THE CENTURY-OLD TREND OF "DE-ECONOMIZATION" OF RUSSIAN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: DETERMINANTS, CONSEQUENCES, WAYS OF OVERCOMING

Abstract

Modern geopolitical and geo-economic processes not only initiate large-scale metamorphoses of the territorial organization of Russian society, but also bring to the forefront issues of positive economic dynamics of both the country as a whole and its individual regions, municipalities, traditionally developed also in line with the logic of economic and geographical analysis. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the century-old trend of changing the role and positions of the actual "economic topics" in the social science "branch" of geographical science, identification of related problem situations and priorities. The presented analysis is based on the author's content analysis of scientific materials published in leading Russian geographical periodicals since the 1920s, as well as statistics of dissertations in the Russian Federation over the past two decades based on the funds of the State Scientific Library. Based on this information, a stable trend of prolonged multi-stage "de-economization" of domestic economic geography is revealed, its main causes and consequences are characterized. It is shown that the "displacement" of economic topics to the periphery of scientific research, which continued in post-Soviet Russian human geography, manifests itself in both quantitative (reduction in the number and proportion of relevant works) and qualitative (increasing lack of accounting for economic determinants and effects in spatial analysis) changes. The basic conditions and the most important directions of "re-economization" of human geography research in modern Russia are emphasized. At the same time, special emphasis is placed on the potential of increasing geographical and economic synthesis (in its subject-object, instrumental, organizational and personnel aspects), as well as on the associated opportunities to increase the practical, national economic, resource-oriented focuses of human geography.