Russian landscape

Russian Peasant Studies, 2021, vol. 6, No 1, pp. 13 – 25.

Russian cultural landscape: Theoretical and practical implications of the concept

B. Rodoman

Boris B. Rodoman, DSc (Geography). E-mail: bbrodom@mail.ru

Abstract. The author argues that the precise final definitions (recognized and universal) are often less important for scientists than the key features of the studied phenome-na. Therefore, the author suggests to combine different concepts in order to get a work-ing and temporary definition of the cultural landscape. The article presents this term as non-evaluative, mainly typological, non-taxonomic and ‘real’, which allows to consider its borders with the natural landscape as mobile, conventional and relative due to the fact that both landscapes are affected by human activities. The author describes fac-tors and trends in the development of the cultural landscape, and regionalization as a tool to study and preserve it. The Russian cultural landscape is primarily determined by the interaction of the state with nature due to the obvious shortage of self-organ-ized local communities. The author identifies endogenous (internal) and exogenous (ex-ternal) factors in the (self)-development of the cultural landscape, which can be either stimulating or hindering. As the main features of the Russian cultural landscape the au-thor considers its historically developed rhythm and ability to self-recover, which differ by country and region. Centuries of the military-colonial despotism and unprecedent-ed centralization of the supreme power have turned the Russian space into a totalitari-an landscape with the hypertrophied radial connections and the suppressed peripheral connections, which is embodied in the administrative-territorial division and deter-mined the extraordinary social-economic, geographical, ecological and territorial polar-ization. The Russian landscape has a very specific feature–the so-called ‘inner periph-ery’, or hinterland (relative and ubiquitous): these are territories located closer to the country’s cores than to its outskirts but with all negative features of the outskirts. This inner periphery plays an important role in the preservation and development of the nat-ural landscape as a potential basis of the territorial ecological framework, but to ensure such a role we need a comprehensive cultural-historical regionalization.

Key words: landscape, cultural landscape, administrative-territorial division, etatization of landscape, anisotropic landscape, ecological potential of чadministrative borders, social-economic polarization, hinterland, inner periphery, regionalization, cultural-historical areas.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-1-13-25

There  is  a  widespread  belief  that  before  any  discussions  scientists  must agree on the terms by providing their precise definitions. This rule  is  rooted  in  the  geometry  of  Euclid  as  an  example  of  an  axio-matic scientific discipline. However, in the humanities and sometimes even in the natural sciences this rule does not work, because the fea-tures of the studied phenomena are more important than their final dictionary  definitions  which  remain  unattainable  ideals.  Therefore, to study the cultural landscape, I suggest the marginal analysis, i.e., the use of different concepts with the deliberate changes in their vol-umes and boundaries according to different criteria. Thus, the cultur-al landscape can be interpreted in different ways depending both on its relationships with such concepts as ‘culture’ and ‘landscape’ and on its evaluative or non-evaluative, individual or typological, general or taxonomic, continuous or discrete, universal or specific definitions, and also taking into account different degrees, directions, ways and goals of the cultural landscape’s metaphorizing in different scientific disciplines and public discourses.
        The  concept  ‘landscape’  implicitly  used  in  the  article  is  one  of  many  possible  interpretations;  thereby,  I  consider  it  rather  work-ing and temporary than recognized and universal for the profession-al  discourse.  I  use  the  term  ‘cultural  landscape’  as  if  I  fully  under-stand  its  content  and  meaning,  but  actually  I  do  not  care  about  its  clear final d ччefinition. I use the term ‘cultural landscape’ as non-eval-uative, mainly typological, non-taxonomic and ‘vulgarly real’, which is quite similar to the term ‘anthropogenic landscape’ (Milkov, 1973). I  believe  that  landscape  (without  any  adjectives)  is  a  material  part  of  the  human  environment  (space),  which  consists  of  solid  and  liq-uid earthly bodies, has mainly a multi-layered structure, is observa-ble and includes natural and artificial elements. In the non-evaluative perspective, the cultural landscape (as not opposed to the ‘uncultured landscape’) developed under the decisive influence of human activities: in this sense, the cultural landscape differs from the natural landscape, but the boundaries between two concepts and two corresponding ob-jects are mobile, conventional and relative. There are very few pure-ly natural landscapes not affected by human activities at least in the distant past; however, when in the mountains or taiga, we see that we did not affect those essential features of the environment that are decisive for our behavior. An intermediate position between the wild nature and the urban environment is taken by suburban, rural, agri-cultural landscapes together with wastelands and landfills recaptured by flora and fauna.
        My descriptions of the Russian cultural landscape follow the clas-sical positivist real geography: I do not care about its images in the minds  of  ignorant  people  or  about  myths  produced  by  their  absurd  representations;  I  do  not  consider  the  cultural  landscape  as  a  text  and do not study texts about it; I do not understand how the entire cultural landscape on most of the earth’s land differs from the natu-ral-anthropogenic landscape in general. Nevertheless, under the con-temporary postmodernist trends, I admit that my interpretation of the Russian cultural landscape is personal (based on my experience and impressions rather than scientific sources), and, if accepted by some readers, can turn into a myth. I hope that this clarification will satis-fy those readers who believe that there is no objective reality or un-conditional truth, but only narratives and discourses.
 
