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

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.

Biographical Note

Sofia Gravrilova (SFB 1199 & Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany)

Sofia Gavrilova is a human geographer of the post-Soviet spaces. For the past six years she has been working in the field of the human geography and social anthropology of post-Soviet countries, focusing on the production of the ‘military landscapes’, ‘the North’, border regions, and peripheries during and after socialism, and their representation. Her doctoral research project at the University of Oxford was dedicated to the analysis of the production of places in Russian regional museums in the transformational period between the socialism and Russian capitalism. During her post-doctoral fellowship at Christ Church Sofia Gavrilova was working on the Gulag mapping research project (www.gulagmaps.org). Now she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig.