ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the post-war period between 1945 and Stalin's death in 1953. The main aim of this chapter is to consider how Soviet physical geography and its cognate environmental sciences were affected by the extraordinary political pressures of the post-war period. It considers the problems of landscape science and concludes with a consideration of S. v. Calsonic's book, The Fundamentals of General Physical Geography, published in 1947, which was an attempt to reconcile landscape and process approaches. Background The Communist Party and Government decree which inaugurated what became known as 'The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature' was passed on 20 October, 1948. The final section considers two sets of events which occurred in the early 1950s: the attacks on Grigor'ev and the Institute of Geography, and the discussions surrounding the publication of a set of papers in the journal Voprosy filosofii.