Factors of the cultural landscape development

The  cultural  landscape  seems  to  be  the  result  of  the  interaction  be-tween society and natural environment, which sounds philosophical-ly  attractive  but  is  hardly  applicable  to  the  Russian  situation.  The  Russian landscape is primarily the result of the interaction between nature  and  the  state  rather  than  society  (Kagansky,  2009).  In  Rus-sia, there is no society as an actor that opposes the state and enters into contractual relationships with it, and there are very few self-or-ganized local communities that interact with the elected local govern-ment and environment deliberately and in solidarity. In Russia, the role of local residents in the development of their native–urban, ru-ral or wild–landscape has steadily declined during the 20th century. All changes in landscape are usually ‘external’ and unexpected–both in their essence and consequences.
        Not every change in landscape and society can be called develop-ment–on the contrary, there are many external influences that hin-der  development.  The  historical  changes  in  the  cultural  landscape  are  determined  by  endogenous  (internal)  and  exogenous  (external)  factors:  ‘internal’  and  ‘external’  in  the  purely  geographical,  territo-rial meaning–the former as located within the considered area, and the latter as coming from the outside. One of the internal factors is the smooth and long-term self-development of the cultural landscape, which in the past centuries was almost unobservable during one hu-man life, because such a self-development was the result of the well-known interaction between nature and the specific, limited, relatively small part of society–a group, community or ethnos. In the smooth autonomous evolution of the cultural landscape, there are two mech-anisms–quasi-natural selection (according to Darwin) and nomogen-esis (Berg, 1922). The selection improves household items, buildings, applied and visual arts, while nomogenesis–transport networks (Ro-doman, 2002), which is confirmed by the study of their evolutionary morphology (Tarkhov, 2005).
        The ‘natural’, ‘normal’ self-development of the cultural landscape is  sooner  or  later  interrupted  by  external  factors,  mostly  unexpect-ed  and  violent–natural  disasters,  conquests,  state  reforms  and  re-organizations.  For  instance,  in  the  21st  century,  the  countryside  of  the so-called Central Russia (more precisely, of the western part of its central area) experienced at least 25 terrible shocks: Stolypin re-forms, first war with Germany, October Revolution, post-revolution-ary devastation, civil war, peasant uprisings, dispossession of kulaksand collectivization, second war with Germany, post-war devastation, integration of collective farms, transformation of some of them into state farms, elimination of ‘unpromising’ rural settlements, ‘land rec-lamation’ (in fact, land deterioration), chemicalization in agriculture, disappearance  of  country  dirt  roads,  dismantling  of  narrow-gauge  railways,  various  market  reforms,  privatization  and  confusion  with 
property rights, collapse of collective and state farms, collapse of flax growing and grain production, attempts and failure to support private farmers, economic crisis and devastation of the 1990s, development of cottage construction by townspeople, contamination and destruction of old forests, and overgrowing of agricultural lands with forests. The fact that after all these shocks there is still some life in the Russian rural hinterland is a miracle rather than a regularity.
        In the southeast of European Russia, not directly affected by the World  War  II,  the  devastation  of  the  village  was  prevented  by  the  attachment  of  many  indigenous  non-Russian  peoples  to  their  small  motherland. There are reasons to believe that the ethnic-confessional heterogeneity of the Volga-Ural Region, officially proved by the pres-ence of ethnic republics in the Russian Federation, together with the patriarchal way of life, family-kinship cooperation and division of la-bor saved the countryside from complete desolation (Nefedova, 2003).
      Thus, under some external factors, the quasi-natural evolution of the cultural landscape can be interrupted, but resumes after the ad-ministrative influence ceases and the reform meets the usual and ex-pected fate of its predecessors according to the ‘law of Chernomyrdin’ (‘we  wanted  the  best,  but  it  turned  out  as  always’).  After  repeated  shocks,  the  continuity  of  development  is  broken,  most  of  previous  achievements are lost, and much has to be started anew.

