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Soviet economicgeography and theeconomic geography ofthe U.S.S.R.C. J. RobertsonPublished online: 27 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: C. J. Robertson (1950) Soviet economic geography andthe economic geography of the U.S.S.R., Scottish Geographical Magazine,66:2, 103-106, DOI: 10.1080/00369225008735448

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THE POPULATION OF SKYE 103

* Hydro-electric development is projected at the Storr Lochs—glacial rock basinlakes in a S-N strike valley below lavas dipping gently W, and W of an intrusivesill. There is a fall of about 50 ft. in a mile. Rainfall is 8o"-o,o" in the catchmentarea of about 3 J sq. miles.

6 The only Kinloch in Skye is near the head of Loch na Dal, Sleat, and the settle-ment does not appear ever to have been large. Although salt-marsh may providegood pasture, it is not suitable for cultivation, house sites, or beaching boats.

6 DARLING, F. F. Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. London :William Collins, Sons and Co. Ltd., 1947. Chap. 4 and 5.

7 STEVENS, A. The Distribution of Rural Population in Great Britain. Trans-actions and Papers, Institute of British Geographers, 1946.

8 Shown by an unpublished survey of Kilmuir by the Department of Health.9 GEDDES, A. Population in India. Geographical Review, 1942, and other papers.

10 GOVAN, H. A. RENDEL, and others. Report to the County DevelopmentCommittee (of Ross and Cromarty). 1947.

11 Statistical Account of Scotland. 1814.12 The New Statistical Account of Scotland. 1845.13 BARCLAY, R. S., and DARLING, F. F. Recent Fluctuations in the Populations

of Parishes in the West Highlands and Islands. Occasional Communication of the WestHighland Survey, August 1948.

14 OGILVIE, A. G. Land Reclamation in Scotland. S.G.M., 1945, 61 (3) : 82,where it is suggested that 165 acres might be reclaimed at Portree Bay.

15 GEDDES, A., and SPAVEN, F. D. N. The Highlands and Isles : Their RegionalPlanning. Edinburgh : The Outlook Tower, 1949.

16 This section owes much to the memorandum by Rendel Govan and others(see 10), and to officials in Skye and Edinburgh.

SOVIET ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND THE ECONOMICGEOGRAPHY OF THE U.S.S.R.

Review by C. J. ROBERTSON

ECONOMIC geographers of all lands will no doubt unite in welcomingthe statement in the Introduction to the first of these volumes x that" the Party and the Government have attached great significance toeconomic geography." Further, we read that " Lenin and Stalinrepeatedly emphasised the need to study the variety of conditionsin different regions and to take them into account in the practice ofsocialist construction." By " socialist " present-day Russian usagemeans, of course, communist. This volume, though it refers only topre-war conditions, is still of very great interest to the western reader,not only as what is claimed to be the first text-book of universitystandard on the economic geography of the Soviet Union, but alsofor the light it throws on what was at the time the orthodox ideologicaloutlook on the subject in the U.S.S.R.

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104 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE

The work under review, the first and more general volume of atwo-volume text-book, was published in 1940, and we owe its appear-ance in English almost ten years later to the Russian TranslationProject of the American Council of Learned Societies, which aims toprovide an insight into Russian life and thought by translating intoEnglish significant Russian works in the fields of the humanities andthe social sciences. Translations are unabridged versions of theoriginal text, so that readers can be " made aware of the traditions,concepts and ideologies by which the thinking and attitudes of thepeople of Russia are moulded." Thus the frequent references to thetrinity of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx maintain the reader's awareness ofthe interplay of idea and action. Possibly some students might findit a convenience if these " genuflections," as the American editors callthem, were printed in red, or marked with the sign of the hammerand sickle.

The original text is the work of seven authors, including two ofthe editors, Ya. G. Feigin and V. F. Vasyutin. The American editionis edited by Professor Chauncy D. Harris. Editorial thoroughnessin this edition may be judged from the fact that the volume includesnot only 19 additional maps—making a total of 84—and 8 additionaltables—making a total of 53—but an impressive apparatus of appen-dices, comprising tables of equivalents, abbreviations, comparativetransliterations, a glossary of Russian geographical terms, boundarychanges 1939-45, citations, a short bibliography, indexes of persons(with short biographies), of plants and animals, and of places. Ofnotable value are the industrial maps (Figs. 27 and 28) for c. 1935 ofthe ' European ' part of the Union, the Central Industrial District, theDonbas, the ' Asiatic ' part of the Union—all with insets for 1913,Tashkent and Fergana, the Kuzbas.

The core of the book is formed by Chapters 2 and 3 on the distribu-tion of productive forces, i.e. the location of industry. These chaptersgo some little way to fill in a picture of which the outlines were alreadyfairly generally accessible in the Report of the Eighteenth PartyCongress in 1939. Voznesensky's much publicised report on theinitiation of the Fourth Five-year Plan in 1946 provided, of course, arough provisional sketch of what was to be the development in theperiod following that described in this book and the war years.

