Soviet Geography

Abstract

THE Russian revolution is usually associated with a fundamental change in the economic and political structure of the country, but it has been far more pervading than this. It substituted a new type of scientific philosophy for the old one that has dominated Western science for many years, and the Russians themselves distinguish sharply between their own, which they call socialistic science, and the Western science, which they call capitalistic. In the West it is assumed that truth, beauty, justice, right and certain other attributes are something absolute, providing unvarying standards independent of time and change. The socialistic men of science, on the other hand, admit no absolute quantities: these, they say, are a relic of the Western belief in a Creator who is the absolute, while they, having given up all such ideas, accept only the life of the community as the essential reality to which all such attributes are to be referred. As this is necessarily changing, absolute standards must disappear: truth, science, art, morals, have meaning only in relation to the life of the time: their value is thus only relative.

Soviet Geography:

the New Industrial and Economic Distributions of the U.S.S.R. By N. Mikhaylov. Pp. xviii + 232. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1935.) 10s. 6d. net.