ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two scholars, D. M. Mendeleev and his disciple E. E. Sviatlovskii, who, in the late imperial and early Soviet periods respectively, sought to identify and map the forms and dynamics of Russian spatial change and to promote a rational, empirical, evolutionary approach to spatial planning and policymaking based on scientific method. It discusses Mendeleev's positivist understanding of space in the context of early twentieth-century Russian spatial thinking, and his recommendations and prescriptions to government for spatial policymaking. In contemporary Russia, a country still struggling to formulate a coherent strategy of economic modernization, to balance state power with the interests of society, to integrate its vast and diverse territory, and to find its place in the world, Mendeleev's century-old vision of illiberal modernity seems still to offer a solution. Mendeleev's rejection of teleological and eschatological notions of Russian spatial identity and evolution was not, however, rooted in a liberal view of progress.
