The measure of an imperial life: Dmitrii Ivanov’s life geography and early glacier surveys in Russian Imperial Turkestan

This article examines how the context of imperial expansion and military governance allowed Dmitrii L’vovich Ivanov (1846–1924) to become a mining engineer and member of the first glaciological expedition in Russian Imperial Turkestan (1880) despite his previous criminal sentence. His biography offers insights into the emergence of glacier science in Turkestan, with the Zeravshan Glacier as its first scientific object. My analysis sheds light on how imperial expansion, military governance, and resource prospecting configured specific sites for glacier science in Central Asia. It shows how the empire’s center–periphery relations as well as the strata and hierarchies of Russian colonial society enabled historical figures such as Ivanov to constitute themselves as glacier scientists. Drawing on archival documents from the Russian State Historical Archive and the National Archive of Uzbekistan, as well as on published sources from the library of the Russian Geographical Society, the analysis is framed by the approach of “life geography” and zeroes in on four geographically grounded moments in Ivanov’s biography.