Soviet geonomics at the time the book was written was mostactively concerned with the development of the new coal and metal-lurgical bases. As events in the following years were to show, themaximum military and political advantages were to be gained bypushing on with the industrialisation of some, at least, of the widelyseparated regions of mineralisation, particularly of iron ore. Thebuilding-up of the Second Coal and Metallurgical Base in the Uralsand Western Siberia and the industrialisation of the national republicswere, however, opposed by " enemies of the people " and " rightistcapitulationists " making considerable use of Alfred Weber's locationtheory and arguing that industrialisation of backward regions sloweddown general industrial development. We see here a reflection, too,of the controversy between the protagonists of world revolution and

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ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF THE U.S.S.R. 105

those of communism in one country. It is not therefore surprising tofind the Weberites being blasted with the full force of the orthodoxeschatology as apologists for the inefficient distribution of productiveforces under capitalism. We read that " Trotskyists, foaming at themouth, argued that a uniform distribution of productive forces wasconceivable only on a world scale "—which, being translated fromMarxian into the more familiar language of the " bourgeois ideo-logists," probably means that a considerable body of opinion thoughtthat a fully rational location of industry was conceivable only in aworld economy. " The traitor Trotsky," in fact, proposed to closelarge plants that were not, he maintained, yielding profits.

The building up of the metallurgical industry in the Urals wascertainly hampered by the relative inadequacy of local supplies ofsuitable coal. Hence the great emphasis on transport economies. Inthe intermediate stage of building up the new regional bases it is notsurprising that " Comrade Stalin repeatedly pointed out " the needto eliminate inefficient and excessive haulage. One mitigation of thedifficulty was found by the Ural-Kuzbas Kombinat in the now classical2230-kilometres pendulum transport between the ore of Magnito-gorsk and the coal of Stalinsk, the need for which was later reducedby increasing output of Karaganda coal. With the vigorous develop-ment of new industrial regions, increasing length of coal hauls wasstill, however, a serious problem, as is indicated in Chapter 5 of thiswork. The problem of long cross-hauls was also attacked by planningthat the principal metallurgical bases should produce all the maintypes of rolled metal, and with this came, too, the economies ofintegration.

The apparent contradiction in the often repeated emphasis inSoviet directives on locating industry near both raw materials andmarket is gradually reconciled as regional planning proceeds and otherindustrial activities and population grow up at the source of rawmaterials, a development greatly facilitated by the wide distributionof electric power resources. Unfortunately the chapter on populationis one of the weakest in this volume, and contains much propagandaof the crudest type on such matters as "shortening of the life span of thelabour population " and " increased death rate among workers "under capitalism, while communism " alone creates all the conditionsnecessary for a rapid increase in population." A continued high rateof increase of population with industrialisation in the Soviet Unionis credited to communism and contrasted with the slowing down ofpopulation increase under capitalist industrialisation. One of thefactors mentioned as lengthening the life span is " Stalin's intenseconcern with the human being."

Passing from the chapters on location of industry and on popula-tion to those on mineral and agricultural resources, we find ourselvesin a more peaceful atmosphere but yet one not without its dangers. Thesummary of mineral resources in Chapter 1 (tables 4 and 5), for in-stance, places the U.S.S.R. in an excessively favourable light vis-à-visthe capitalist countries by generally including in reserves not only A(proved) and B (apparent) but C (inferred) deposits; nor is any

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io6 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE

allowance made for quality. In the statistics of coal, for instance, allkinds are added in a simple total, while for iron the total of 267 milliardtons includes no less than 200 milliard tons of the low-grade ferruginousquartzites.

While the American editors and publishers of this Russian workhave done a fine job in giving it a streamlined finish, their standardsof faithful presentation of the matter as originally presented to theRussian public have prevented some much-needed pruning of repetitiveor otherwise redundant text, some of it due, of course, to the multipleauthorship of the original. The German publication 2 under review,the work of a single author over a number of years, interrupted by thewar, does not labour under this disadvantage nor under that of polem-ical distractions—interesting though the latter may be to the studentof Russian affairs. The work by Werner Leimbach is the first volumein a new series of Kleine Länderkunden published under the generaleditorship of W. Evers of Hannover, on lines originally advocated byPenck and Credner for more pragmatic geography.

The ground covered is wider than in the Russian volume, as itincludes sections on the organisation of geographical research, eth-nology, settlement, and external trade, and also some treatment oftrends and possibilities, as well as systematic discussion of the physicalfeatures, resources, industries, and transport. There is considerablymore detail on many aspects, both physical and economic, than in theRussian work, and the author has made estimates in some cases upto 1947. Admirable care is shown in the presentation of the statistics.There is a descriptive bibliography of over 200 references, which oninspection is seen to err somewhat on the side of generosity. The bookis notably rich in small sketch maps, which frequently mean a consider-able saving in time to the reader. Besides the 92 maps in the textthere are 65 photographs, many of them air views, generally accom-panied by instructive captions. Such juxtaposed views as Nos. 31and 32, showing respectively strip holdings, and the large fields of akolkhoz, are particularly welcome.

With the publication of the two volumes under review the studentis now provided with a range of several important text-books, each ofwhich has ' something the others haven't got.' With a discreet blending,he should be able to construct a fair picture of the Soviet Union—asit was before the initiation of the Fourth Five-year Plan.

1 Economic Geography of the U.S.S.R. Edited by S. S. BALZAK, V. F. VASYUTIN,and YA. G. FEIGIN. American Edition edited by Chauncy D. Harris. Translatedfrom the Russian by Robert M. Hankin and Olga Adler Titelbaum. Preface byJohn A. Morrison. 8 1/2 × 5 1/2. Pp. xlv+620. 84 figs. 39 tables. 14 appendices.New York : The Macmillan Company, 1949. $10.00.

2 Die Sowjetunion : Natur, Volk und Wirtschaft. By WERNER LEIMBACH. 7 3/4 × 5.Pp. 526. 92 sketch maps. Coloured map (1 : 20,000,000). 65 photographs.[Kleine Länderkunden.] Stuttgart : Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung (Kosmos-Verlag), 1950. DM 28.

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