Dmitry Anuchin

Dmitry Anuchin: The Man Who Assembled Russian Geography

In 1880 a soldier's son stood up at Moscow University and began delivering the first course in anthropology ever taught at a Russian university. Over the next four decades Dmitry Anuchin founded a department, two museums, a journal and a school of thought, and published something on the order of a thousand papers across geography, anthropology, archaeology, ethnography and the history of science. He is one of those figures whose achievement is hard to point at, because it is the shape of an entire national discipline.

A Soldier's Son in St Petersburg

Anuchin was born on 8 September 1843 in St Petersburg — 27 August by the Julian calendar then in use, which is why sources give two dates. His father was a soldier and his mother came of peasant stock, an unfashionable pedigree for a future academician. He studied in the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University, where he encountered Darwin's evolutionary theory and the broader idea that natural phenomena are interconnected rather than separately catalogued. Both stayed with him permanently.

His first post after graduating was secretary of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals and Plants, and his earliest papers dealt with poorly studied animals. Through the 1870s he moved steadily toward humans: work on primates and on human racial types, and ethnographic studies of Siberia. Moscow University appointed him to head its anthropology department.

Paris, and the Making of a Discipline

Between 1876 and 1878 the university sent him abroad for more than two years, chiefly to Paris. He worked in the laboratories of leading scientists and studied the great anthropological museums, and in 1878 organised the Russian section at the Paris World Anthropological Exhibition. He came home with a French model of what a scientific anthropology looked like — institutional, museum-based, methodologically strict — and set about building a Russian version of it.

The results came quickly. He instituted Russia's first elective course in physical anthropology in 1879–80, and defended a master's dissertation on cranial anomalies in January 1881.

The Chair, the Department, the Museum

In 1884 Anuchin established the Department of Geography and Ethnography in Moscow University's Faculty of History and Philology — the seed of what became the geographical faculty. He gave the first Russian lecture course on the history of geography. He built a geographical museum that became one of the most complete in the country, with a library of ten thousand volumes, and an anthropological museum that grew into the largest museum of anthropology and ethnology at the university. A geographical exhibition he organised in 1892 won the Grand Gold Medal of the Russian Geographical Society.

The honours accumulated: an honorary doctorate in geography in 1889 for his study of the distribution of male stature across the Russian population; the presidency of the Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography in 1890; election to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1896 and honorary membership by 1898; honorary membership of the Russian Geographical Society in 1900 and its Constantine Medal in 1914. He belonged to the Paris Anthropological Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, and held the Orders of St Vladimir and St Anna and the French Legion of Honour.

Geography as a Science of Connections

Anuchin's theoretical position is the part most worth recovering. Against Alfred Hettner's influential view that geography should confine itself to describing the distribution of things — a chorological, essentially cataloguing discipline — Anuchin insisted that geography must study the earth in and of itself, above all its surface, and must ask how phenomena connect and where they came from. Origins and relationships, not inventory.

He built a classification to match, dividing the field into general and specific geography, with general geography spanning inorganic nature as physical geography, organic nature as biogeography, and humanity as anthropogeography. The scheme put people inside geography rather than beside it, which is precisely why the same man could run an anthropology department and a geography department without feeling any contradiction.

Lakes, Rivers and the Ground Itself

He did the fieldwork too. He investigated the sources of major rivers — the upper reaches of the Dnieper, the Western Dvina and the Volga — and the glaciers of the Caucasus, and joined expeditions across the Moscow region, the Valdai Upland and Dagestan. His treatment of lakes was the innovation: rather than describing them as isolated bodies of water he analysed them as complex elements of the landscape, examining their genesis and their distribution systematically. That work founded Russian limnology, and his relief studies started the systematic examination of Russian landforms.

In 1894 he founded and edited *Zemlevedenie*, the journal that made Moscow the second great centre of Russian geographical thought after St Petersburg.

The Last Decade

Anuchin's later career shows a scientist trying to keep science out of politics and then working with whatever state arrived. He argued for professionalising ethnography as a discipline distinct from missionary and amateur collecting, and proposed a government commission on the model of America's Bureau of Ethnology; the Academy of Sciences declined and created a Committee for Regional Description of Russia instead. He opposed Lev Sternberg's plan for an imperial ethnography bureau on the grounds that it would entangle the field with the state. From 1915 he worked with the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces. After the October Revolution he contributed to Gosplan and to the compilation of the first Soviet world atlas, the *Atlas mira*. He died in Moscow on 4 June 1923.

Why Dmitry Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is synthetic range — the capacity to hold five disciplines as one problem and to see that the connections between them were the actual subject. Most polymaths are serial specialists. Anuchin was arguing something specific: that the earth's surface, its organic life and its human inhabitants form a single interlinked system, and that studying any of them in isolation produces catalogues rather than knowledge. That is why his critique of Hettner matters, and why his lake work was different from his contemporaries' — he treated a lake as a component of a landscape with a history rather than a feature on a map.

One position deserves particular credit. On race, at a moment when polygenism was respectable across European science, Anuchin held that all humanity descends from common ancestors whose descendants only gradually differentiated. He was right, and being right about that in the 1880s required judgement rather than fashion.

The honest counter-case is that Anuchin is remembered as a builder rather than a discoverer. There is no Anuchin law, no theory that carries his name; his roughly one thousand papers include comparative studies of bows, arrows and funeral practices that are careful rather than revelatory. Much of his towering domestic reputation rests on Soviet-era canonisation of him as the founder of the Moscow school, and outside Russia he is barely known. His genius, if the word fits, was institutional and integrative: he did not so much solve problems as construct the apparatus — chairs, museums, journals, students — with which several generations of Russians could.

Legacy

The apparatus outlived him, which was the point. The geography faculty at Moscow State University descends from his 1884 department and the Anuchin Institute there carries his name, as does the university's D. N. Anuchin Prize for geography. *Zemlevedenie* established Moscow as a centre of geographical thought. His name is on a lunar crater, a glacier on Novaya Zemlya, a mountain in the northern Urals, and islands and straits in the Kuril chain — the standard Russian honour, scattered across the surface of the earth he insisted on studying whole.

Achievements

• Order of Saint Anna, 2nd class
• Constantin Medal
• Order of St. Vladimir, 4th class
• Order of St. Vladimir, 3rd class
• Recorded as explorer, anthropologist and archaeologist