Authors

Discussion

This paper explores the Museum of Zemlevedenie, situated atop the main tower of Moscow State University, as both a symbolic and material expression of Soviet cultural centrality. Conceived in the late Stalinist era as the methodological heart of Soviet natural science, the museum encapsulated the ambition to reorganize global and cosmic knowledge from the vantage point of Moscow—the ultimate ideological and epistemological centre of the Soviet world. Drawing parallels with the earlier kraevedenie movement, the institution transformed the tradition of Erdkunde into a distinctly Soviet project that merged geography, geology, biology, and cosmology into a unified science of space and matter.

The museum’s architectural elevation, exhibition design, and restricted access articulated an explicit geography of knowledge: from the elevated position of the capital, the peripheries of the Soviet Union and the world were to be studied, mapped, and integrated into a single socialist cosmology. Using archival materials, guidebooks, interviews, and site analysis, this paper situates the Museum of Zemlevedenie within broader debates on centre and periphery in Soviet cultural production. It argues that the museum functioned not merely as an educational institution but as a performative apparatus of centralization—a laboratory of imperial vision where the Soviet Union’s peripheries were both represented and subordinated, naturalized as fragments within a Moscow-centred image of the world.