Izvestiâ Rossijskoj akademii nauk. Seriâ geografičeskaâ

Since 2022 the journal Izvestiya Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk. Seriya geograficheskaya is publishing thematic issues and special sections devoted to actual geographical topics and problems. Post-Industrial World: Trends, Shifts and Pulsations is the eighth special issue of the journal and the third thematic corpus of articles on social geography (with a special section in no. 3 for 2022, prepared for the anniversary International Geographical Congress in Paris in 2022). The special issue contains eight articles prepared based on the results of the First All-Russian scientific conference with international participation dedicated to the scientific legacy of A.P. Gorkin, held in October 2023 by the Faculty of Geography of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The articles contain the results of original scientific research and materials specially prepared in memory of the scientific legacy of the Alexander Pavlovich Gorkin, outstanding Soviet and Russian economic geographer. The authors of the special section’s articles touch upon a wide range of topics related to the peculiarities of world development in the post-industrial era. The topics considered illustrate the significant theoretical and philosophical-methodological potential of A.P. Gorkin’s ideas for modern socio-geographical research. The articles emphasize the advantages of the system and structural approach, the need to use relativism and to consider inertia and mobility in the analysis of the location of post-industrial industry, the influence of the agglomeration effect, innovative, creative and institutional factors on changes in industry location, as well as the role of tacit knowledge and unlimited resources in the geography of modern industry. The authors also consider the paradoxes of post-industrial development from the standpoint of polyscale approach and insufficient attention to the meso level in the A.P. Gorkin’s version of the structural and systemic approach.

Alexander Pavlovich Gorkin’s professional life is an example of faithful service to geography on the one hand, and on the other hand, an example of an absolutely non-canonical scientist with very broad interests, diversified creative activities, which became the subject of the research. The subject of the study is the period of A.P. Gorkin’s professional activity, which lasted for almost 60 years from the 1960s to the 2010s. The research question of the article: where was the creative energy of A.P. Gorkin directed during his working life and what lessons should the new generation of Russian geographers learn from it? The identified research question determined three tasks to be solved: (1) to assess the forms of manifestation of scientific creativity of A.P. Gorkin in the methodology of the “portfolio approach” adopted in economics; (2) to identify cross-cutting features of Gorkin’s scientific creativity in all areas (publications, lectures, encyclopedias, etc.); (3) to determine the elements of Gorkin’s creative heritage. The information base of the work was taken from the intellectual system of case studies of scientometric data of Lomonosov Moscow State University (“ISTINA”). The novelty of the research lies in the systematic approach applied for the first time to the study of the scientific creativity of a talented scientist: not only the traditional publication activity, but also his educational, teaching and lecturing activities are considered as parts of the whole. Main results: (1) the “investment portfolio” of Gorkin’s creative energy calculated for the entire cycle of his professional life consists of 660 equivalent articles, including 300 equivalent articles as education of young personnel for economic geography, 220 as publication activity, 80 as teaching activity, 60 as lecture activity; (2) the thematic triad that runs through A.P. Gorkin’s publications, in the titles of his students’ dissertations, and in his lectures—theoretical and methodological problems of socioeconomic geography, geography of post-industrial industry, and social geography; (3) the most important lessons of A.P. Gorkin for us: the values of collectivism in science that he possessed; interest in the study of big, systemic phenomena and the art of posing major problems of the economic geography; topics for long-term research study—spatio-temporal patterns of modern economic activities; the role of industry and other sectors of national economy in the process of “densification” of the space-time continuum of socioeconomic development of mankind; measurement of mobility and inertia of location in socioeconomic geography.

The article analyzes the current dynamics of Russian marine exports of oil and petroleum products under the conditions of embargo and price cap imposed by unfriendly countries following the start of the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The article demonstrates that Russian oil exports have remained resilient to sanctions due to a shift towards alternative markets and active use of mechanisms to bypass Western non-market restrictions. Special attention is paid to the changing geography of Russian oil exports, which have rapidly shifted from the markets of Western countries to those of China, India, and Turkey. The changes in the tanker transportation of Russian oil and petroleum products following the embargo, as well as the tools used to bypass sanctions, including the marine transshipment of oil cargo and the use of a shadow fleet, are discussed in detail. The article analyzes the new economy of Russian oil exports under the conditions of external restrictions and the current trends in the pricing for Russian oil on the global market. The necessity of changing the existing pricing rules for Russian oil exports and switching to Russian pricing indicators, as well as Russian oil cargo insurance, is demonstrated. The task of creating an alternative financial and logistics framework for trading Russian oil cargos in the context of regionalization of international trade, due to the increasing influence of non-market sanctions, has been identified.

The landscape direction in painting and the landscape approach that arose on its basis had a significant impact on the development of geography. However, the main attention of the researchers was paid to the issues of definition and typologies of the geographical landscape. For the first time, the article raises and solves the question of the content of the landscape approach itself, provides its main characteristics, and discusses the results of its application in geography. The on-screen perception of the surrounding world, which underlies the approach, contributed to the creation of three-dimensional representations of terrestrial landscapes and, on this basis, the formation of geographical images of countries and regions (image-paintings by Yu.G. Tyutyunnik). For many decades, landscape images, along with geographic maps, have been important products of field geographic research. All this contributed to the development of the geographical imagination in the community of geographers. In Russian geography, the heyday of the landscape approach coincided with the beginning of the development of the landscape concept, and its crisis turned out to be timed to the early Soviet stage of the dehumanization of Russian geography. The article examines the history of the formation of the concept of “landscape” in painting, analyzes the requirements for a geographical landscape from the classics of world geography A. Gottner and V.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, discusses the negative consequences of the loss of the landscape approach for Russian geography and the possibility of its application at the present stage.

The article presents a spatial statistical modeling of employment in the North Rhine-Westphalia. The source of information was statistical reference books for the years 1948 to 2021. We examined the level of municipal districts and extra-district cities. As a result of administrative-territorial reforms, the number of districts varied from 53 to 94. In order to process heterogeneous statistics and to identify differences, the territory of North Rhine-Westphalia was divided into 400 cells of equal size. The statistics were linked to these cells by appropriate recalculations. Spatial schemes were constructed. The dates of fundamental shifts in the spatial structure of the economy of North Rhine-Westphalia were identified. The main changes affected the economic centers of the state—the Ruhr area and the Rhine region. New growth poles appeared on the periphery of the region—the case of Bielefeld and Münster. The historical and current degree of polarization of the economic landscape by industry, trade and transport was studied. Whereas in the past industrial enterprises were concentrated in industrial centers, today they are relatively evenly distributed throughout the region. Each factory has its own function in the production process.