The journal Izvestiya RAN (Akad. Nauk SSSR). Seriya Geograficheskaya has been published since 1951 (No. 1 was for March–April 1951). All these years it has kept the position of the country's leading academic journal on basic problems of geography. This journal (and its predecessor Izvestiya Akad. Nauk SSSR. Seriya Geograficheskaya i Geofizicheskaya) has traditionally been headed by leaders of domestic geography (Academicians A.A. Grigor'ev, L.S. Berg, N.N. Baranskiy, I.P. Gerasimov, and V.M. Kotlyakov); leading geographers of the country have been members of its editorial board.