Non-equilateral triangle: Yu.G. Saushkin between L.S. Berg and N.N. Baransky

Abstract

Four decades after the death of Yu.G. Saushkin as the organizer of Soviet economic geography demand a reassessment of his scientific biography and the role that senior colleagues had played in his creative maturation. First of all, the role of L.S. Berg and the entire school of Russian naturalists, of which he was a representative, in the first period of Saushkin's formation as an encyclopedic geographer should be totally reconsidered. It seems that the ideas and achievements of this stage of the «early» Saushkin, as well as the whole concept of anthropogeography, cultural landscape, «landscape» evolution, etc., may be of significant interest for the modern development of Russian economic geography, in response to the challenges facing our science. The departure of Yu.G. Saushkin from a landscape integration paradigm to a rayon-type one, and a radical change in the creative credo at the second stage of his scientific biography was absolutely inevitable and objective. But this does not mean that we do not need to look for a constructive potential for the development of our science, which is contained in his early works and the works of L.S. Berg as his main teacher of the first period of his scientific life.