Geography and Power in the Establishment of the Russian Geographical Society. From the “World of Hopes” to the “World of Reality”

The article is devoted to the history of the establishment of the Russian Geographical Society. The author focuses on two important aspects of the process. On the one hand, his attention is drawn to the study of how geography and new approaches to geographical science, characterized by departure from the descriptive strategy of geographical research to the broader, panoramic, coverage, influenced the formation of the highest administrative elite of the Russian Empire. On the other hand, the author analyzes the program of the Russian Geographical Society from the point of view of management technologies, discovering behind the thematic mapping of the imperial territory the tendencies of the new ideological course towards stabilizing the state space and studying the “Russian people”.