Features of the Russian landscape

The  Russian  landscape  is  not  only  a  passive  victim  of  the  state  arbi-trariness, but also an avenger. Moscow is unusually lucky–it has nev-er  suffered  from  natural  disasters  (like  destructive  earthquakes)  oth-er than weather disasters (hurricanes, extreme colds and heats, smoke from  fires  and  floods,  although,  after  the  Moscow  River  was  put  un-der control, severe floods as in the first decade of the 20th century are very unlikely today). However, in many other regions the situation is worse:  although  the  inevitable  future  revenge  of  nature  for  unforgiv-able  mistakes  is  often  delayed  and  not  obvious,  the  epiphany  always  comes albeit too late. For the construction in deltas and floodplains, on drainage  slopes  and  mountainsides  with  streams,  which  were  impru-dently deprived of forests, and in the seismically hazardous areas peo-ple pay with destructions from floods, avalanches, mudflows, landslides and earthquakes. However, these well-known natural disasters are de-termined by the irrational land use, but I am interested not in the na-ture’s  revenge,  but  in  the  whole  cultural  landscape’s  revenge  for  our  voluntarism. The cultural landscape is responsible for social calamities as a response to the arbitrariness of sovereigns and officials.
        Moreover,  regions  differ  by  the  historically  developed  landscape  rhythms (Rodoman,  2002).  For  instance,  in  Western  Europe  this  rhythm is more fractional (high-frequency), while in Siberia it is less fractional  (low-frequency)  than  in  the  Moscow  Region.  Under  the  evolutionary  self-development,  the  anthropogenic  superstructure  of  the  cultural  landscape  harmonizes  with  its  natural  basis,  but  under  interventions the resonance is often broken. Thus, the opposition to the traditional landscape led to the failure of three main Russian re-forms–of Alexander II, P.A. Stolypin and E.T. Gaidar: these reforms were not completed and turned out to be counterproductive.
        The cultural landscape is very inert, which often prevents its dep-rivation  of  the  ability  to  self-recover.  The  location,  size  and  shape  of  lands hinder changes in their use: in the countryside, the state failed to destroy the peasant-landlord landscape by replacing it with a uniform distribution of small estates and farms in the Western-European way. Contemporary  parcels  are  household  and  garden  plots  with  cottages,  and  latifundias  are  unused  fields  and  wastelands  that  surround  plots  and wait for new plowing or construction but are doomed to long deso-lation due to being too far from cities. Land reforms were disasters for rural residents and inevitably failed, because it is impossible to quick-ly move fields, gardens and houses. After every reform the country re-turned to the pre-reform situation that even deteriorated, because the population responded by the revival of archaic practices.
        The Soviet rural collectivization turned out to be the third wave of enslavement, and the post-Soviet privatization–the fourth (the first wave  ended  in  the  middle  of  the  17th  century,  and  the  second  wave  began  and  reached  its  heights  in  the  18th  century).  After  the  aboli-tion of serfdom, the former landlord peasants and their descendants were  relatively  free  for  only  60  years  and  then  became  Soviet  serfs  without  passports.  Today  residents  of  small  towns  in  Central  Rus-sia, of single-industry towns, industrial communities and rural settle-ments are economically less free than the landlord peasants on quit-rent not to mention the state peasants before 1861. Moreover, in most parts of tsarist Russia, there was no serfdom, while today in Russia nobody  can  start  a  ‘small  business’  without  a  powerful  administra-tive-criminal protection.
        Nevertheless, not all state attacks on the cultural landscape were destructive. A good example is the unjustly forgotten ‘Great Stalin’s (actually  Dokuchaev’s)  plan  for  the  transformation  of  nature’,  de-spite the fact that the field-protective forest belts did not solve their main  tasks  sufficiently–to  protect  fields  from  dry  winds  and  to  in-crease  productivity,  because  these  belts  were  designed  as  huge  rec-tangles  and  did  not  take  into  account  the  relief  and  river  networks.  This  fact  was  proved  by  the  geographer  D.L.  Armand  (1961),  who  was  a  talented  engineer  and  calculated,  albeit  too  late,  the  parame-ters of the field-protective forest belts. His work was also forgotten after the political wind from Moscow blew towards northern Kazakh-stan–the ‘virgin lands’.
        However, albeit in a perverted form, the ‘transformation of nature’ improved  the  ecological  situation  in  sparsely  forested  and  woodless areas (which does not apply to the destruction of large rivers by hy-draulic power systems and to the transformation of the Volga river into a cascade of ‘swamp-reservoirs’). The wide forest belts between fields and along roads improved the landscape and its biodiversity. To-day there are no such complex reclamations, and forest belts are cut down  and  built  up  with  cottages.  The  Russian  quasi-market  econo-my does not seem to possess mechanisms for improving the cultural landscape. I do not think that we need a totalitarian regime to mobi-lize people for good deeds, because there are successful government programs for the landscape transformation under non-authoritarian regimes (for example, in the Netherlands and Israel).

