The history of geographic science as a relay race of scientific generations. Article I.

Abstract

Continous alternation of scientists' generations is a significant factor of scientific progress. The leading scientific ideas in geography overcome when they hand from generation to generation, which was typical for Russian geography at least from 1870's. Since then the Russian geographical school takes its origin, basing upon the V. V. Dokuchaev's ideas of necessity to create a particular science concerning ineraction between mankind and nature, having the natural territorial systems as its subject (later termed as landscapes or geosystems). By the beginning of Soviet period the human resources of Russian geography were determined by the community of the generations of geographers. The elder of them was formed by naturalists with wide area of scientific thought, with two leaders among them: P.P. Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, who was leading the Russian Geographical Society, and V. V. Dokuchaev, who had created the world's strongest geographical school. Its core was formed by the geographers of second pre-October generation, basically the direct students and followers of V. V. Dokuchaev: A. N. Krasnov, G. N. Tanfilyev, V.<|>I. Vernadsky, K. D. Glinka, G. F. Morozov, G. N. Vysotsky, L. S. Berg, S. S. Neustruev et al. This generation made a statement as early as at the turn of XIX and XX centuries. Finally, the third pre-October generation of geographers (among them R. I. Abolin, N. I. Vavilov, A. A. Gri-goryev, I. M. Krasheninnikov, S. V. Obruchev, V. N. Sukachyov) began to enter the arena of scientific research in the last pre-October years and had realized its creative potential mostly as late as after the October Revoution. The Soviet geography at least till the middle of XXth century was in many ways beholden for its success to the scientific and educational activity of pre-October scientific generations.