Results of the Third Congress of the Geographical Society of the USSR

A review of the IGU symposium on the history of geographical thought, held in July 1976 in Leningrad, discusses common themes in papers presented by Soviet geographers and foreign participants. In the view of the Soviet organizers, the foreign presentations were more concerned with the past than with the current impact of geography on socio-economic activities, which is said to distinguish the Soviet school of geography. The work of the symposium demonstrated that the ideas of geographical determinism had been largely abandoned. The presentations of foreign geographers suggested that they were still inadequately informed about the work of Soviet geographers despite ongoing translation programs.     

The Forthcoming Congress of the Geographical Society of the USSR and its Program

A factual account of the economy of the Virgin Lands Kray, one of the Soviet Union's most Important wheat-growing areas, established in December 1960 as a distinct administrative entity within the Kazakh SSR. In addition to wheat farming, which suffers from unreliable rainfall, the kray plays an important role as a supplier of iron ore to the Urals and as a prospective producer of aluminum.     

125 Years of the Geographical Society USSR

A brief review of the history of the Geographical Society USSR and of its contributions to various branches of geography. A book-length account of the history of the society appeared in Leningrad in 1970 under the title Geograficheskoye obshchestvo za 125 let [The Geographical Society Over the Last 125 Years], Leningrad: Nauka, 1970.     

The Moscow Branch of the Geographical Society of the USSR in the Next Few Years

This survey of the program of activities of the Moscow Branch includes a list of topics suggested for discussion at meetings of geographers and a detailed program of activities for the dissemination of geographical knowledge through lectures, publications, exhibits, excursions, radio-television, photographs and films, and library services.     

Problems of Geographical Education in the USSR

Geography education in the Soviet Union is found to lag behind advances in geography as a research discipline. Courses in both elementary and secondary schools and at the college and university level are overloaded with factual material at the expense of theoretical problems and general concepts. An essential requisite for improving the content of geography education is better training of geography teachers. Soviet geography teachers are now being trained mainly in the combined geography-biology faculties of teachers colleges. Combined training in more than one teaching discipline is essential because a teacher trained in geography alone would not have a full teaching load of 18 hours a week in most schools. However, the geography-biology combination does not appear to be optimal because the emphasis in biology is no longer on botany and zoology, as in the past, but on human physiology and genetics, with less relevance to geography. It is recommended that geography as a teaching discipline be combined with other subjects of instruction having greater relevance to geography teaching, possibly chemistry, physical education or foreign languages. Less emphasis on fact-loaded regional courses and more stress on systematic courses is recommended, together with training in mathematical techniques.     

Geographical Problems in the Iron and Steel Industry of the USSR

Technological advances in the Soviet iron and steel industry are producing changes in the locational pattern of the industry. The increasing concentration of production in large iron and steel plants requires the use of large iron-mining establishments of the order of 30 million tons of crude ore. Iron and steel plants were once viewed in the Soviet Union as oriented toward the market of a particular economic region. But the growing plant capacity and a trend toward specialization in particular types of finished products tend to expand the marketing zone of individual plants far beyond the boundaries of single economic regions. Future planning of the industry is in terms of five basic iron and steel zones: Central Russia, Urals, South, Siberia and Kazakhstan, of which the Urals and the South are fully integrated and the three others are in varying stages of formation. The declining share of coke in the blast-furnace charge tends to shift the locational pattern increasingly toward iron-ore sources, and this accounts to a certain extend for the gradual shift of iron and steel capacity toward Central Russia, with its ore reserves of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly.