voluminous studies of the empire’sflora and fauna, while Johann Gottlieb Georgi
did the same for the empire’s many ethnic groups (1776). As for mapping, Ivan
Kirillov headed its Geodetic Service and personally compiled hundreds of regional
maps. He was involved in the expedition that founded and mapped Orenburg,
establishing Russian control in the heart of Bashkiria; Kirillov compiled his expert-
ise in the first general map of Russia, published in 1734. A decade later the
Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Joseph-Nicholas de l’Isle, published
theAtlas russicusof the empire with more sophisticated geodesic standards than
Kirillov’s.
Military engineers also were involved in mapping. Together academicians and
military engineers mapped new territories in the southern Urals and Kazakh steppe,
the Far East, the Arctic border and routes across to Alaska and North America in
the second half of the century. Catherine II established her own Privy Geographical
Department and assiduously commissioned maps of her expansion into New
Russia, Crimea, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Paul I transferred
this collection to the military as the Map Depot (1797–1800), which formed in
turn the basis of the Ministry of War’s Military-Topographic Depot that became
the lead institution for surveying and map-production into the next century.
Mapping for non-military purposes proliferated in the second half of the
eighteenth century; almanacs and calendars regularly included maps of various
aspects of the empire, such as postal roads. The need for accurate cadastral surveys
of landed estates at the local level increased over the century with the growth of
noble landholding and the confiscation of church lands in 1764. A General Land
Survey of noble and state property was ordered in 1765 to establish property
rights and to compile empire-wide maps. Carried out by the Survey Department
of the Academy of Sciences, by the end of the eighteenth century nineteen
provinces in European Russia, comprising almost 70 percent of the empire’s
population and most of its manorial property, had been mapped in detail; by
1843 thirty-four gubernii had been mapped. In preparation for the 1775 reforms,
a complete redrawing of the gubernia system was carried out, as noted in
Chapter 14. Existing gubernii were reduced in size to conform to the reform’s
population limits and new gubernii were created. As John LeDonne showed,
surveyors designed gubernii to follow natural geographical and cultural bound-
aries, in the process occasionally shifting a border district (uezd)fromone
gubernia to another. Alongside census takers the 1775 reform installed surveying
teams in each gubernia Treasury, supported by a school of surveying established
in St. Petersburg in 1779. All this effort resulted in a new general map of the
empire in 1785; detailed atlases of each gubernia were planned but not completed,
and how regularly and accurately gubernia teams carried out their mapping tasks
varied with locality.
Gradually in the eighteenth century Russia was developing a more territorial
sense of the state. At the same time, it had a long way to go to match its European
counterparts’knowledge of their own territorial acquisitions. Borders, for example,
were an issue in point. While progress had been made with defining borders with
the Ottoman empire already in the seventeenth century and sovereign borders were
338 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801