Trends in the development of the Russian landscape

Centuries of the military-colonial despotism and unprecedented cen-tralization of the supreme power have radically changed the Russian space and turned it into a totalitarian landscape (Rodoman, 2002)–a material-spatial embodiment of the service-distribution, command-ad-ministrative economy and autocratic-bureaucratic hierarchy, in which radial connections (center-periphery) are hypertrophied, while all pe-ripheral connections are suppressed. I call this striking difference be-tween radial and other connections the centric anisotropy (there are many anisotropies typical for the landscape). Radial connections re-produce or reflect the so-called ‘vertical of power’, while peripheral connections  reveal  the  lack  or  shortage  of  cooperation  between  ele-ments subordinate to the center.
        The Russian totalitarian landscape is embodied in the administra-tive-territorial division which consists of the universal units of social life similar to houses or apartments. There are many types of depart-mental regionalization (Kordonsky, 2010), but all of them are congru-ent  with  the  national  administrative-territorial  division.  The  cultur-al landscape is a reflection of relationships between people; therefore, in Russia, the infrastructure, routes of transport and migration, and interpersonal ties reflect primarily the bureaucratic hierarchy (main roads were previously the routes of officials and couriers).
        The  hopes  that  after  the  1990s  political  and  market  reforms  the  Russian  society  would  quickly  move  from  the  inert  hierarchi-cal structure to a more flexible network society did not come true. There are developing Internet networks, but in real life centraliza-tion  and  bureaucratization  have  increased,  which  leads  to  the  fur-ther etatization  of  landscape.  The  Russian  centralized  anisotropic  landscape  is  universal  and  reproduces  at  all  levels  of  the  territori-al hierarchy–in regions (‘subjects of the Russian Federation’), cit-ies and rural areas.
        Due to the continuing concentration of all activities in cities and suburbs and to the relative isolation of regions, whose heads do not cooperate but only follow instructions from Moscow, there are no lo-cal transport routes at the borders of administrative regions and dis-tricts, which creates zones of depopulation and economic decline. The higher the taxonomic rank of the administrative region, the wider the zone of desolation along its borders. The widest zone of desolation is along the state borders of the Russian Federation.
        There are unused lands on both sides of the border between Rus-sia and the CIS countries, while between Russia and the EU coun-tries–mostly  on  the  Russian  side.  Such  depressive  border  strips  have increased in Russia despite all global trends and dreams about the  close  regional  cooperation  and  fruitful  international  cross-bor-der  cooperation  (Barinov,  2012).  However,  every  cloud  has  a  silver  lining:  these  strips  help  to  preserve  the  gradually  reviving  natural  landscape,  which  allows  to  include  them  into  the  econet–the  glob-al network of specially protected natural areas (in the Internet, the word ‘econet’ often means the ‘ecological Internet’ which has noth-ing to do with ecology). The spontaneous eсonetization of adminis-trative borders and their significant ecological potential are a unique and  specific  feature  of  the  post-Soviet  space,  which  does  not  seem  to have analogues outside this space and, therefore, is unknown to Western geography.
        The Russian extraordinary social-economic polarization (especial-ly property inequalities) has a specific integral part–the geographi-cal, ecological, territorial polarization, i.e., the growing contradictions between the more successful and prosperous urbanized cores of the country and the depressive areas paradoxically located not so much on its geographic outskirts as everywhere inside its cores–in the so-called glubinka. This word has already become a scientific term (Rus-sian Glubinka...,  2012)  and,  probably,  will  take  its  rightful  place  in  international  dictionaries  like  other  ‘primordially  Russian’  concepts  (intelligentsia, dacha, raspoutitsa–flooded country roads), although glubinka  is  a  partial  synonym  for  the  term  ‘intra-periphery’  (Rodo-man, 1987) and ‘inner periphery’ (Kagansky, 2012).
