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Transits and Transitions: Astronomy, Topography, and Politics in Russian Expeditions to View the Transit of Venus in 1874

Transits et transitions : Astronomie, topographie et politique dans les expéditions russes visant à observer le transit de Vénus en 1874
Simon Werrett
p. 147-176

Résumés

Les expéditions russes dépêchées pour l’observation du passage de Vénus en 1874 sont l’occasion d’explorer la nature de l’astronomie et de la société dans la Russie impériale tardive. Cet article met en lumière le personnel et les sites impliqués dans les missions russes et examine leur intégration dans les réseaux bourgeonnants du pouvoir impérial russe conçus afin de propager une gouvernance efficace au sein de l’empire dans le sillage de la débâcle de Crimée. Pour le grand-duc Constantin Nicolaïevitch, frère du tsar Alexandre II, et son cercle de réformateurs, l’astronomie et la géographie prennent part à l’effort pour revigorer l’empire et l’autocratie sur la base d’une plus grande participation des sujets et pour démontrer la vitalité russe vis-à-vis de l’étranger. Au même moment, une autre vague d’expéditions est organisée par les révolutionnaires populistes qui « vont vers le peuple » en répandant leur message révolutionnaire. Cet article se concentre sur les manières dont le passage de Vénus rencontre ces diverses interprétations du voyage impérial et de la gouvernance « scientifique » en Russie.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 On the Americans in Vladivostok, see Steven J. Dick (2002) Sky and Ocean Joined: The U. S. Naval Ob (...)
  • 2 The project of cultural history of astronomy is set out in the introduction to David Aubin, Charlot (...)

1In late 1874, an American expedition led by Asaph Hall travelled to the Russian outpost of Vladivostok to view the transit of Venus. Although this expedition has been recounted by several historians, those made by Russians have been largely overlooked.1 This is surprising, since Russia organized more transit expeditions than anybody else that year, including the Americans, British, and French. This paper examines the Russian expeditions as a typical instance of astronomical activity in nineteenth-century Russia and assesses their importance among the 1874 transit observations. Recently, historians have drawn attention to the “cultural history” of astronomy, which seeks to identify astronomy’s status as a form of sociopractical culture, and as an activity operating in conjunction with other cultures, like that of the military-governmental sphere. The case of Russia’s transit expeditions explored here supports arguments that astronomy constitutes, and is itself constituted, within a complex economy of interactions between these different spheres of social and technical practice.2

2The Russian transit expeditions will be addressed from two perspectives. First an examination of the background, preparations, and activities of the various transit expeditions sent out by Russia in 1874 will be located within larger projects of the Russian autocratic government and attempts to expand and consolidate the Russian empire. Relations between the astronomers of Russia’s central observatory at Pulkovo and the autocracy were close, and organization of the expeditions reflected Russia s continuing absolutism, with royal patronage playing a key role in mobilizing astronomers. The transit expeditions were also bound up with Russia’s military and naval operations in new territories recently acquired for the empire. Transit expertise emerged out of intensive military activity in Central Asia and the Far East, compelled by Russia’s ongoing imperial feuds with Britain. Transit expeditions led to the accumulation of topographical, hydrographical, and geographical information, ultimately as important a legacy of the expeditions as the observations of Venus. This fitted Pulkovo and the government’s ideas about astronomy as a tool for both state and scientific interests.

3It is also useful to consider how the transit expeditions were given meaning in Russia. While the results of the expeditions were ambiguous and not published for many years, the expeditions themselves were publicized to Russian audiences in a popular essay by Russian astronomer Eduard Eduardovich Lindeman a month before the transit. Here the expeditions were presented as the purest of pure science, with no connection to the imperial topography they were clearly intended to contribute to, or to any other practical advantage. This “purification” of the transit can be linked to broader concerns among Russian scientists to distance themselves from the tense political situation developing in Russia. 1874 witnessed what was known as the “mad summer”, when thousands of radical students dressed in peasant garb to “go to the people”, to preach revolution against the repressive regime of Tsar Alexander II. The culmination of two decades of increasingly radical activity, this “populism” (narodnichestvo) has its own distinctive views of the relevance of science to society, and understanding them helps explain the way Pulkovo astronomers presented the transit expeditions to the public.

2. The Transit

  • 3 F. G. W. Struve, reported speech in Charles Piazzi Smyth (1862) Three Cities in Russia, 2 vols. (Lo (...)
  • 4 N. I. Nevskaia (1973) J. N. Delisle (1688-1768)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 26, p. 289-313. O (...)
  • 5 On Russian expeditions in the 1760s, see Harry Woolf (1959) The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eight (...)

4Astronomy was always closely connected with autocratic government in Russia. As the first director of Pulkovo observatory, Wilhelm Struve put it, a “high appreciation of astronomy seems inherent in the Romanov race.”3 In Russia, astronomy was encouraged, funded, and practiced by the Tsars. Peter the Great founded Russia’s first observatory in the early eighteenth century, hiring Frenchman Joseph Delisle, author of a new method for calculating the solar parallax from transits of Venus.4 Although most of his work on the parallax problem was done in France, Delisle raised awareness of transits in Russia, and Russia’s astronomers played an important role in observations of the transits of 1761 and 1769. Again the sovereign participated in these events. After another French astronomer, Jean Chappe d’Auteroche, observed the transit of 1761 he published an account of his travels condemning the Russians as a course and brutal people, prompting Catherine the Great to write a line-by-line rejoinder. In 1769, it was Catherine who ordered astronomers of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences to view the transit, and it was under her orders that many foreign astronomers were invited to Russia to do the same. Despite the paucity of Russian astronomers, Catherine was eager to see her regime fully participate in Europe’s astronomical activities.5

  • 6 On the history of Pulkovo, see Simon Werrett (forthcoming) “The Lord of Pulkovo: Observatories in t (...)
  • 7 On Struve’s astronomical work, see Alan H. Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters: The L (...)
  • 8 Benjamin A. Gould (1849) “The Observatory at Pulkowa”, North American Review, 144, p. 143-162, on p (...)
  • 9 Anon. (1850) “Royal Observatory at Greenwich”, Littell's Living Age, 316, p. 433-457, on p. 440.

5Imperial patronage continued to provide an important context for astronomical innovation in the nineteenth century. At the close of the eighteenth century academicians argued for the establishment of a new observatory to be located just outside St. Petersburg. This came in 1839, when Tsar Nicholas I founded the “Central” or “Nikolaevskii” observatory at Pulkovo, bringing the Dorpat University astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve as director of the new institution. Nicholas lavished money on his new observatory, since Pulkovo was to fulfill imperial and astronomical needs. Government and military personnel were trained in the practical astronomy necessary to make accurate maps of the Russian empire, vital for improving communications and troop movements over a huge area.6 Struve, and the mostly German astronomers he employed at Pulkovo, simultaneously carried out surveys of the heavens, composed stellar catalogues, and worked on measures of parallax.7 So much of the Tsar’s money was spent in administering these projects that Pulkovo soon gained a reputation as the “El Dorado” of astronomy.8 Russian astronomy was thus a blend of courtly, governmental and scientific activity, linking the observatory to Bureaus for military topography and naval hydrography, the main corps of imperial surveyors and geodesists, to the Academy of Sciences, located in St. Petersburg, and to the Russian court, located right next to Pulkovo at the Tsar’s estate of Tsarskoe Selo. Foreign visitors noted the observatory’s intimacy with Russia’s autocratic regime. One astute observer wrote, “Pulkowa is like the palace of an astronomical autocrat, who has but to will, and men and money appear at his call to take the heavens by storm.”9

  • 10 Airy quoted in Richard A. Proctor (1882) Transits of Venus: A Popular Account of Coming and Past Tr (...)

6Pulkovo would play a central role in the transit observations. In 1874 Russia was once again well-placed to view the transit. The beginning would be visible from the Bering and Okhotsk seas, and the whole transit was visible from south-eastern Siberia, China, Japan, the East Indies, and Australia. The end was visible in south-eastern European Russia, southwestern Siberia, central Asia, the Caucasus, Crimea, Turkey, Arabia and east Africa. Russia possessed territories in many of these places, and as British astronomer royal George Biddell Airy, the self-appointed manager of global transit expeditions, put it, “We may, with the utmost confidence, leave the selection of the stations, the determination of longitude, and the observation of the phenomenon, to our Russian friends.”10

  • 11 On the setting up of provincial observatories see B. A. Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki islori (...)
  • 12 Otto told Airy that Russia would “do its duty” in the approaching transit. See O. Struve to G. Airy (...)
  • 13 Communication of Otto Struve to the Physico-Mathematical Section of the Academy of Sciences, 21 Oct (...)

7These activities would tighten relations between the military, autocracy and astronomy in Russia. They would also strengthen connections between Pulkovo and numerous recently-founded provincial observatories and university astronomy departments across Russia.11 To encourage participation in the transit observations, Otto Struve proposed founding a commission in 1869, probably at Airy’s request.12 Writing to the St. Petersburg Academy, Otto invoked Russian prestige as a reason for approving the commission, “the learned world [...] expects that [...] observation [...] will be undertaken by Russian astronomers, not only because the line [of good observation points] lies in Russian possessions, but still more because it considers this the scholarly legacy of Russia after having taken a memorable part in observations of a similar event in the reign of Catherine II.”13 The Academy approved, and the Commission first met at Pulkovo on 13 February 1870, sending invitations to provincial observatories to cooperate in the expeditions.

Figure 1 : E. Desmaisons, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, c. 1865, albumen silver print on card.

Figure 1 : E. Desmaisons, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, c. 1865, albumen silver print on card.

© Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, On loan from the Historical Photographs and Special Visual Collections Department, Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

  • 14 The members of the commission are reported in Eduard Eduardovich Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie pla (...)

8The commission consisted of military and scientific representatives. Struve presided, and the Academy of Sciences was represented by Swiss astronomer Heinrich Wild (1833-1902) and St. Petersburg University astronomer and tutor of military topography at Pulkovo Aleksei Nikolaevich Savich (1810-1883). From Pulkovo came two more Baltic German astronomers, Wilhelm Döllen (1820-1897), and August Wagner (1828-1886), both related to the Struves by marriage, and observatory members since its early days. Representing the military-topographic and hydrographic depots were their directors, General Major E. I. Forsh and Vice-Admiral Semen’ Il’ych’ Zelenoi, the latter also a teacher and popularizer of astronomy.14 The commission depended on the patronage of another Romanov, the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich (1827-1892), brother of Tsar Alexander II.

  • 15 On Konstantin’s patronage, see Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p. 101- (...)
  • 16 A. I. Alekseev (1996) Fedor Petrovich Litke, trans. Serge Le Comte (Fairbanks: Univ. of Alaska Pres (...)
  • 17 Smyth (1862) Three Cities, op. cit., 2, p. 345-351; H. A. Brück and M. T. Brück (1988) The Peripate (...)
  • 18 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 441.

9Konstantin had two passions: the navy and astronomy. As a young man in the 1840s, Konstantin attended lectures by Wilhelm Struve, and learned to use the large telescope at Pulkovo under his tutelage.15 At home, Konstantin was brought up by Admiral Fedor Petrovich Litke, one of Russia’s first circumnavigators, and president of the Academy in 1874. Litke and Nicholas planned a naval life for Konstantin and he spent his early years at sea, soon made Lord High Admiral of the Russian Navy.16 On his return to St. Petersburg, Konstantin began patronizing a variety of astronomers, geographers, and archeologists. Charles Piazzi Smyth’s famous visit to Pulkovo in 1859 was made with the intent of interesting Konstantin in a gyroscopically stabilized platform for ships he had invented, and which Konstantin saw into production.17 The Grand Duke kept his own meteorological and magnetic observatory on his estate at Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg, and imbued with this passion for astronomy and naval affairs, became a significant patron of the transit expeditions. When the Pulkovo commission applied to the Russian government for funding, Konstantin pulled the necessary strings to approve the budget, obtaining 25,000 roubles towards the expense.18 He also arranged naval vessels to transport astronomers to their destinations in eastern Siberia, and, perhaps most importantly, he proposed the use of Vladivostok, then an outpost of Russia’s empire and home to the Russian navy’s Pacific headquarters, as a station for observing the transit. Otto Struve concurred, sending a Russian party and inviting astronomers from the U.S. there.

  • 19 Alexander’s reforms are explored in W. Bruce Lincoln (1990) The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucra (...)
  • 20 Letter of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to Education Minister A. S. Nosov, 21 December 1856, re (...)

10Konstantin’s outlook on science reflected his academic education, and provides further insight into the value given by the regime to astronomy. He saw the future of Russia as lying in a technically-informed and participatory autocracy. In the 1860s, Konstantin had enthusiastically participated in reforms undertaken by his brother Alexander as an antidote to the conservative regime of his father Nicholas I, widely seen as responsible for Russia’s disastrous failures in the Crimean War. Alexander had seen through the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, liberalization of the press, and educational reforms, including education for women. Science was encouraged as a tool of modernization and students permitted to travel abroad.19 Konstantin joined in, associating with liberal reformers and seeking the abolition of torture, the end of censorship and emancipation of the serfs. He also wanted to devolve decision-making to technical experts, rather than leave everything in the hands of the Tsar. Under a policy called “artful openness” or “artificial publicity” (iskusstvennaia glasnost’), Konstantin vigorously promoted astronomy, topography, geography and hydrography, as tools for the modernization and consolidation of the imperial administration, seeking the advice of scientists and technical specialists before making policy decisions in the navy, which he controlled. Konstantin supported “pure” (chistaia) science and in 1857 persuaded the education minister to increase funding for Pulkovo and to free the observatory from some of its practical, topographical work.20

  • 21 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 446 details some of these expeditions (...)

11Konstantin’s personal concern to balance autocracy and devolution may have been reflected in Pulkovo’s organization of the transit expeditions, since the observatory served as a focal point, rather than an overlord, of the Russian expeditions. Although Pulkovo chose most of the sites for observations and oversaw most of the operations, several independent expeditions were planned, while others were funded and managed by the universities. Thus the government grant of 25,000 roubles was supplemented with another 20,000 roubles from the universities. Dorpat and Vilnius universities organized independent expeditions, and an expedition to Luxor in Egypt was paid for by the Moscow Society for the Friends of Nature who chose Döllen to head their expedition.21

  • 22 On the problems of disciplining imperial observers, see David N. Livingstone (2003) Putting Science (...)
  • 23 E.g. the military topographer Ieronim Stebnitskii was in Pulkovo from 28 March to 9 June 1874. Z. K (...)
  • 24 One Pulkovo report noted, “This instrument was sent last summer [1873] to the conference of scienti (...)

12The most centralized aspects of the project were its instrumentation and training. Organizers placed little confidence in human observers and did their best to mechanize observation as a means to assure trustworthy witnessing.22 In 1874 provincial observatory personnel thus spent two months training in observing techniques at Pulkovo prior to the transit.23 Skills were disciplined using an artificial transit, invented by Pulkovo vicedirector August Wagner. It consisted of a “scene reproducing the transit of Venus” made from of a large double convex lens illuminated from behind to represent the sun, across which a small black ball was made to move. Observers were calibrated against the machine. Connected to a battery, the moment the ball touched the edge of the “sun” a circuit closed indicating the exact moment of contact. By comparing this to the moment of contact recorded by the observer, human error could be calculated and compensated. The same apparatus was used to calibrate astronomers in Germany.24

  • 25 The instruments used for thirteen of the Russian expeditions are detailed in Wittram (1891 ) Zusamm (...)

13Instruments assisted discipline. But the large number of institutions involved in Russian preparations complicated standardization. Instrumentation would be a mixture of independently-owned telescopes and specialised devices bought and distributed by Pulkovo. Most observers used available university telescopes by Merz or Frauenhofer, passage instruments by Ertel, and circles by Repsold or Pistor and Martins of Berlin, in addition to box and pocket chronometers to make time and longitude determinations.25 While the sizes and quality of these instruments varied, new instruments, like the heliometer and the photoheliograph, were more homogenous.

  • 26 See “Heliometer,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, 29 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University (...)
  • 27 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., on p. 27, 39, and 62.

14The heliometer, which provided angular measures of Venus’s progress across the sun using an adjustable split lens, received much use in Russia, following improvements made by W. Struve since 1839. For the transit, the Pulkovo commission ordered three new heliometers from Repsold, with 4” apertures and a five foot focal length. Otto Struve, Georg Auwers and Friedrich Winnecke superintended the design, essentially the same as the heliometer used by James Ludovic Lindsay at Mauritius in 1874, the only one used by British observers.26 The Russian heliometers were then distributed and used in the Russian Far East and Tschita and Nerchinsk in Eastern Siberia.27

  • 28 On photography at Pulkovo, see Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki, op. cit., p. 263; on Smyslov, (...)
  • 29 Holly Rotherme! (1993) “Images of the Sun: Warren de la Rue, George Biddell airy and Celestial Phot (...)

15The photoheliograph was first employed at Pulkovo in 1864 to photograph the Sun, and afterwards used extensively at Vilnius Observatory in Poland, under the direction of Petr Mikhailovich Smyslov.28 Developed by Warren de la Rue in 1854, the photoheliograph was a telescopic camera that magnified a focal image of the Sun, diminishing its brightness, onto a photographic plate behind a very fast shutter. The astronomer viewed the image projected from a viewing telescope, and used a thread to open the shutter for an exposure.29

  • 30 Otto Struve (1872) “Russian Preparations for the Observation of the Transit of Venus of 1874”, Mont (...)

16For the transit, three of John Dallmeyer’s photoheliographs were ordered from London and distributed to observers. These were a modification of de la Rue’s design, using a rectilinear four inch objective and an enlarging lens to create an image of four inches diameter. Vilnius sent one of them to Krasnovodsk in Turkestan, while from Pulkovo Swedish astronomer Karl Bernhard Hasselberg used another at the bay of Possiet on the Sea of Japan. He was assisted by Hermann Struve (Otto’s son), who used a conventional telescope to observe the transit and made chronometric and positional measurements in tandem with Hasselberg’s photographs. Another photoheliograph was used by a professor from Moscow University in Khiatka, Eastern Siberia, but poor weather prevailed.30

  • 31 On early Russian astrophysics, Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki, op. cit., p. 307-309.
  • 32 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 437.

17One method the Russians appear not to have used was spectroscopy. A recent development in astronomy, spectroscopy had been used by Moscow astronomers B. Ia. Shveitser and F. A. Bredikhin since 1868, while Otto Struve had penned an essay “On the place of astrophysics in astronomy” two years before.31 But the method was not extended to the transit expeditions. As Eduard Eduardovich Lindeman (1842-1897) explained in his popular essay on the transit in Russia, “this method will probably be used by only a few specialists already well-acquainted with this method of observation.”32

18After receiving their training at Pulkovo and instruments from Germany, Russian observers spread across the empire, some under directions from Pulkovo and others independently. Although the number varies with different accounts, some twenty-seven Russian expeditions were organized to observe the transit (others say 24 or 31). Most were decided well in advance by the Pulkovo commission, but reports from the Caucasian and Siberian divisions of the Russian Geographical Society on cloud cover led to a few late changes of stations.

  • 33 Otto’s travels are discussed in Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p. 188 (...)
  • 34 The dispute is discussed at some length in Proctor (1882) Transits of Venus, op. cit. p. 164-190, 2 (...)

19News from the Russian expeditions took time to reach foreign astronomers. Throughout the late 1860s and early 70s, Struve travelled abroad to discuss plans with French, German, and British astronomers.33 He also maintained an intermittent correspondence on the Russian expeditions with Airy. However, communications were not as smooth as Airy may have liked. When Russian preparations got under way, they caused a stir in London, where Airy and the astronomer Richard Proctor quarrelled over the significance of Russian stations for Britain’s transit expeditions.34 The dispute, which may be briefly recounted, highlights the importance of the Russians’ activities in the international context.

  • 35 Edmond Halley (1991) “Doctor Halley’s Dissertation on the Method of Finding the Sun’s Parallax and (...)

20The British dispute hinged on the right method for observing the transit. During a transit, the small black dot of Venus crosses the sun’s disc. The exact timing and length of its path depends on the position of an observer on earth. In 1716, Edmund Halley had written that for two widely separated observers, the differences would be large enough to be measured. With the distance separating the observers taken as a base line, the solar parallax and the distance to the sun could be calculated. Soon after, Joseph Delisle proposed a different method, based on the observation of only one ingress or egress of Venus at stations dispersed on the Earth of known longitude, from which the distance between two transit paths, and hence the parallax, could be determined.35

21The location of observing stations thus differed according to which method was preferred. Airy held Halley’s method as being unsuitable for observing the 1874 transit, and so rejected the idea of setting up stations in the Southern hemisphere. He partly based his choice on an argument about Nerchinsk, the Siberian position which the Russians would need to occupy as a Halleyan station for comparison with any British Halleyan observations in the South. Nerchinsk, Airy was sure, would not be occupied by the Russians, since the length of day there was so short that it was very unlikely Venus could be observed.

  • 36 Struve wrote to Airy on 6 April 1873, “At Nerchinsk... the cold is rather strong, but, according to (...)
  • 37 Sheehan and Westfall (2004) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 235.

22Against this view, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) secretary and popularizer Proctor argued that Halleyan stations set up in Siberia by the Russians and by the British in the south would yield useful results. He was outraged that by 1872 almost no provisions had been made for British Halleyan stations except for one on Kerguelen Island in the Indian Ocean. Shortly after Airy’s pronouncements, British astronomers heard that Struve was indeed planning to set up a Halleyan station in Nerchinsk, whose weather was less grim than Airy imagined.36 Proctor was ecstatic, though it was only in 1873 that the RAS agreed to plan southern stations for Britain. Struve’s use of Nerchinsk, and Proctor’s advocacy were instrumental in this decision, and one commentator has proposed that this probably encouraged other nations to set up Halleyan stations elsewhere.37

23Back in Russia, in the autumn of 1874 observers set out for their final destinations, including Nerchinsk. A table of the sites where observations took place shows the regions which the commission finally decided on (Table 1). These were in the Maritime (Primorye) province, now the Russian Far East, south-eastern Siberia, the Crimea, Central Asia and Persia, Japan and China, with a single station in Egypt.

Table 1 : Russian observations of the Transit of Venus in 1874.

Location

Observer(s)

Institution

Kharabovka*

Pavel Pavlovich Kuhlberg

MTD

Kamen-Rybolov*

Sergei Pavlovich Glasenapp

Pulkovo Observatory

Lt. Bolshov

MTD

Nakhodka Bay*

Lt. Shubin

Russian Navy

Vladivostok*

Lt. Mikhail Liutsanovich Onatsevich

HDMM

Blagoveshchensk

Unknown

Kazan University

Busse, Sakhalin Island

Unknown

Russian Navy

Omsk

Miroshnichenko

unknown

Orenburg

Solimani

unknown

Tschita*

V. N. Vinogradskii

Kazan University Observatory

E. A. Predchetenskii

Kazan University

Khiatka

Vitol’d Tseraksii

Moscow University

Nerchinsk*

L. F. Schwarz

Dorpat University Observatory

Orianda*

Ivan Egorovich Kortazzi

Nikolaev Naval Observatory

Kerch

Unknown

Odessa University

Erivan

August Fedorovich Wagner

Pulkovo Observatory

Nakhichevan

N. A. Tochalov

Warsaw University

Krasnovodsk (Turkmenbashi)

Unknown

Vilnius Observatory

Fort Perovskii, Tashkent

Unknown

St. Petersburg University

Fort Ural’skoe, Tashkent

Unknown

Kharkov University

Tehran*

leronim Ivanovich Stebnitskii

MTD

Ashurade

Unknown

unknown

Possiet*

Karl Bernhard Hasselberg

Pulkovo Observatory

Hermann Struve

Pulkovo Observatory

Hakodate*

Capt. Lt. L. P. Yelagin

HDMM

Yokohama*

Karl Struve

Russian ambassador to Japan

Edo(Tokyo)

Unknown

unknown

Peking*

Hermann Fritsche

Russian Magnetic Observatory

E. Fritsche

Wife of Hermann Fritsche

Luxor, Thebes*

Wilhelm Döllen

(with Auwers and British party)

Moscow Society of Friends of Natural Knowledge/ Pulkovo Observatory

* indicates successful observation of one or more contacts; abbreviations used are: Military-Topographic Depot = MTD, Hydrographic Department of the Marine Ministry = HDMM.

  • 38 On the Great Game, see Peter Hopkirk (1992) The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia(...)
  • 39 Quoted in Taras Hunczak, ed. (1974) Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New (...)
  • 40 Mark Bassin (1999) Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russ (...)
  • 41 Hopkirk (1992) The Great Game, op. cit., p. 301.

24Obviously these were good positions for viewing the transit, but what also bound many of these sites together was their location in territories recently annexed by Russia. They were products of Russia’s on-going imperial expansion which has been termed “the Great Game”. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia vied for power in Central Asia, the British desiring a buffer zone to keep the Russians out of India, and the Russians expanding south and east with an eye set on India.38 Both forces viewed each other with suspicion. As the British ambassador Lord Curzon said, Russia “was as compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun.”39 Under Alexander II, the game shifted eastwards, as the Russians took control of the “Primorye” (or Maritime) province in order to prevent the British from taking control of China following the second Opium War.40 Securing the province, and many other central Asian regions, now left Russia in a position to “descend like an avalanche on Turkey, Persia, and the road to India.”41

  • 42 On the development of Vladivostok, see N. P. Matveev (1990) Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk g. Vladivo (...)

25It is not clear whether Struve and Airy’s correspondence was marked by the tensions of the Great Game, but there was undoubtedly a close connection between Russia’s military activities and its transit expeditions. Grand Duke Konstantin oversaw much of Russia’s expansion and patronized the transit expeditions. He made Vladivostock, for example, the base for the Pacific fleet, as well as an observation site for the transit.42 The same may have been true for other stations set up in the Maritime Province, at Busse on Sakhalin Island, Nakhodka, Blagovechensk, Kharabovsk, and Kamen-Rybolovov.

  • 43 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen. op. cit., p. 56-57; A. Alekseev (2000) “I (...)

26Hydrographers and military topographers repeatedly visited these new Russian possessions during the 1860s and 70s, so that for many of them, the transit was part of a regular series of precision observations. Astronomy, imperial telegraphy, and naval and military topographic work were thoroughly intertwined. Vladivostok, for example, underwent extensive hydrographic surveys by Lt. Lev Petrovich Yelagin in 1874. Another hydrographer, Mikhail Onatsevich, was sent to relieve him, but only after training at Pulkovo with orders to observe the transit and assist Hall’s American expedition at Vladivostok. When Onatsevich arrived, Yelagin moved on to Hakodate, Japan, observing the transit there before continuing hydrographic work.43

  • 44 Otto Struve (1872) “Russian Preparations for the Observation of the Transit of Venus of 1874”, Mont (...)
  • 45 On the Kuhlberg-Schamhorst expedition, see Shibanov (1975) Studies in the History of Russian Cartog (...)
  • 46 Wittram (1891) Zusammensteliung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., p. 73.

27A crucial resource for the consolidation of the Maritime Province was the Siberian and Amur telegraph, stretching from the Ural Mountains to Nikolaevsk.44 Built between 1861 and 1871, this telegraph was of vital importance both to the Russian empire and to the transit expeditions. Enabling swift communications between European Russia and the Far East, the telegraph could also be used to determine the longitude of transit stations, and for this reaon five stations were located along the line, at Omsk, Blagoveshchensk, Tschita, Kharabovsk, and Vladivostok. Between 1874 and 1877, an expedition under the military-topographers K. V. Schamhorst and Pavel Kuhlberg made telegraphic determinations of the longitude of twenty points in Eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province, some of which were then subsequently used as measures for these transit stations, or as points from which to calibrate longitude measurements using clocks.45 Kuhlberg, like Onatsevich and Yelagin, was also ordered to take time out to observe Venus at Kharabovsk.46

  • 47 On which see Richard A. Pierce (1960) Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Be (...)
  • 48 On Stebnitskii’s transit expeditions, see Novokshanova (1960) Ieronim Ivanovich Stebnitskii, op. ci (...)
  • 49 J. Stebnitzky (1876) “Über die geographische Lage und die absolute Höhe der Stadt Teheran”, Astrono (...)

28Transit work and imperial surveying also overlapped in Central Asia and Persia, another stage of confrontation in the Great Game.47 Russian transit stations were positioned in recently acquired territories, at military bases or near the Indo-European telegraph then being constructed by the firm of Siemens and Halske. Tashkent, Krasnovodsk (Turkmenbashi), and Ashuradeh were all recent Russian imperial acquisitions, captured in the 1860s, and the sites of naval and military bases. Again, in the following decades, the military-topographic depot and the Russian Geographical Society sent numerous expeditions to survey and record these areas’ landscapes and natural history, many organized by the chief of the Caucasian division of the military-topographic depot. General Major Ieronim Ivanovich Stebnitzki. In 1874 Stebnitzkii collaborated with Pulkovo to undertake a transit expedition to Tehran, the capital of Persia. Tehran was not in Russian territory but relations were good enough with the ruler Nasir Al-Din Shah to permit Stebnitskii’s presence. Translators and assistants were provided by the Persian government to take Stebnitskii’s instruments on mule trains from the border to the capital.48 Following his transit observations, made from the grounds of the Russian mission in Tehran, Stebnitskii joined a German transit team to conduct determinations of the longitude difference between nearby Ispagan and Berlin, and Tehran and Erivan.49 After their work was completed, Stebnitzkii returned to the Transcaucasus, conducting further topographic surveys on the way.

  • 50 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., p. 77-83.
  • 51 Ibid., p. 11-21.

29Where telegraphic or military stations were unavailable, Russians utilized imperial embassies and palaces for transit observations. The Russian ambassador to Japan was Karl Struve, Otto’s brother and later ambassador to the U.S., who conveniently made his observations from his offices in Yokohama, a busy port for foreign trade, watching the transit with a Russian naval officer after a trip to Pulkovo to train on Wagner s artificial transit.50 Alternatively, Ivan Kortazzi, director of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s observatory at Nikolaev, made observations from the terrace of the Orianda Palace, the Crimean residence of the Grand Duke Konstantin and one of the more opulent sites from which the transit was viewed.51

30Russian observers rarely had to establish the makeshift camps put up by their European counterparts in inhospitable climes. And their observations often formed one of a more or less continuous series being undertaken before and after the transit to supply maps and communications to imperial military forces. Transit observations were made possible by, and helped to strengthen, existing networks of interests in governmental surveillance science, which helps to explain why Russia was able to make so many observations in 1874, more than Germany, France and the USA combined. The transit was more or less business as usual for most Russian observers.

  • 52 Sheehan and Westfall (2004) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 263-265.
  • 53 Sellers (1991) Transit of Venus, op. cit., p. 155-166. On speed-of-light measures, see Richard Stal (...)

31The results of observations from Russia’s transit stations suffered from problems experienced by other observers, failing to give the degree of accuracy to the solar parallax which astronomers had expected.52 For many European and American observers, distortions of telescopic images due to the earth’s atmosphere, the black drop effect, and the imprecision of photography proved intransigent problems. It took a great deal of time to collect and reduce the data, and by the time they appeared, if they ever did, other determinations of solar parallax based on alternative methods were proving more consequential. David Gill’s southern observations of the displacement of Mars against the background of fixed stars yielded a parallax measure with a tiny probable error in 1877. The failure to reduce the observations was probably due to the success of alternative methods for determining the astronomical unit using measures of the speed of light, developed by the Canadian astronomer Simon Newcomb during the early 1880s. By 1900, the asteroid Eros, which passes very near the Earth in its highly elliptical orbit, could be used for much more accurate parallax measures.53

  • 54 Otto Struve to Admiral F. P. Litke, 1 December 1874, repr. in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomiche (...)
  • 55 George Biddell Airy (1874) “Telegrams relating to the Observations of the Transit of Venus, 1874, D (...)

32In Russia, Otto Struve was at first optimistic, as telegrams from his observers began arriving shortly after the transit.54 He told the Academy of Sciences that Pulkovo was ready to reduce and publish the results immediately. The list of successes and failures were telegraphed out to Berlin and London and published by Airy.55 Of 27 stations, 13 made successful observations while 14 had experienced bad weather.

  • 56 Wittram (1891) Zusammenslellung der Contactbeobachlungen. op. cit., p. 38-50.
  • 57 Proctor ( 1882) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 217.

33Successful results at least resolved Airy and Proctor’s dispute over methods. Siberian stations used the Halleyan method, while those in Western Siberia, Central Asia, and Persia followed Delisle. Fortunately for Proctor, the Nerchinsk observations proved a resounding success, observed with a heliometer by the director of Dorpat University, Ludwig F. Schwarz.56 In fact, Nerchinsk was no desolate outpost without sun. Like other Russian stations, it had long been a base for meteorological and topographic observations and Schwarz himself had visited the area on yet another expedition of the Russian Geographical Society in 1855-1858. After the transit, Proctor represented Nerchinsk as a self-evidently ideal observing station, “the success is particularly gratifying, as Nertchinsk was the best of all stations for applying Halley’s method.”57 He went on: “Of course Russia occupied this excellent station” and added the success of the American expedition under Hall at Vladivostok to the Haleyan triumphs.

  • 58 From about 100 plates, Hasselberg said he had succeeded in taking twenty-seven practicable photogra (...)
  • 59 Otto Struve, quoted in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 167, (...)

34But in Russia things went quiet. The Pulkovo astronomer Hasselberg published a technical description of his photoheliograph in 1877, and Stebnitskii published an independent account of his observations a year later, but no other Russian account appeared.58 By late 1889, Otto’s optimism had evaporated. “Unfortunately,” he told the Academy, “owing to the poor weather, our success was very much less than expected. Of thirty-three Russian stations, only at two, and those outside the borders of Russia, was the weather good enough to see the whole transit. Nine others only succeeded in partially viewing the transit, and at the remaining 22, clouds, rain, and snow were the cause of complete failure.”59

  • 60 George Biddell Airy (1875) “On the Method to be used in Reducing the Observations of the Transit of (...)

35Evidently Otto decided not to publish anything. But a year later his successor as director of Pulkovo the Moscow astronomer F. A. Bredikhin requested the military-topographic depot’s chief astronomer Theodor Wittram to publish the results of the 1874 expedition. Wittram’s Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen und Ableitung der geographischen Coordinaten der Beobachtungstationen appeared in 1891. Although Wittram followed international guidelines for presenting the transit results, as the title of Wittram’s book indicates, he focused on precise determinations of the longitude and latitude of the stations. Wittram detailed transit observations for thirteen stations, but gave no determination of the parallax.60 A second volume was planned giving results of telegraphic determinations and heliometric measurements, but this was never published. Similarly an account by Wagner of his techniques for training observers using the artificial transit never appeared. Thus the transit ultimately yielded topographic information in abundance, while its astronomical relevance quickly dissipated. Just as the transit expeditions seem to have emerged out of a larger pool of topographic work, so they sunk back into it within a few years after 1874. The transit of Venus had perhaps turned into “the topographic event of the century.”

  • 61 O. Struve to S. Newcomb, 1 September 1881, quoted in Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Charact (...)

36As for the 1882 transit of Venus, Struve declined to send Russians out to observe what he called a “fruitless trouble”, telling Newcomb: “We are happy to leave this observation to others”, though he did help in Newcomb’s sponsorship of an American expedition to Siberia, in addition to loaning instruments to the astronomer Félix Tisserand for a French expedition.61

3. The Transition

37If in the long term, Russian transit observations, like those of many other countries, proved to be less consequential for astronomy than their proponents had once imagined, they had nevertheless proved crucial in an international context. Assessments of the appropriate methods for viewing the transit and the best global locations for doing so hinged on the Pulkovo commission’s decisions. But the transit also had a more local significance in Russia, which throws light on the place of astronomy in Russian culture in the 1870s. Pulkovo made some efforts to publicize its transit expeditions to the Russian public, and used them to forward a particular image of the sciences of some political significance at the time. A survey of this publicity, and the political context in which it was made, brings out the local meanings the transit enjoyed in Russia during the 1870s.

  • 62 Wilhelm Döllen (1870) O prokhozhdeniiakh Venery cherez disk solntsa (St. Petersburg). The author ha (...)
  • 63 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit.

38Pulkovo began publicizing the forthcoming transit expeditions early on. In 1870, Döllen published a short pamphlet at the order of the new transit commission, giving details on how to view the transit with a telescope.62 However no further publicity followed until November 1874, when Pulkovo’s librarian and secretary-astronomer Lindeman published a popular explanation of the transit and details of forthcoming Russian expeditions in the journal Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe).63

39Lindeman’s article is remarkable for its portrayal of the transit expeditions as “pure science”. He wrote,

  • 64 Ibid., p. 426-7.

On 27 November [Russian calendar] an event will occur in the sky which will add a new and eloquent page [...] to the history of thought [...]. In this history [...] such an event, for the comprehension and use of which preparations are being made by intellectuals (soznatel’niia) across the world [...] without any concern for local advantage, only from the pure esteem for science — in this history, such an appearance constitutes a remarkable event.64

  • 65 Ibid., p. 454.

40Lindeman went on to explain the significance of the transit for the calculation of solar parallax and the earth-sun distance, described the instruments to be used around the globe, and detailed the history of Russian plans for transit expeditions. Only once did Lindeman touch on their military-topographic significance, at the conclusion of his article. If the expeditions should fail, he said, they would at least leave a topographical legacy for the future, providing “the foundation for the most exact study of our Asiatic possessions and for the hydrographic description of the seas lying to the east of them.”65 The idea here was that a successful expedition would be pure, disinterested science and a failed one a contribution to imperial topography. The expeditions of course depended on military-topographic networks to succeed and would have been a contribution to imperial topography regardless of their success, as indeed they were.

  • 66 See the remarks of F. G. W. Struve, reported in Smyth (1862) Three Cities, 2, p. 184-185.
  • 67 On France, see David Aubin, (2004) “Un passage de Vénus en politique”, La Recherche Hors série, 15, (...)

41Nevertheless, the bulk of Lindeman’s article did not emphasize practical utility, but the nature of the expeditions as an example of pure scientific research untainted by local politics or demands. Such an image went against an older tradition at Pulkovo of representing the observatory and its work as both a contribution to science and to the military topography of the State.66 It also contrasted representations of the transit expeditions elsewhere in Europe.67 Yet Lindeman put all of this aside. For the Russian public, the transit was to be an event in the “history of thought”.

42Lindeman’s portrayal of the transit thus deserves an explanation. The article may be seen as part of a larger response by academics in the 1870s to alternative representations of science, and especially the geographical and topographical sciences, being made by Russia’s radical student movement. Lindeman’s article, and the transit expeditions themselves, occurred in the aftermath of one of the key events in early Russian radical protest, the “mad summer” of 1874. Understanding this movement clarifies the politics of representation lying behind Lindeman’s image of purity.

  • 68 On materialism, nihilism, and science, see James Allen Rogers (1960) “Darwinism, Scientism, Nihilis (...)

43In the 1850s and 60s, Russian students and anti-government intelligentsia had discarded the idealist Hegelianism so popular in Russia during the previous two decades in favour of the increasingly nihilistic materialism of figures like Dmitri Pisarev and Nikolai Chemishevskii. Materialism combined with a rising sense that radicalism should be joined with action, following the call of exiied critic Alexander Herzen that Russians should “go to the people”, that is, to the peasantry, to relieve their oppression under the Tsars. Materialism saw the sciences as its foundation, and posed scientific analysis and results as fundamentally relevant to the solution of social ills.68

  • 69 On mutual aid, see Peter Kropotkin (1989) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Black Rose B (...)

44Field sciences of territorial surveillance were of particular import, as exemplified in the geographical career of a representative radical student of this generation, Prince Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin. Kropotkin became famous as an anarchist revolutionary and socialist critic of Darwin’s idea of the struggle for existence. The latter, Kropotkin claimed, amounted to a blatant transferral of capitalist values of laissez-faire competition into the natural order. In opposition, Kropotkin offered the idea of mutual aid, the cooperation of animals as a means to further their survival.69

  • 70 On the Russian Geographical Society and its expeditions, see Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Cul (...)
  • 71 On Kropotkin’s travels, see V. A. Markin (1982) “Deiatel’nost’ P. A. Kropotkina v Russkom Geografic (...)
  • 72 Kropotkin (1989) Mutual Aid, op. cit., p. 9.
  • 73 On Kropotkin’s political geography, see Jim MacLaughlin (1986) “State-Centered Science and the Anar (...)

45Significantly, the idea of mutual aid came to Kropotkin while he was serving as a member of the Russian Geographical Society on an expedition to Siberia during the 1860s.70 He visited Irkutsk, Tschita, and the new Amur and Maritime Provinces, making meteorological measurements which provided records subsequently essential for siting transit stations.71 Expecting to see nature “red in tooth and claw” on his Siberian and Far Eastern surveys, Kropotkin was surprised to find animals and plants cooperating with one another, as he explained in his later book Mutual Aid, “even in the Amur and Usuri regions [in the Maritime Province], where animal life swarms in abundance, facts of real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom to my notice.”72 He cast his topographical work in the same way, claiming that it contributed to an immediately practical geography with human needs at the centre.73 Later Kropotkin recalled his views during an 1871 expedition to Finland sponsored by the Russian Geographical Society:

  • 74 Peter Kropotkin (1889) Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin), p. 237.

I saw what an immense amount of labor the Finnish peasant spends in clearing the land and in breaking up the hard boulder-clay, and I said to myself: “I will write the physical geography of this part of Russia, and tell the peasant the best means of cultivating this soil. Here an American stump-extractor would be invaluable; there certain methods of manuring would be indicated by science.”74

46By advocating useful knowledge, Kropotkin fell into line with many nihilist and radical students who demanded practical, though democratizing, results from science in the 1850s and 60s. At the same time, Kropotkin went further, casting suspicion on such practical geography in favor of a more radical rejection of geographical boundaries and a social version of cooperation, integration, and mutual assistance between land owners and peasantry. Thus he continued his thoughts on assisting Finnish peasants:

  • 75 Ibid., p. 238.

But what is the use of talking to this peasant about American machines, when he has barely enough bread to live upon from one crop to the next [...]. He needs me to live with him, to help him to become the owner or the free occupier of that land. Then he will read books with profit, but not now.75

  • 76 On the populist movement, see Franco Venturi (2001) Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist (...)
  • 77 C. J. G. Turner (1993) A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press), p. 7.

47The urgency sensed by Kropotkin led him to change tack. Following the Finland survey, he rejected an offer to become secretary of the Geographical Society and turned to radical agitation. This was an indication of changes in radicalism immediately preceding the transit. In the early 1870s, students and critics of the government felt increasingly desperate for revolution. They now sought to move beyond the crude scientific pragmatism of the nihilists and engage more directly with the problems of the peasantry. Led by the ideas of Kropotkin, Mikhailovskii, and Chaikovskii, the “populists” sought a simpler way of life, less revolutionary doctrine, and engagement in traditional crafts and physical labor, intensifying opposition to pure knowledge.76 The new approach had significant influence. In March 1874 Leo Tolstoy stopped writing Anna Karenina as a “repulsive and disgusting” bourgeois novel to begin his path to the peasantry.77 Then, in the summer of 1874, the new movement exploded. This movement sought not to harness knowledge of the territory as a means of liberation but to disrupt and resist precisely the spatial and social boundaries which such knowledge normally constructed. During the summer, thousands of students across Russia dressed themselves in peasant clothing and left the cities in order to “go to the people", as Herzen had put it, swarming into the countryside to mingle with the peasants and educate them in rising up against the state. Just prior to the transit expeditions then, radicals were breaking the very boundaries of imperial order which official military topography and geography were supposed to enforce. Mass arrests and brutal repression by the Tsarist secret police and military followed in the fall of 1874.

48Students and university professors formed the kernel of these “populist” protests, making academic sites such as St. Petersburg University extremely suspicious in the government’s eyes. It is not possible here to assess the actual political positions that scientists and astronomers took in response to the protests. However it is clear that at least in public, the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which presided over Pulkovo and the transit expeditions, adopted a position which sought to distance it from any taint of radical activity. The students’ politicization of the sciences, their demands that science be a practical tool of revolution, led official Academic policy to veer towards representing science as a pure, disinterested, and apolitical domain. To maintain good relations with Alexander II’s autocratic regime, the Academy’s secretary K. S. Veselovskii showed in 1865 an explicit concern against the radicals’ arguments for social utility, which continued into the 1870s:

  • 78 Quoted in Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Culture, op. cit., p. 72,

It is unfortunate that the conditions under which we live exercise an unfavorable influence on the Academy. [...] We may find consolation in our dedication to pure science and in our love for Russia. Science is one and indivisible for the entire enlightened world. [...] We reject the idea that some sciences are more useful and others less useful. [...] To safeguard the interests of pure knowledge is the duty of the Academy.78

  • 79 Alexis E. Pogorelskin (1987) “Vestnik Evropy and the Polish Question in the Reign of Alexander II”, (...)

49In late 1874, after the summer rebellions, the pressure to conform to official government agendas was intense, and this may help to explain the manner in which Lindeman represented the Transit expeditions as a pure enterprise. His choice of publishing venue bears this out. Vestnik Evropy, founded by the liberal M. M. Stasiulevich, was the most prominent liberal journal on the market, and generally pro-western and pro-science. Against Alexander II’s attempts to deflate student radicalism by restricting study abroad and making education in the classics compulsory, Vestnik Evropy had recently proposed sending students to Germany for a scientific education and liberal educational reforms along German lines.79 Nevertheless, the journal’s authors were forced to express patriotism and avoid overt political comment in the face of Alexander’s increasingly suspicious censors. Thus most of the journal’s content was literary, and more political pieces were couched in cautious terms.

50Distancing the transit expeditions from practical imperatives Linde-mann instead claimed their very lack of utility warranted the interest they should enjoy among the public:

  • 80 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 427.

The event has a huge significance for science, but it is impossible of course to expect it by itself to interest the public. But because it will reverberate in the intellectual life of mankind, because of its power of attraction for participating in pure scientific interests, it becomes a social event [...] and a subject which has [...] a right to popularity.80

  • 81 Charles Lyell’s gradualism followed an anti-revolutionary position, see James A. Secord (1997) “Int (...)
  • 82 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., both quotes on p. 426.

51Populism here amounted to “pure scientific interests,” not radical geographies. Like others in the field sciences before him, Lindeman used gradualism to cast astronomy as a non-revolutionary science.81 The transit expeditions were indicative of a specific form of history, he argued, rele-vant “not [...] to that history [...] of battles and state revolutions, but to the history of thought.” “Man” said Lindeman, “seeks out a more advantageous level for his existence; where, by microscopical increases over his father’s experience, he prepares the way for discoveries.” 82Science developed best through gradual change guided by paternalistic respect. Thus the transit expeditions were made to fit the reactionary ideals of the Tsarist regime, and, combined with the image of pure science, the Academy’s attempts to distance itself from student radicals.

4. Conclusion

52There is still much to do to fully grasp the variety of meanings and consequences given to the Russian transit of Venus expeditions of 1874. But already it is evident that they were by no means inconsequential in the broader international projects of that year, and took on their own peculiar significance in Russia. The transit led to a major collaborative project between Pulkovo observatory, the universities, and the military, which dispatched a very large number of expeditions, under varying levels of central control. These expeditions were integrated into broader programs of imperial surveillance and topography, which they both depended on and helped stimulate. They fitted a long tradition of autocratically patronized practical astronomy in Russia and continued a close relationship between the imperial family and the astronomers of Pulkovo. Grand Duke Konstantin’s position at the head of the navy and the newly-acquired territory of the Maritime Province provided vital resources for transit expeditions and also made them distinctive from European expeditions as domestic projects utilizing a broad base of pre-existing military support. However, while figures such as Otto Struve and the Grand Duke encouraged the use of astronomy in practical empire-building, public representations of the transit expeditions downplayed this side of the affair. The hostile political climate in which the transit occurred was encouraging official institutions like the Academy of Sciences to present science as pure, disinterested, and patriotic, the epitome of a non-revolutionary and apolitical activity, far distant from radical students’ ideas of science as a practical and revolutionary pursuit. In the relatively little publicity produced around the transit, astronomers followed the Academy’s lead, casting it as pure, apolitical science.

53Despite this, the long-term significance of the expeditions was in building the topographic map of Russia’s empire, as the desire to turn the results of the expeditions into a meaningful measure of the sun’s distance dwindled, leaving little trace today of Russian participation in the “astronomical event of the century”.

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Notes

1 On the Americans in Vladivostok, see Steven J. Dick (2002) Sky and Ocean Joined: The U. S. Naval Observatory 1830-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 238-263; and Steven J. Dick, Wayne Orchiston, and Tom Love (1998) “Simon Newcomb, William Harkness, and the Nineteenth-Century Transit of Venus Expeditions”, Journal for the History of Astronomy 29, p. 232-33.

2 The project of cultural history of astronomy is set out in the introduction to David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, and Otto Sibum, eds. (forthcoming) The Heavens on Earth: Observatory Techniques in the Nineteenth Century (Durham: Duke Univ. Press). See also David Aubin (2003) “Orchestrating Observatory, Laboratory, and Field: Jules Janssen, the Spectroscope, and Travel”, Nuncius, 17, p. 143-162; David Aubin (2003) “The Fading Star of the Paris Observatory in the Nineteenth Century: Astronomers’ Urban Culture of Circulation and Observation”, Osiris, 18, p. 79-100; Charlotte Bigg (2000) “Photography and the labor history of astronomy: the Carte du Ciel” in Acta Historia Astronomiae, 9, p. 90-106; Theresa Levitt (2003) “Biot’s Paper and Arago’s Plates: Photographic Practice and the Transparency of Representation”, Isis, 94, p. 456-476; Jimena Canales (2002) “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ and Its Alternatives in Late Nineteenth-Century Science”, Isis, 93, p. 585-613.

3 F. G. W. Struve, reported speech in Charles Piazzi Smyth (1862) Three Cities in Russia, 2 vols. (London), 2, p. 179.

4 N. I. Nevskaia (1973) J. N. Delisle (1688-1768)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 26, p. 289-313. On astronomy in eighteenth-century Russia, see N. I. Nevskaia (1984) Peterburgskaia astronomicheskaia shkola XVIII v., (Leningrad: Nauka); V. L. Chenekal (1951) Ocherki po istorii Russkoi astronomii (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk SSSR); and A. N. Drashusov (1843) “Astronomicheskie zaniatiia Petra Velikogo”, Moskvitianin, 11, p. 142-143. Delisle’s method was introduced in Joseph-Nicolas de l’Isle (1761) Avertissement au sujet des observations qu'il conviendra de faire le 6 juin 1761 : Vénus passant sur le soleil (Paris).

5 On Russian expeditions in the 1760s, see Harry Woolf (1959) The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press); George E. Munro (1983) “Politics, Sexuality and Servility: the Debate between Catherine II and the Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche”, in Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. G. Cross (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners), p. 124-133; and Marcus C. Levin (1998) “An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great’s Debate with Chappe d’Auteroche over Russian Culture”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, p. 49-63.

6 On the history of Pulkovo, see Simon Werrett (forthcoming) “The Lord of Pulkovo: Observatories in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I”, in D. Aubin et al (forthcoming) Heavens on Earth, op. cit.; Mari E. Williams (1989) "Astronomical Observatories as Practical Space: The Case of Pulkowa”, in The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilization, ed. Frank A. J. L. James (London: MacMillan), p. 118-136; and Otto Struve (1865) Obzor deiatel’nosti Nikolaevskoi glavnoi observatorii v prodolzhenie pervykh 25 let ee sushchestvovaniia (St. Petersburg). On Russia’s surveying institutions, see Fyodor A. Shibanov (1975) Studies in the History of Russian Cartography, part 2, Cartographica monograph no. 15 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press), p. 135-167; Z. K. Sokolovskaia (1967) Kartograficheskie i geodezicheskie raboty v Rossii v XIX-nachale XX v. (Moscow: Nauka); and Alexei Postnikov (1996) Russia in maps: a history of the geographical study and cartography of the country (Moscow: Nash Dom-Âge de l’Homme).

7 On Struve’s astronomical work, see Alan H. Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters: The Lives of Wilhelm and Otto Struve (Dordrecht: D. Reidel); Z. K. Novokshanova (1964) Vasilii Iakovlevich Struve (Moscow: Nauka); Otto Struve (1895) Zur Erinnerung an der Vater den Geschwistern dargebracht von Otto Struve (Karlsruhe: G. Braunschen Hofbuchdruckerie).

8 Benjamin A. Gould (1849) “The Observatory at Pulkowa”, North American Review, 144, p. 143-162, on p. 143.

9 Anon. (1850) “Royal Observatory at Greenwich”, Littell's Living Age, 316, p. 433-457, on p. 440.

10 Airy quoted in Richard A. Proctor (1882) Transits of Venus: A Popular Account of Coming and Past Transits (London: Longmans & Green), p. 167.

11 On the setting up of provincial observatories see B. A. Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki islorii astronomii v Rossii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo tekhniko-teoreticheskoi literatury), p. 142-234.

12 Otto told Airy that Russia would “do its duty” in the approaching transit. See O. Struve to G. Airy, 10 November 1868, quoted in Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p.186.

13 Communication of Otto Struve to the Physico-Mathematical Section of the Academy of Sciences, 21 October 1869, quoted in V. K. Abalakin, ed. (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia v Pulkove 1839-1917gg. (St. Petersburg: Nauka), p, 139-140, on p. 140.

14 The members of the commission are reported in Eduard Eduardovich Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery pred’ Solntsem”, Vestnik Evropy, 6, p. 426-454, on p. 445; on Savich, see G. P. Loginova (1967) Aleksei Nikolaevich Savich (Moscow: Nauka); on Döllen, see Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., passim; on Wagner, see Anon. (1991) “Vagner, Avgust Fedorovich”, Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar ‘Vavilov-Veselovskii’ (New York: Norman Ross Publishing), p. 3-4; on Zelenoi, see ibid. vol. VII (New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1962), p. 342-3.

15 On Konstantin’s patronage, see Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p. 101-5, 156-7, 186; Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 451. On Konstantin, see Jacob W. Kipp (1976-2000) “Konstantin Nikolaevich (1827-1892)”, in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski, 60 vols (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press), 1976-2000, vol. 17, p. 158-163; W. E. Mosse (1954) “Russia and the Levant, 1856-1862: Grand Duke Constantine Nicolaevich and the Russian Steam Navigation Company”, Journal of Modern History, 26, p. 39-48; Aurele J. Voillette (1974) “The Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich and the Reform of Naval Administration, 1855-1870”, The Slavonic and East European Review, 52, p. 584-601.

16 A. I. Alekseev (1996) Fedor Petrovich Litke, trans. Serge Le Comte (Fairbanks: Univ. of Alaska Press), 1996, p. 149-80.

17 Smyth (1862) Three Cities, op. cit., 2, p. 345-351; H. A. Brück and M. T. Brück (1988) The Peripatetic Astronomer: The Life of Charles Piazzi Smyth (Bristol: Adam Hilger), p. 73-74.

18 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 441.

19 Alexander’s reforms are explored in W. Bruce Lincoln (1990) The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press); and Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds. (1994) Russia's Great Reforms. 1855-1881 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press). Their significance for the sciences is discussed in Alexander Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Culture: 1861-1917 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press), p. 3-65.

20 Letter of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to Education Minister A. S. Nosov, 21 December 1856, repr. in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 105-6.

21 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 446 details some of these expeditions. On Döllen’s expedition, see Theodor Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen und Ableitung der geographischen Coordinaten der Beobachtungstationen (St. Petersburg), p. 6.

22 On the problems of disciplining imperial observers, see David N. Livingstone (2003) Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 147-153; and John Law (1986) “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India”, in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul), p. 234-263.

23 E.g. the military topographer Ieronim Stebnitskii was in Pulkovo from 28 March to 9 June 1874. Z. K. Novokshanova (1960) Ieronim Ivanovich Stebnitskii: voennyi geodezist, geograf uchenyi (Geodeizdat), p. 48.

24 One Pulkovo report noted, “This instrument was sent last summer [1873] to the conference of scientists in Leipzig, and having been in the conference, members of the German preparatory commission immediately ordered a few such instruments for themselves, to train their observers and correct their instruments.” Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit,, p. 448-449, on p. 449. This article provides a description of Wagner’s artificial transit. See also Otto Struve (1873) “List of Stations selected for the Observation of the Transit of Venus by Russian Astronomers”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 33, p. 415-417, on p. 417. For more on British transit machines, see Jessica Ratcliff’s article in this special issue of the Cahiers François Viète.

25 The instruments used for thirteen of the Russian expeditions are detailed in Wittram (1891 ) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., passim.

26 See “Heliometer,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, 29 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 13, p. 226. See also M. T. Brück (2004) “Lord Lindsay’s expedition to Mauritius in 1874”, in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy ed. D.W. Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, “IAU Symposia and Colloquium” 196), p. 138-145.

27 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., on p. 27, 39, and 62.

28 On photography at Pulkovo, see Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki, op. cit., p. 263; on Smyslov, F. A. Shibanov (1966) “Iz istorii prakticheskoi astronomii, geodezii i kartografii v Rossii”, Istoriko-astronomicheskie issledovaniia, 9, p. 235-243 esp. p. 242; see also Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie pianety Venery”, art. cit., p. 435-6.

29 Holly Rotherme! (1993) “Images of the Sun: Warren de la Rue, George Biddell airy and Celestial Photography”, British Journal for the History of Science, 26, p. 137-169; and John Lankford (1987) “Photography and the 19th-Century Transits of Venus”, Technology and Culture, 28, p. 648-657.

30 Otto Struve (1872) “Russian Preparations for the Observation of the Transit of Venus of 1874”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1872, 32, p. 219-220; K. B. Hasselberg (1877) Bearbeitung der photographischen Aufnahmen im Hafen Possiet (St. Petersburg); Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki, op. cit., p. 263 claims Hasselberg’s photographs were used by the American David Peck Todd to calculate the solar parallax as 8.883”, but no mention of them may be found in Todd’s 1881 paper on determination from the American photographs. See David Peck Todd (1881) “On the Solar Parallax as Derived from the American Photographs of the Transit of Venus, 1874, December 8-9”, Copernicus: An International Journal of Astronomy, 1, p. 167-175. On Khiatka, see Otto Struve to Admiral F. P. Litke, 1 December 1874, repr. in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 166.

31 On early Russian astrophysics, Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov (1956) Ocherki, op. cit., p. 307-309.

32 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 437.

33 Otto’s travels are discussed in Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p. 188-9.

34 The dispute is discussed at some length in Proctor (1882) Transits of Venus, op. cit. p. 164-190, 217-218. See also William Sheehan and John Westfall (2004) The Transits of Venus (New York: Prometheus Books), p. 225-235.

35 Edmond Halley (1991) “Doctor Halley’s Dissertation on the Method of Finding the Sun’s Parallax and Distance from the Earth, by the Transit of Venus over the Sun’s Disc, June the 6th, 1761”, trans. James Ferguson, and repr. in David Sellers (1991) The Transit of Venus: The Quest to Find the True Distance of the Sun (Leeds: Maga Velda Press), p. 201-217; and Delisle (1761) Avertissement, op. cit.

