Human Geography

This article was written in April 2015 for the 80th anniversary of the regional geographer, Dr. geogr. Sciences, professor of the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University, leading. scientific co-workers Graduate School of Urbanism of the National Research University Higher School of Economics Leonid Viktorovich Smirnyagin . It contains real stories from the life of this wonderful man. On December 3, 2016, Leonid Viktorovich passed away. In 1992–1993, Smirnyagin was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council under Boris Yeltsin and had a great influence on the development of federalism in Russia.

Discovery of America

The USA as a topic was incomprehensible to me. Having lived with my parents for several years in French Africa, by the age of 18 I turned out to be a frank Francophone; I even approached the Beatles from the Michelle ma belle side, and not from the Let it be side... Secuture, Bourguiba and Leceppes meant much more to me than Nixon both Carter and the English language were learned through similar French words, which was a pure character building exercise for English teacher Lyubov Dmitrievna Dolinskaya.

My aunt at that time worked at the Institute of the USA and Canada as an assistant to Lev Karpov, a man of very status at that time, and on top of everything else, as she said, an incredibly smart and handsome man. She knew a lot about handsome and intelligent men, and when I heard from her about Leva’s most charming and intelligent friend, who works on the faculty, I was really intrigued and, throwing away my French manners, decided to enroll in Smirnyagin’s American class.

It was with this background that in 1979 I came to a meeting with the future leader on the 19th floor of the main building of Moscow State University, in the recreation foyer, from the window of which there was a view of the hefty complex of the Chinese embassy and “Formosa” - a small glass favorite of all Moscow State University students - beerhouse, so nicknamed for its typological similarity to the island of the same name, located off the coast of China. The Mehmatians preferred the simpler one - Taiwan - apparently not realizing the Portuguese period of this country. As always, there were a lot of people at the Department of Foreign Regional Studies, who were chatting about what, joyfully and carefree. I'm with them, but I'm waiting, waiting for the first meeting with my supervisor.

First a voice appeared, it intensified for several minutes, rumbling and rolling around the recreation area, and only then the figure of its owner appeared... Aunt was right: in front of me was a powerful, energetic and handsome man with a beard and a huge roll of an outline map. My surprise knew no bounds, the map was dotted with small squares, there were several thousand of them, and they were called counties. “What are these counties in the USA? Where are they from? - I was perplexed.

The map was accompanied by a large collection of statistics on population income, and my task was to try to capture geographic patterns in the distribution of income levels of the US population by county, and over several years. Thus began my American odyssey, with this map of counties, the memorization of which became a kind of valor.

In competitions like “who can remember the most counties and draw the most states,” Vadim Myachin regularly won. The competition took place in Kozlovsky Lane. All Smirnyagin’s students, their friends and girlfriends knew this apartment. The second floor of a magnificent apartment building in the Art Nouveau style and a room in a large communal apartment. Some students had a key and could be entered to immerse themselves in a huge library...

Smirnyagin’s desk in Kozlovsky was always littered with abstract journals (RJ). Under Soviet censorship, it was extremely difficult to find such an excellent source of information, but here you are: geography, US history, and various thematic articles and collections. The abstract journal was headed by Oleg Vladimirovich Vitkovsky, but the American theme always came through L.V.

One day there was a fire in the house and the apartment was gone... But it was in it that the Smirnyagin school was born. To this day, when I pass by, I instinctively look into the second floor windows.

Kozlovsky was not the only center of American studies in Moscow, although he was undoubtedly the most important. Not far from it, on Pokrovsky Boulevard, there was the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia” (it is still there), headed by Alexander Pavlovich Gorkin - his theory of spatial cycles in the US economy was, perhaps, not only one of the most interesting, but also as the Americans say, eye-opening (opening the eyes). The junior students knew about it, of course, from Leonid Viktorovich, since Gorkin read only to the seniors.

Many of Smirnyagin’s graduate students, including me, earned extra money by writing small encyclopedic references on American cities and states. What useful work it was! I am still grateful to Leonid Viktorovich and Alexander Pavlovich for it. The USA began to sparkle with different colors - the country became alive and loved, and geographical nomenclature ceased to be a subject of cramming.

The encyclopedic epic continued with a series on American states in the magazine “USA: Economics, Politics, Ideology.” This was a special project: for the first time in many Soviet years, a magazine of this level ordered detailed reviews of American states. Leonid Viktorovich wrote most of it himself, but entrusted some of the states to his students and colleagues.

It turned out to be a magnificent series, finally without any Marx, Engels and Lenin, everything is to the point, very imaginative, informative and kind; not about “ideological enemy number one”, but about a magnificent country full of energy, contradictions and achievements. The articles were large and together made a good book. I really regret the current unbridled and obscurantist anti-American campaign and I think that Leonid Viktorovich and I should repeat this series, if only just like that, out of a sense of respect for ourselves and our colleagues...

