries, also contribute funds for scientific expeditions on top of authoring more than a hundred articles on zoology and geography? In St. Petersburg, Sidorov also organized “Northern evenings to familiarize those actively involved in the North with one another,” to facilitate collaboration among scholars, entrepreneurs, and explorers.

Why was geography – and the Geographical Society – so important to all these men?

It is interesting to note just where in the empire branches of the Geographical Society were opened: there was one in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), to study the seemingly endless diversity of languages, peoples and customs of the Caucasus, and one in Irkutsk that launched expeditions into the Siberian taiga. And then, it turned out, the Orenburg steppe, the Baltics, Ukraine, Western Siberia, and the Amur River region also needed to be explored. What did the Caucasus and the Amur region have in common? They shared the status of being largely unknown to the outside world until they began being studied and described through efforts by the Society.

And so, one step at a time, year by year, Russian geography was “cultivated” and the obscure corners of the vast empire were “discovered.”

Today, it is easy to call these geographers colonizers, since they were helping the empire subjugate more and more peoples. And to some extent, perhaps that is a fair designation.

In the novel The Gift («Дар»), Nabokov gives his protagonist, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a geographer father who is a member of the Russian Geographical Society.

Between 1885 and 1918 he covered an incredible amount of territory, making surveys of his route on a three-mile scale for a distance of many thousands of miles and forming astounding collections. During these years he completed eight major expeditions which in all lasted eighteen years; but between them there was also a multitude of minor journeys, “diversions” as he called them, considering as part of these minutiae not only his trips to the less-well-investigated countries of Europe but also the journey around the world he had made in his youth. Tackling Asia in earnest he investigated Eastern Siberia, Altai, Fergana, the Pamirs, Western China, “the islands of the Gobi Sea and its coasts,” Mongolia, and “the incorrigible continent” of Tibet – and described his travel in precise, weighty words.

These journeys loomed large in the imagination of the son, presumably an alter ego of Nabokov himself:

I relived all my father’s journeys, as if I myself had made them: in my dreams I saw the winding road, the caravan, the many-hued mountains, and envied my father madly, agonizingly, to the point of tears—hot and violent tears that would suddenly gush out of me at table as we discussed his letters from the road or even at the simple mention of a far, far place.*

Among Russians, Nabokov was not alone in suffering from a severe case of travel bug.

* Excerpts quoted from The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage Books, New York, 1991), translated by Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author.