        The inner periphery of some centric area consists of territories located closer to its center than to its outskirts; however, these ter-ritories have such features of the outskirts as poor transport acces-sibility,  slow  development,  obvious  lags  in  many  social-economic  fields, and archaic characteristics of landscape and everyday life. In the  simplest  and  universal  (triangular-hexagonal)  geometric  mod-el of regionalization and communications, the inner periphery is lo-cated  in  the  cells  of  the  transport  network  or,  which  is  the  same,  at the borders of regional junctions (Rodoman, 1999). However, in real  life,  the  transport  factor  is  often  insufficient  for  the  develop-ment of intra-periphery, and other factors of internal peripheraliza-tion play their role: natural conditions, ethnic composition of the lo-cal population, economic-social history of the region. For instance, the largest inner periphery of the Russian Empire developed in the 19th  century  in  the  Petersburg-Moscow-Warsaw  railway  triangle  and consisted of the northwestern provinces of Russia and a part of Belarus. Many uyezd towns were cut off from railways and fell into decay. In the 20th century, the rare and belated highways played the same role of the ‘destroyer of backwoods’. Most small villages dis-appeared due to the lack of satisfactory transport routes with the ‘civilized’ outside world.
        The key features of the inner periphery, especially important in the  specific  and  unique  conditions  of  Russia,  are  its  relativity  and  ubiquity: one cannot say for sure and show on the map peripheral and central areas, because such ‘statuses’ of territories depend on the  chosen  ‘coordinate  system’.  In  Russia,  the  administrative-ter-ritorial  division  is  the  main  coordinate  system;  therefore,  one  can  easily  find  as  many  types  of  centrality-peripherality  as  there  are  levels in this division: internal periphery of regions, municipal dis-tricts, and so on. In addition, there are unofficial, implicit regional junctions  such  as  the  latent,  non-existent  districts  that  were  once  official  (for  example,  the  Tarsky  district  in  the  Omsk  Region)  or  that have never been official but were partly identified as important nodes, for example, in the famous geographical zoning of E.E. Leiz-erovich (2004). The ubiquity of the inner periphery is determined by its relativity: for almost any geographical point one can find objects for which it will be central or peripheral.
        In my works (Rodoman, 2002, 2006), the Russian inner periphery is presented as playing an important role in the preservation and de-velopment  of  the  natural  landscape  without  large  funding.  The  tra-ditional economic approach focusing on investment, employment and jobs is irrelevant here, because the wildlife restoration (although not in the best and desired form) goes by itself, and we should not inter-fere with it. The inner periphery is a potential basis of the territori-al ecological framework–any artificial secondary colonization of the Russian non-black-earth inner periphery outside the suburban areas will  fail.  The  few  remaining  permanent  native  residents  of  this  hin-terland, who are truly attached to their small motherland and want to keep their traditional way of life, should be given the rights of abo-rigines regardless of their ethnicity and subsidies for the sake of pre-serving nature, culture, land, and Russia.
        Thus,  in  the  ‘geographically-politically  correct  perspective’,  the  Russian  inner  periphery  is  not  only  a  sick  and  decaying  land  that  needs to be cured by the traditional economic methods, but also a con-centration  of  ecological  opportunities  for  the  preservation  and  pros-perity of the natural landscape. The discovery of the anisotropic total-itarian landscape, devastated border strips, inner periphery and their ecological  potential  are  important  achievements  of  the  Russian  so-cial-economic and theoretical geography, which are based on the un-biased study of one’s country, i.e., on the study not focused on some fashionable borrowed concepts.

