Is it true that the term “eternal permafrost” was invented by the theoretician of anarchism, Prince Peter Kropotkin?

In many articles there is a statement that the author of the phrase “Eternal Merzlot” is an anarchist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin. We decided to check if this is really so.

An indication of the authorship of Kropotkin can be found in most brief biographies the theoretician of anarchism. This is stated in the Russian version of "Wikipedia" - as in an article about Kropotkina, and in the article about Eternal permafrostTrue, in both cases without indicating the source. There is a mention of this and in the biography of Kropotkin on the site Polit.ru, and c Livejournal, and in the publication of the publication "Arguments and facts", And on the site"Bitter". The wording, however, It often happens More accurate: not "invented", but "introduced into scientific use."

In 1874, Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, at that time the secretary of the physical geography department of the Russian Geographical Society, presented a report on his 1871 trip to Sweden and Finland. The result of his expedition was sensational work "Studies about the ice age", In which Kropotkin scattered the theory of his predecessors and presented convincing evidence of the existence of the ice age. His work was released only in 1876 for reasons that were not related to physical geography. A few days after the performance, Kropotkin was arrested for political activities, namely, for belonging to the Narodnic mug of Tchaikovites. As later I remembered Kropotkin, already during the report, he was ready to arrest: “I was offered to take the place of the chairman of the department of physical geography, while I myself asked myself the question:“ Will I spend this very night already in the third compartment? ”

The preface to the collection of 1876 states that "the author does not have the opportunity to finally prepare the last chapters of his composition for printing." These two years Kropotkin spent in prison, and in 1876 he fled abroad, from where he returned to Russia only after the 1917 revolution.

His “Studies on the Ice Age” became one of the first scientific works in this field and finally strengthened the theory of glaciation. Kropotkin uses the terms "eternal -freezing soils" and "eternal permafrost." Given the effect made by his work, one can understand why the authorship of the phrase remained in Russian literature behind Kropotkin.

But the phrase itself, as well as detailed studies of eternal permafrost, appeared earlier. In 1843–1844, Russian scientist and traveler Alexander Middendorf committed a scientific expedition to Siberia. The result of this trip was the work “Journey to the North and East of Siberia”, in which Middendorf examined in detail the climatic features of the region and the structure of the soil. The book came first on German (1851), and then In Russian (1862).

In this work, Middendorf studies in detail the eternal permafrost and describes it as "Eternally frozen Siberian soil", Clarifying that the experiments Show In some places permafrost, hundreds of meters deep. Throughout the study, the phrase “Eternally frozen soil” is found many times. Middendorf’s practical work is mentioned as an important source with Kropotkin. And in modern science it counts The first difficulty of permafrost.

The very phrase “permafrost” is also found in a special literature earlier than Kropotkin presented his study. It can be found in dissertation For the professor’s rank at the Mining Institute, the author is the mountain engineer Julius Eichhikhald. In this scientific work, entitled “On the Development of Gold -Solder Sredpers, especially the Nerchinsky Mountain District”, published in St. Petersburg in 1868, there is The next phrase: “From the eternal permafrost of the soil, the layers of sediment are dense, in winter with difficulty and a large waste of tool, the extracted mass.”

Thus, Prince Kropotkin was not the first to introduce into scientific use the phrase “permafrost”, it existed before him. The works of Middendorf, who wrote about “ever freezed soil”, were well known to contemporaries, after publishing work on the climate of Siberia, he became an academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and then its indispensable secretary. Therefore, Kropotkin, despite his undoubted scientific merits, cannot be considered the author of this term.

Photo on the cover: P. A. Kropotkin at work, 1891. Kropotkin Museum

Not true

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