The exhibition at the Headquarters of the RGS in St. Petersburg will tell about the life of geographers during the Great Patriotic War

The celebrations dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Victory, planned at the Headquarters of the Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg, started with an exhibition from the collections of the Scientific Archive of the RGS «Geographical Society during the War Years».

The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the pre-war period: the activities of the Lecture Hall of the Geographical Society of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, established in 1938, which was named after Yu. M. Shokalsky in 1940. You will see pre-war posters and calendars that will tell you about the topics that experts were interested in on the eve of the terrible events.

With the outbreak of war, in 1941, many members of the Geographical Society of the USSR were drafted or volunteered for the Red Army. In July 1941, the economic geographer Vadim Pokshishevsky volunteered for the front. The exhibition presents a statement written by him to the military enlistment office of the Oktyabrsky District of Leningrad about an unscheduled conscription into the army.

Scientists also contributed to the overall victory and to breaking the siege of Leningrad with their research. For example, of particular interest in the exhibition are the materials about Lake Ladoga by the outstanding lake scientist Ivan Molchanov, which were transferred by the Society to the Hydrographic Service of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. These maps and diagrams of Lake Ladoga were used during the construction of the Road of Life, as well as for the construction of a pipeline and the laying of a power line along the bottom of Lake Ladoga.

The building of the Geographical Society in Leningrad was provided in July 1941 to house the evacuation hospital No. 2010. The staff had the facilities of the library, archive, and the hall where the Council of the Society met. What happened in the building at that time, how they survived, what tasks they solved, and how they coped with hunger and cold, tell the personal diary entries of the scientific secretary of the Geographical Society of the USSR Vitaly Romishevsky. In the autumn of 1941, Vitaly Ivanovich moved into this building, becoming, by his own definition, its «permanent monitor.» Romishevsky scrupulously recorded everything that happened around and in the city itself in his diaries. Thanks to this valuable document, we can trace the history of the Geographical Society during the Great Patriotic War day by day.

For example, an important milestone in the life of besieged Leningrad is the introduction of grocery, or, as they were called, bread cards. The researchers were supplied according to the standards for the employees: 125 g of bread per day. One by one, the employees and scientists of the Geographical Society who remained in Leningrad were dying. The registration cards of the active members of the Society who died in the most difficult year, 1942, are presented at the exhibition as a sad testimony of the terrible hungry months.

But, as a call to life, as a hymn to hope and faith in victory, sound the words from an ordinary 1941 edition of «Geographical Atlas for Secondary Schools», signed by cartographer Pavel Pomerantsev, where he writes: «The good time will come, and in the new atlas everything will be even better and more interesting… We must live to see it by all means!»

Vera Kovalevskaya