36 Struve wrote to Airy on 6 April 1873, “At Nerchinsk... the cold is rather strong, but, according to Professor Schwarz [director of Dorpat University Observatory], who has spent ten years in those parts, that cold is commonly accompanied with a complete calm and dry air, and thereby it is not unpleasant for astronomical observations. With this conviction, Prof. Schwarz has selected for himself the station of greatest cold, Nertchinsk.” Otto Struve (1873) “List of Stations”, art. cit., p. 417.

37 Sheehan and Westfall (2004) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 235.

38 On the Great Game, see Peter Hopkirk (1992) The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Tokyo: Kodansha International), 1992; Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac (1999) Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint); and Edward Ingram (1982) “Approaches to the Great Game in Asia”, Middle Eastern Studies, 18, p. 449-457.

39 Quoted in Taras Hunczak, ed. (1974) Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press), 1974, p. 267.

40 Mark Bassin (1999) Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press).

41 Hopkirk (1992) The Great Game, op. cit., p. 301.

42 On the development of Vladivostok, see N. P. Matveev (1990) Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk g. Vladivostok (Vladivostok: Izd-vo USSURI).

43 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen. op. cit., p. 56-57; A. Alekseev (2000) “Iakoria pomalu travit!” Tak nachinalsia Vladivostok (Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochnoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo), p. 223-4; A. A. Khisamutdinov (1992) Vladivostok: etiudy k istorii starogo goroda (Vladivostok: Izd-vo Dalnevostochnogo universiteta), p. 154; M. L. Onatsevich (1875) “Nabliudeniia vo Vladivostoke nad’ prokhozhdeniiem’ Venery cherez’ disk’ solntsa”, Morskoi Sbornik, 5, pages unknown.

44 Otto Struve (1872) “Russian Preparations for the Observation of the Transit of Venus of 1874”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 32, p. 219-220, on p. 219; M. S. Vysokov (1996) “Russkii voenno-morskoi flot i sozdanie telegrafnoi sviazi na Dal’nem Vostoke”, in Rossiiskii flot na Tikhom okeane: istoriia i sovremennost': Materialy Tikhookean. Konf. Posviashch. 300-Ietiiu Ros. Flota (17-20 Okt. 1996 g.) Vyp. 1. Istoriia Tikookeanskogo flota (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevost. Universiteta), p. 51-56; and Jorma Ahvenainen (1981) The Far Eastern Telegraphs: the history of telegraphic communications between the Far East, Europe, and America before the First World War (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia).

45 On the Kuhlberg-Schamhorst expedition, see Shibanov (1975) Studies in the History of Russian Cartography, op. cit., 2, p. 161-2;

46 Wittram (1891) Zusammensteliung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., p. 73.

47 On which see Richard A. Pierce (1960) Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), 1960; Dietrich Geyer (1987) Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914, trans. Bruce Little (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press).

48 On Stebnitskii’s transit expeditions, see Novokshanova (1960) Ieronim Ivanovich Stebnitskii, op. cit., p. 47-52; Stebnitskii published an account of his expedition (1878) Otchet nachal'nika voenno-topograficheskago otdela kavkazskago okruga general'hago shtaba general-maiora Stebnitskago ob ekspeditsii dlia nabliudeniia prokhozhdeniia Venery pered diskom Solntsa 26 Noiabria (8 Dekabria) 1874 goda v g. Tegerane (St. Petersburg).

49 J. Stebnitzky (1876) “Über die geographische Lage und die absolute Höhe der Stadt Teheran”, Astronomische Nachrichten, 89, p. 1-8.

50 Wittram (1891) Zusammenstellung der Contactbeobachtungen, op. cit., p. 77-83.

51 Ibid., p. 11-21.

52 Sheehan and Westfall (2004) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 263-265.

53 Sellers (1991) Transit of Venus, op. cit., p. 155-166. On speed-of-light measures, see Richard Staley’s and Stéphane Le Gars’s articles in this issue.

54 Otto Struve to Admiral F. P. Litke, 1 December 1874, repr. in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 166-7.

55 George Biddell Airy (1874) “Telegrams relating to the Observations of the Transit of Venus, 1874, December 9, received by the Astronomer Royal”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 35, p. 85-89, on p. 87.

56 Wittram (1891) Zusammenslellung der Contactbeobachlungen. op. cit., p. 38-50.

57 Proctor ( 1882) Transits of Venus, op. cit., p. 217.

58 From about 100 plates, Hasselberg said he had succeeded in taking twenty-seven practicable photographs, of which twenty-two could be used for measuring the necessary angles and distances. In his treatise, Hasselberg (1877) Bearbeitung, op. cit., he gave an in-depth treatment of the apparatus used, the sources of error, and the determinations made from the photographs.

59 Otto Struve, quoted in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 167, n.4.

60 George Biddell Airy (1875) “On the Method to be used in Reducing the Observations of the Transit of Venus, 1874, December 8”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 35, p. 277-288, on p. 287-8.

61 O. Struve to S. Newcomb, 1 September 1881, quoted in Batten (1988) Resolute and Undertaking Characters, op. cit., p. 189; O. Struve to education minister A. P. Nikolai, 22 February 1882, repr. in Abalakin (1994) Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, op. cit., p. 183-4.

62 Wilhelm Döllen (1870) O prokhozhdeniiakh Venery cherez disk solntsa (St. Petersburg). The author has not been able to see this publication.

63 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit.

64 Ibid., p. 426-7.

65 Ibid., p. 454.

66 See the remarks of F. G. W. Struve, reported in Smyth (1862) Three Cities, 2, p. 184-185.

67 On France, see David Aubin, (2004) “Un passage de Vénus en politique”, La Recherche Hors série, 15, p. 85-89.

68 On materialism, nihilism, and science, see James Allen Rogers (1960) “Darwinism, Scientism, Nihilism”, Russian Review, 19, p. 10-23; Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Culture, op. cit., p. 14-21; on nihilist philosophy, Evgenii Lampert (1965) Sons Against Fathers; Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press); A. Walicki (1979) A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, Ca : Stanford University Press), p. 183-221.

69 On mutual aid, see Peter Kropotkin (1989) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Black Rose Books); Ruth Kinna (1995) “Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid in historical context”, International Review of Social History, 40, p. 259-283; and James Allen Rogers (1963), ‘The Russian Populists’ Response to Darwin”, Slavic Review, 22, p. 456-468.

70 On the Russian Geographical Society and its expeditions, see Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Culture, op. cit., p. 223-227; Nathaniel Knight (1998) “Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, 1845-1855”, in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, eds. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press), p. 108-141; and David J. M. Hooson (1968) “The Development of Geography in Pre-Soviet Russia”, Annals of the American Association of American Geographers, 58, p. 250-272.

71 On Kropotkin’s travels, see V. A. Markin (1982) “Deiatel’nost’ P. A. Kropotkina v Russkom Geograficheskom Obshestve”, Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki, 2, p. 89-96; Martin A. Miller (1976) Kropotkin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 53-76; V. A. Markin (1985) Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, 1842-1921 (Moscow: Nauka), p. 55-123; and Sergei Anisimov (1943) Puteshestviia P. A. Kropotkina (Moscow, Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR).

72 Kropotkin (1989) Mutual Aid, op. cit., p. 9.

73 On Kropotkin’s political geography, see Jim MacLaughlin (1986) “State-Centered Science and the Anarchist Critique: Ideology in Political Geography”, Antipode, 18, p. 11-38, esp. p. 25-31.

74 Peter Kropotkin (1889) Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin), p. 237.

75 Ibid., p. 238.

76 On the populist movement, see Franco Venturi (2001) Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in 19th Century Russia (London: Phoenix Press), p. 469-506; Martin A. Miller (1970) “Ideological Conflicts in Russian Populism: The Revolutionary Manifestoes of the Chaikovsky Circle, 1869-1874”, Slavic Review, 29, p. 1-21; Pamela Sears McKinsey (1979) “From City Workers to Peasantry: The Beginning of the Russian Movement ‘To the People’”, Slavic Review, 38, p. 629-649; Daniel Field (1987) “Peasants and Propagandists in the Russian Movement to the People of 1874”, Journal of Modern History, 59, p. 415-438; and Sh. M. Levin (1958) Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 60-70-e gody XIX veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsialno-ekon. literatury).

77 C. J. G. Turner (1993) A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press), p. 7.

78 Quoted in Vucinich (1970) Science in Russian Culture, op. cit., p. 72,

79 Alexis E. Pogorelskin (1987) “Vestnik Evropy and the Polish Question in the Reign of Alexander II”, Slavic Review, 46, p. 87-105, esp. p. 93-94.

80 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., p. 427.

81 Charles Lyell’s gradualism followed an anti-revolutionary position, see James A. Secord (1997) “Introduction”, to Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (orig. London, 1830-33; London: Penguin), p. ix-xliii.

82 Lindeman (1874) “Prokhozhdenie planety Venery”, art. cit., both quotes on p. 426.

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