I got to go to the American south and, as often happened later, the work begun in writing continued with a most interesting trip. A few years after the publication of the series, on the recommendation of Leonid Viktorovich, I went for several months to Miami, to Florida International University, as a researcher and teacher in the department of Professor Ralph Klem. For some time I lived there in the company of Vladimir Sudarev from the Institute of Latin America, and then Leonid Viktorovich arrived, and we began to actively study Miami.

Since then, I have visited these places many times and compared the city with those first impressions. Now San Francisco has changed a lot, lost its luster and has become the American “capital of the homeless,” illustrating Smirnyagin’s many times repeated thesis about the connectivity of the country’s regions with each other, the openness of their economy and the impossibility of pursuing reasonable social policies in a single state and city. Otherwise, even charity can turn into its opposite.

This is exactly what happened in San Francisco: the best program to support the poor in the United States attracted homeless people from all over the country to the city, and, as eyewitnesses say, other cities participated in this program, paying for tickets to San Francisco from the city budget for their homeless people.

San Francisco actually turned out to be Leonid Viktorovich’s second home. Katya, the eldest daughter of Leonid Viktorovich, settled not far from the city with her husband Misha. Then, in the 2000s, I found myself visiting them with my whole family: my children, Fyodor and Peter, still remember their wonderful and hospitable home, as well as the routes around Northern California, carefully laid out for us by Leonid Viktorovich.

Science and beliefs

Although the slogan “I have nothing to say, but I have something to add” hung in L.V.’s apartment in Kozlovskoye for some time, in its first part it was completely untrue. This impression may form among people who are not very familiar with L.V., and only because he constantly advertises those he respects at his lectures and in public appearances.

Medvedkov, who was “banned” from traveling abroad, became our idol thanks to L.V. and his stories about Medvedkov’s campaigns around Tehran with a voice recorder, on which he recorded his impressions of the city, and then transferred them to the map.

We read Leizerovich’s work on key areas to the holes, admired the polarized biosphere of Rodoman, respected Gokhman’s works on the world economy, loved Lappo’s urban studies and Lipets’ theoretical seminars, ran to Simonyan’s lecture on the geography of foreign trade... We also knew L.V.’s foreign colleagues, such like Judy Pallot, Ralph Klem, Michael Bradshaw and others. Some of L.V.’s students, including myself, on Smirnyagin’s recommendation, went to Judy at Oxford University, to the luxurious Christ Church College, the country of Lewis Carroll and Boyle (the one with Marriott), studied at Bodleian Library) and visited the Rover car factories in the industrial part of Oxford.

Generosity towards his colleagues at the Academy did not at all hide L.V.’s own scientific merits. The theory of social zoning, the political geography of the USA and Russia, the original typology of countries - this is only part of the long list of scientific achievements of L.V. It was thanks to his own scientific qualities that Smirnyagin was invited by the first President of Russia to his Presidential Council, and then to the Analytical Center under the President.

It was then that the country received a reasonable regional strategy, the entire body of legislation on federalism and local self-government. In the same period, thanks to L.V., real political geography and the emergence of its leaders, such as Andrei Berezkin, Nikolai Petrov, and Vladimir Kolosov, became possible in Russia.

I remember working at the Analytical Center with L.V. at that time was one of the most interesting in my entire career. A wonderful atmosphere, complete openness, a huge amount of information, the smartest people around: Yasin, Satarov, Pain, Mukomel, Popov, Lavrov, Urnov, Livshits... You can’t list them all... L.V. was inspired, worked a lot, appeared on TV, gave interview and at least several times actually influenced events of national importance.

When, as a result of the next parliamentary elections, Zhirinovsky gained a large number of votes, and Yuri Koryakin uttered the famous words “Russia, you’ve gone crazy!”, when it seemed that political hooligans were coming to power in the country, Smirnyagin, live on air to the whole country, compared Zhirinovsky to the rhinoceros Toto , for whom disappointed citizens voted in Brazil. The well-chosen metaphor turned out to be healing, and passions for Zhirinovsky gradually began to subside.

During the first Chechen war, also on live television, L.V. called on the army to march “on tiptoe,” and for some time, at the very beginning of the epic, even before the storming of Grozny, these calls had their effect. It is a pity that Yeltsin stopped listening to Smirnyagin and his colleagues on the Presidential Council and succumbed to the pressure of incompetent generals; life could have turned out completely differently...

Discovery of Russia

The discovery of Russia was no less important for me than the discovery of America. By the time I entered Moscow State University, I was not often able to travel around the country: I was in St. Petersburg, in Taganrog with relatives, in the Elbrus region on a summer hike, and I didn’t really have anywhere else, except that already in my first year I traveled a little with a propaganda team in the Pskov region.

The first trip to the Urals turned out to be a real discovery for me, and it’s not just about new interesting places - and there were more than enough of them on the trip: charming Shishkinsky-Tsvetaevskaya Yelabuga, and Naberezhnye Chelny with its psychopathic buildings, and modest Ufa, and militarized Chelyabinsk, and the fabulous Miass with Chrysostom, and the copper Kyshtym (the birthplace of the Smirnyagins), and the mysterious Chelyaba-40 on the horizon (10 years without the right to correspondence), Yekaterinburg, the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant with the surrounding forest lopsided from the explosion, the Kungur caves and Perm with its charismatic chief architect, who abandoned everything to give a lecture to Moscow students.

