Measuring One-Sixth of the Globe: Land Surveying, the Market, and Governance in Russia, 1762-1941

FAIN: FEL-262813-19

Igor Khristoforov
Princeton University (Princeton, NJ 08540-5228)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on land surveying and use in Russia, 1762-1941.

This project aims to make land surveying a focal point in interpretation of how the Russian Empire and the pre-war Soviet Union, two very different political and economic regimes, saw, governed, and used the land. It highlights and explains the similarity between the pre-Soviet and Soviet patterns of land measurement and management both on the local level, in the practices of delimiting individual plots of land, villages or kolkhozes (Soviet collective farms), and on the country-wide level, in the policies of large-scale population management. It shows how the government’s well-known projects – such as the Stolypin land reform launched in 1906, the Bolsheviks’ nationalization of land, the collectivization, or the resettlement of the millions of people from one region to another, were implemented with the help and through the agency of land surveyors. The research explores the ideology, theory, the practice, as well as the political and social meaning of land surveying.