ECONOMIC-AND-GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE URALS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1920s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2079-7877-2024-2-50-58Keywords:
economic geography, state planning region, economic-and-geographical characteristics, description, USSR, Urals, Ural Oblast, book, series of publicationsAbstract
As a result of economic zoning of the country performed by the USSR Gosplan (State Planning Committee) in the
1920s, a need arose to draw up characteristics of the emerging regions, which became the reason for the almost simultaneous creation
of several series of economic-and-geographical descriptions of the regions of the Soviet Union. As to the Urals, being one of the
country’s leading industrial regions, books dedicated to it were published in five of the series, intended both for specialists and for
various segments of the population. The article provides a retrospective review and some comparison of economic-and-geographical
descriptions of the Ural Oblast (the region was included in the zoning grid under this name) in the second half of the 1920s, and also
talks about the authors of these books, many of whom subsequently became the country’s leading economic geographers and made
significant contributions not only to the geography of the Urals but also to various areas of economic geography and to the methodology
of teaching geography. Publications about the Urals marked the beginning of subsequent intensive study of the region both by scientists
from Moscow and Leningrad and by leading local economic geographers.
