10. Knowledge and Power in Sovietized Hungarian Geography

Our chapter demonstrates how the discipline of geography was reorganized in a country belonging to the Soviet occupation zone after World War II. After the violent establishment of the Communist system, geography was found guilty of having served the interwar political regime. The old “reactionary” and “bourgeois” geography was demolished, and a new, Marxist-Leninist geography based on Soviet principles was established. The latter derived from economic determinism, and “physical” and “economic” geography were strictly separated. State research institutes, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Central Planning Office became the most important “centers of calculation” where Soviet-type “big science” was established. Several “old” geographers were pensioned off or exiled from academia. Others were driven to the periphery or forced to compromise with the system. Important positions were given to politically loyal “newcomers.” Geography as a discipline was expected to contribute to the “construction of socialism,” so “bourgeois” subdisciplines without “practical utilization” were dismantled, and “reactionary” human geography was rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on issues serving the needs of economic planning, such as the socialist transformation of settlement networks, the establishment of a spatial framework for economic planning, and the transformation of nature to promote agricultural production. Geography was, moreover, expected to participate in the propagation of these new goals. Thus, Sovietization thoroughly reshaped Hungarian geography and changed its social, political, and economic roles as a field of science.