Regionalization as a method for the study of the Russian space

Regionalization is one of the most important methods in geographical sciences, and plays the same role in geography as periodization in his-tory and classification in zoology and botany. Regionalization allows to define and describe specific areas of land accurately and unambiguously, thus, representing the territory completely, without any gaps. Region-alization is also the highest, synthetic form of thematic mapping (Ro-doman, 2007). There are many thematic maps made by the differentiat-ed/qualitative/colored-background method in the natural-geographical sciences: for instance, the natural landscape of the former USSR was studied and depicted on maps. The physical-geographical regionaliza-tion can and should serve as a model for the cultural landscape, region-alization, but the question is what should be the territorial units of the cultural  landscape  regionalization,  i.e.,  what  ‘natural-cultural  territo-rial complexes’ should be taken as ‘cells’ of the area. Cultural geogra-phers cannot compare with naturalists in the complex taxonomic pyr-amids; therefore, we should start with the simplest self-evident models such as presenting the cultural landscape as a combination of the well-known cultural-historical areas as its primary and largest units.
        Ecologists hope to preserve the natural landscape as the econet–a continuous  network  of  wide  ‘green  corridors’  that  cross  a  dense-ly populated urbanized territory. This is the basis of my conceptual project of the ‘polarized biosphere’ based on the Russian spatial spe-cifics  (Rodoman,  2002).  Due  to  the  hyper-centralization  of  the  Rus-sian space, there are still strips of the wilder natural landscape on the borders of regions, republics and their municipal districts–with no cross-border communications or local highways. The borders of the Moscow Region are an obvious exception to this rule due to its being not only one of the core regions at the national/federal level, but also the core of the Russian state; therefore, on the borders of the Moscow Region  with  the  outside  world  rather  interaction  than  barrier  func-tions prevail. From the outside of the Moscow Region borders, there are  concentrations  of  objects  and  activities  that  strive  to  get  closer  to the capital but cannot enter the metropolitan area.
        The forest-park protective belts grow by themselves on the admin-istrative  borders  due  to  the  specifics  of  the  administrative-territori-al division. The development of the econet on the administrative bor-ders is a wonderful, convincing example of the ‘sleep-mode’ benefits: to achieve a good goal (self-restoration of nature) we need a gracious lack of action instead of purposeful activities.
        In Russia, until the World War II, rural settlements location fol-lowed the morphological structure of the natural landscape (Solntsev, 1962), which differed by natural area (Gvozdetsky, Zhuchkova, 1963). Thus,  on  the  Moscow  Upland,  northwest  of  Moscow,  villages  were  built  on  moraine  hills,  while  on  the  erosional  plain,  south  of  Mos-cow, villages were built in the valleys of small rivers. In general, in the Moscow Region, there were areas of different types of rural set-tlement, which corresponded to natural (physical-geographical) are-as of the same size. In the middle of the 20th century, this tradition-al system of rural settlement was destroyed by the mass distribution of land to the townspeople for gardens that were immediately turned into  summer  dacha  villages.  Collective,  state  and  forest  farms  will-ingly got rid of lands that hindered the achievement of the plan indi-cators. In the suburbs, the so-called ‘garden partnerships’ occupied the lands of the ecological framework–forest edges and damp clear-ings,  floodplains,  riverheads  and  high  moors.  The  cottage  villages  suitable for year-round living, which became widespread at the end of  the  20th  century,  inherited  the  same  ecophobic  patterns  of  loca-tion. The townspeople have built up such types of land on which the local peasants had not settled before. The ecological consequences of such settlement patterns were harmful not only for wild flora and fau-na, but also for people (destruction of surface and ground water run-offs,  pollution  and  degradation  of  forests,  etc.).  Thus,  the  tradition-al cultural-historical provinces are destroyed by suburbanization and transformation  of  the  former  village  into  a  second  place  to  live  for  the townspeople, who do not follow many previous patterns of rural construction, do not reproduce the traditional organization of the ru-ral settlement with houses built along the river, do not clean or pre-serve the old village ponds.
        I  believe  that  the  cultural-historical  regionalization  of  the  cul-tural landscape, which makes the scientific geography possible. Un-fortunately,  architects  and  geographers  are  not  interested  in  the  cultural  landscape  regionalization,  and  the  corresponding  regions  disappear–unknown, unexplored and unmapped.
        The Latvian Ethnographic Open-Air Museum in Riga is one of the  oldest  in  Europe  and  copies  the  Stockholm  Skansen  Museum  in  grouping  its  exhibits  according  to  the  historical  regions  of  Lat-via–Vidzeme,  Kurzeme,  Zemgale  and  Latgale.  In  Soviet  times,  Moscow tried to intervene in this non-routine (for the USSR) situ-ation and to change this grouping by the class division, so that the museum would present typical courtyards of the poor, middle peas-ants and kulaks, but I was lucky to see the original regional expo-sition. The question is whether we can identify historical areas in Russia.Unlike other European countries, Russia lacks historical provinc-es  (like  Normandy  and  Provence  in  France,  Vidzeme  and  Kurzeme  in Latvia). Russians identify themselves by administrative units (re-gions,  republics)  and  even  name  cattle  breeds  by  province  (for  in-stance,  Yaroslavl  and  Kostroma  breeds).  Surprisingly,  neighboring  Ukraine, quite close to Russia in culture, consists of historical regions (Volyn, Podillia, etc.) that can be the basis of both its possible feder-al structure (similar to Germany and Austria) and its disintegration (they are presented in Kiev, like in Riga, in the open-air museum). A similar museum in New Moscow would present the national cultural and natural heritage by administrative region.
Thus, for classifying and making an inventory of the Russian cultural landscape, including the purpose of preserving the national cultural heritage, scientists should identify and model special cultural-historical areas that do not necessarily coincide with the administrative or natural divisions. I have repeatedly suggested and described such a model based on three zones regions of the traditional rural landscape around Moscow, which was almost destroyed by cottage villages (Rodoman, 2011). I believe that each zone should have at least one protected-landscape museum-reserve and be presented by a preserved typical rural area – one village or a bunch of villages with the surrounding land, including forests and reservoirs. Certainly, the key and unique feature of the Russian cultural landscape is the huge role of the authoritarian state in its development: the unilateral influence of the government on landscape and population without any feedback, colonial methods of the multiple development of the same territory, landscape polarization, centric anisotropy of space, growth of the inner periphery, devastation of border strips, and spontaneous restoration of ‘wild nature’. The last three processes can be used to restore the favorable natural landscape and to help Russia to choose the environmental specialization in the global economy. To identify and preserve the samples of the cultural and natural heritage we need a universal scientific zoning regionalization of the cultural landscape.