The main discovery was not even the landscapes, but the people and L.V.’s ability to find a common language with them, a topic for conversation. His respect for their views and circumstances was amazing. In general, to some extent, for us Muscovites, it was not only geographical education and educational program on Russia, but also a test of tolerance and, of course, an exercise in knocking down the capital’s arrogance.

The route was prepared very seriously using books, field diaries, and conversations were held with experts. We kept a so-called tape, marking on a specially lined sheet of graph paper objects, types of development, types of agricultural use of land, power lines and other infrastructure... We were the directors of our route and all this helped to see and understand the country.

There were a lot of second-year student practices: a kaleidoscope of pictures of Abkhazia, Kakheti, Altai and Kemerovo flashes in my head. But, perhaps, one of the most unforgettable trips was through Altai. Extraordinary beauty, overnight stay on Lake Kolyvan, described by Alexander Humboldt himself; sailing on Lake Teletskoye with an aggressive company of fighters against the construction of the Katunskaya hydroelectric power station, Shukshin's house not far from Biysk, a state farm for breeding deer in Shebalino with a view of the Roerich Sinyukha Mountain, a visit to the unfortunate Rubtsovsk, in which the lights were continually cut off from nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk test site ( that in neighboring Kazakhstan).

Generally speaking, managing practitioners is an extremely difficult and dreary business, and it is not just about preparing students and reading their work. The entire organization of the practice, its logistics with dormitories, buses, trucks, student illnesses, communication with the “locals” one way or another fell on L.V.

Either the gas tank will leak on the way from Derbent to Cuba, then the driver will throw a tantrum on the way to Perm, then in Estonia they will throw a three-liter can of yellow paint from the 12th floor of a hostel onto a bus with Moscow students, then in Chelyabinsk the locals will organize a “hunt” for the capital’s girls... The reward for these worries, of course, is great - here are the anthracite sands of Lankaran, and Roerich's landscapes of the Altai Mountains, and an intimate feast in Tbilisi, and a factory for the production of thermoplanes (flying saucers) near Ulyanovsk...

There were some absolutely stunning finds... On one of our trips we passed through Nelidovo, a place not far from where the Volga and Dnieper originate. This is a swampy, wooded, dense area. It was here that Leonid Viktorovich’s father died at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War. An intellectual who probably did not know how to properly handle weapons, like many other militiamen, he ended up in real hell. The place of his death was unknown for many years, but in the year when we found ourselves there, on the eve of practice, Leonid Viktorovich received a letter from a local search group that discovered a mass grave where Viktor Smirnyagin was buried. L.V. and I got to this place...

Students

Student love for L.V. does not fade! This is gratitude not only for the gift of the country and wonderful lectures. The point, of course, is charisma, simplicity, sincerity, goodwill and general human caliber. Why did students with difficult characters always flourish under Smirnyagin? How did he know how to convey criticism without offending, and be honest about shortcomings?

One day, after a radio show in which I participated, he called and completely trashed my conversational style, just as he did in his student days with the texts of some articles or ill-conceived concepts. Previously, I could not even imagine that there could be nothing better than such scoldings: in them you feel concern for you and a desire to help, they really help a lot.

In geography, Smirnyagin also speaks on behalf of a person. Any of his passions, for example, zoning or regional economics, was always actually a passion for people. The words “social geography” somehow especially resonated in his mouth. In the second year, during one of the lectures on the typology of countries, he asked us a simple question: “What is the meaning of social progress?” and asked for a detailed answer. Creativity in the social sciences in the early 1980s was an unusual category, to say the least. The brains are stuffed with stencils and clichés according to which such questions should be answered. Many of us followed these official patterns, some tried to get away from them, but almost no one, with the exception of Igor Tsyganov, answered it sincerely.

Igor’s answer was: “Freedom; social freedom is the meaning of human development.” This was the answer that was obviously closest to Leonid Viktorovich. We often discussed with him in the smoking room on the 19th floor Berdyaev, Lord Acton, Adam Smith, von Hayek and other liberal thinkers, but in all of them he lacked socialism in the European sense of the word. Social justice interested him no less than freedom. But how then did he manage to protect his liberal socialism from the terrible scolding and hypocrisy that the official Soviet communist doctrine exuded?

He, just like modern European professors, could calmly talk about Marx without the slightest desire to thereby please the official position, simply because it seemed important and interesting to him. You have to be truly independent, free and strong to be able to do this. This is probably because he is a real European professor, a strange and rarely encountered type in the endless expanses of Russia.

PS Leonid Viktorovich! What a pity to leave like this, mid-sentence... You are the best teacher, the most reliable friend, an excellent conversationalist and a very interesting person. Without you, our world will be completely different, but we will try not to upset you with our despondency (you really did not like despondency), we will remember you and continue unfinished conversations.