Revisiting Schools of Cartographic Thought: The Soviet School and Marxism-Leninism

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Soviet school of cartographic thought offered an alternative theoretical framework for cartography. Konstantin Salishchev, the school’s founder, was a prominent leader of the International Cartographic Association who debated against the communication paradigm widely accepted by Western scholars. The reason was the widespread adoption of the Marxism-Leninism ideology by Soviet geographers and cartographers. The concept of “map as a model of reality” was a key idea of the Soviet school. It was aligned with Lenin’s reflection theory and the practical demand for high-quantity map production. Having dialectic materialism at its core, Marxism-Leninism imposed the principle of non-reductionism on Soviet science, which led to the rejection of the cartographic communication paradigm. An analysis of the proceedings of the International Cartographic Conference of 1976 and 1980 brought evidence of the underrepresentation of user study research within the Soviet school. Although several other theoreticians of cartography opposed Salishchev (cartographic dissidents), they did not change the school of thought. The successors of Salishchev “inherited” the school, also applying a cognitive paradigm to geoinformation science and remote sensing. Due to the lack of cartographic communication research, adopting the geovisualization paradigm seems challenging in contemporary Russia.