In Aleksandr Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, we encounter the tsarevich Fedor drawing a map. Tsar Boris asks his son what he is doing, and Fedor answers, “A chart of all the land of Muscovy; our tsardom from end to end. Here you see; there is Moscow, there Novgorod, there Astrakhan. Here lies the sea, here … Perm, and here Siberia.” The tsar answers, “Very good! Here’s the sweet fruit of learning. One can view as from the clouds our whole dominion … Learn, my son.” Godunov hopes that Fedor will someday rule the lands he has drawn on his map. Although Pushkin’s depiction is historically premature, its sense is in keeping with Denis J. B. Shaw’s treatment of early modern geography in Reconnoitring Russia. It was the imperializing Russian state that, despite strong opposition from Russian Orthodox churchmen, drove acquisition of geographical knowledge. During this period educated Russians came to know their land and its human and natural resources in much greater detail than ever before.

Shaw, well-known British geographer, passed away in 2024. Reconnoitring Russia, published posthumously, chronicles the transitional seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during which Russians became “modern,” learning to map and describe their empire and its resources and peoples in a precise, math- and science-based manner. Under the umbrella term, “geographical endeavour,” Shaw examines the surveying, mapping, exploring, publishing, and teaching activities that marked a revolutionary turn in elite Russians’ view of their land. Shaw argues that this geographical endeavor evolved in connection with military conquest and imperial growth. Foremost in the eighteenth century was the military need for resources to wage war effectively and the political need to establish visual presence through maps and other geographical publications as a way asserting borders. Over these centuries, as rulers fought wars and annexed lands, their focus remained on peripheries—first Siberia and the Far East, the southern and southwestern steppe, then the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, and by the eighteenth century, Turkish lands, the Baltic Sea and Swedish holdings, and finally the north coast of the Black Sea.

Reconnoitring Russia is structured into six chapters, organized by periods. The first introductory chapter gives a useful overview of the period in comparison and contrast to the development of geographical knowledge and activity in various European countries. The second chapter gives an introduction to Muscovite mapping before Peter I. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw collections of European maps and atlases among the Muscovite elite, the drawing of mainly cadastral maps, and the emergence of Russia’s first major geographer, Semyon Remezov. The third chapter describes major changes in geographical education, mapping techniques, and organized expeditions under Peter. The following chapter deals with the period between Peter I and Catherine II, focusing on expeditions to North America, the assembling of the first Russian atlas, and the first cohort of major Russian geographers, among them, Vasilii Tatishchev, Aleksei Chirikov, and Stepan Krashennikov. In Ch. 5, attention pivots to the Black Sea and what is now the Ukrainian steppe under Catherine II. Also of great importance is the design of the first university curriculum in geography and starting the first cadastral survey of the entire Russian empire (which ended only in 1865). The final chapter addresses the post-Catherine period up to 1825, featuring the first Russian geographical dictionaries and encyclopedias and studies translated into English. Significantly, whatever progress was achieved, Shaw claims that Russian lands were fully surveyed, mapped, and described only in the mid-twentieth century.

Despite several similarities to European developments in geographical activity and knowledge related to state building and imperial expansion, the Russian geographical endeavor was motivated largely by state interests rather than national feeling or local affection. Shaw reminds us of several defining differences, all of them well known. They include the pervasive use of foreign specialists, state control over surveying, mapping, exploratory expeditions, and finally the contiguity of the European-Russian center and its colonies, which meant that Russians made no real distinction between the two areas.

Early Russian geographers were generally disinterested in Russian terrain beyond major cities, in strong contrast to their European counterparts. The consistency of these points of orientation is remarkable. The focus on the center, concern with borderlands, ignorance of and boredom with central Russian areas endures even to this day. Shaw’s book gives valuable context that situates Russian imagined geographies that are alive and well in our time.