ECONOMIC-AND-GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE URALS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1920s

Abstract

As a result of economic zoning of the country performed by the USSR Gosplan (State Planning Committee) in the1920s, a need arose to draw up characteristics of the emerging regions, which became the reason for the almost simultaneous creationof several series of economic-and-geographical descriptions of the regions of the Soviet Union. As to the Urals, being one of thecountry’s leading industrial regions, books dedicated to it were published in five of the series, intended both for specialists and forvarious segments of the population. The article provides a retrospective review and some comparison of economic-and-geographicaldescriptions of the Ural Oblast (the region was included in the zoning grid under this name) in the second half of the 1920s, and alsotalks about the authors of these books, many of whom subsequently became the country’s leading economic geographers and madesignificant contributions not only to the geography of the Urals but also to various areas of economic geography and to the methodologyof teaching geography. Publications about the Urals marked the beginning of subsequent intensive study of the region both by scientistsfrom Moscow and Leningrad and by leading local economic geographers.