References
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Российский культурный ландшафт:
теоретические и практические возможности концепции

Борис Борисович Родоман, доктор географических наук. E-mail: bbrodom@mail.ru

Автор полагает, что в науке точные окончательные определения (общепризнанные и универсальные) часто менее важны, чем понимание ключевых характеристик рассматриваемых феноменов. Поэтому для изучения культурного ландшафта автор предлагает сочетать разные понятия, меняя их содержание и концептуальные границы так, чтобы получить рабочее и временное определение культурного ландшафта. В статье этот термин представлен как безоценочный, преимущественно типологический, нетаксономический и «реальный», что позволяет считать его границы с понятием природного ландшафта подвижными, относительными и условными – решающее воздействие на оба ландшафта оказала человеческая деятельность. Автор обозначает факторы и тенденции в развитии культурного ландшафта и предлагает районирование как инструмент его изучения и сохранения. Характер российского культурного ландшафта обусловлен в первую очередь взаимодействием государства с природой – в силу очевидного недостатка самоорганизованных местных сообществ. Автор выделяет эндогенные (внутренние) и экзогенные (внешние) факторы (само)развития культурного ландшафта, которые могут как стимулировать, так и тормозить его. В качестве главных особенностей российского культурного ландшафта в статье представлены его исторически сложившийся ритм и способность к самовосстановлению, которые различаются по странам и регионам. Столетия военно-колониального деспотизма и беспрецедентной централизации верховной власти превратили российское пространство в тоталитарный ландшафт с гипертрофированными радиальными и подавленными периферийными связями, что воплотилось в административно-территориальном делении страны и обусловило ее чрезмерную социально-экономическую, географическую, экологическую и территориальную поляризацию. Российский ландшафт имеет одну очень особенную черту – так называемую «внутреннюю периферию», или глубинку (относительную и повсеместную): это территории, расположенные ближе к центрам страны, чем к ее окраинам, но обладающие всеми негативными чертами окраин. Внутренняя периферия играет важную роль в сохранении и развитии природного ландшафта, выступая потенциальной опорой территориального экологического каркаса, но для обеспечения этой роли необходимо проводить комплексное культурно-историческое районирование страны.      
Ключевые слова: ландшафт, культурный ландшафт, административно-территориальное деление, этатизация ландшафта, анизотропный ландшафт, экологический потенциал административных границ, социально-экономическая поляризация, глубинка, внутренняя периферия, районирование, культурно-исторические области.

Б.Р. 15 мая и 20 июня 2021 г.