The 1928 Soviet–German Alai–Pamir expedition

The idea for the German–Soviet Alai–Pamir expedition was first proposed in the autumn of 1925 by German meteorologist Heinrich von Ficker, who was in Moscow to participate in the bicentennial celebrations of the Russian (then Soviet) Academy of Sciences.Footnote ¹⁸ That the initiative originated in German scientific circles reflected Germany’s long-standing interest in mountain research and, more specifically, in the Pamirs, an interest Ficker shared.Footnote ¹⁹ As a former director of the Prussian Meteorological Institute and a professor of meteorology, Ficker was deeply engaged in the study of orographic influences on climate at both regional and global scales.Footnote ²⁰ His mountaineering background, shaped by years spent in the Alps, further informed his scientific perspective, making the Pamirs a particularly compelling site of inquiry. Characterized by their extreme elevations, glacial systems and distinctive climatic conditions, the Pamirs especially represented, in Ficker’s view, an ‘ideal case’ for studying climate and weather, for they showed ‘the influence of elevation in its purest form’.Footnote ²¹ His participation in Willi Rickmer Rickmers’s 1913 expedition to the north-western Pamir had already provided him with valuable scientific experience. The expedition explored the Peter the Great Range and partially mapped the mountains and glaciers along the southern slopes of the Garmo and Khingob valleys, including passes toward the Vanch and Muksu rivers. From a point high on the Garmo glacier, Rickmers climbed Mirza-tash, gaining a sweeping view of the central Sel Tau – what he called the ‘dreamland of the future’, to which he and Ficker hoped to return.Footnote ²² But the First World War and the Russian Revolution interrupted these dreams. Further travels in this unsettled region would have to wait on events and the willingness of the Soviet Union to be involved. Happily, Ficker’s proposal was enthusiastically received by his Soviet hosts. The plan to resume work begun in 1913 now seemed significantly more feasible, as the Soviets were eager to pursue their own interests in exploring the Pamir region as part of the broader process of Sovietization in Central Asia and the systematic exploration of its natural resources.Footnote ²³ For these projects to be successful, the Soviets needed to fill in the section of the map they referred to as ‘the unexplored territory’ (neissledovannaya last′), a term used interchangeably with ‘white spots’ (belye piatna).

These terms, while seemingly descriptive, carry significant epistemological weight, warranting closer examination.Footnote ²⁴ In this instance, the invocation of absences did not simply register a lack of understanding; it generated an imperative, illustrating what James C. Scott has described as the state’s drive toward legibility – the process by which distant and complex landscapes are rendered into orderly forms that can be managed from the centre. This process, of course, begins by marking the Pamirs as a place of profound illegibility: a region whose remoteness, topographical complexity, and lack of administrative infrastructure made it resistant to the ordering impulses of the modern state. Yet, to understand the Pamir ‘knot’, as the expedition participants described the area, was essential. This place, where several mountain ranges came together, forming a confusing entanglement of peaks, passes, valleys and glaciers, offered a ‘way to understanding the entire structure of Asia’.Footnote ²⁵ That this area also sat at or near the meeting point of three imperial frontiers – the Soviet, the British, and the Chinese – only intensified the stakes of rendering it knowable, as knowledge acquisition was inseparable from questions of sovereignty, security and legitimacy.Footnote ²⁶ In that respect, the ‘white spots’ – these zones of epistemic opacity – indicated areas where the limits of cartographic representation, scientific knowledge and political authority overlapped. To name a space a ‘white spot’ was thus to demand its transformation into something observable, measurable and administratively intelligible.

To ‘know’ the Pamirs, in this framing, was not merely to observe or classify them scientifically; it was to reimagine them as part of the Soviet symbolic and material order. As one of the expedition’s participants, Otto Schmidt, stated in his report in the aftermath of the expedition, ‘we were tasked with opening up this unexplored territory’.Footnote ²⁷ Schmidt’s use of the Russian verb vskryt′ (‘open up’, ‘uncover’) here conveyed more than the mere imposition of order; it suggested an act of revelation, of releasing something hidden and full of promise. It implied that the land, once opened, would yield knowledge or abundance – a latent richness waiting to be disclosed and harnessed. In this sense, the Soviet embrace of Ficker’s proposal was not merely pragmatic but aligned with broader projects of knowledge production and territorial integration – an assertion of knowability that reinforced the state’s political claims over these remote highlands.

The timing for such a joint expedition was ideal. German scientists were in a period of prolonged isolation, barred from participating in international congresses by the Treaty of Versailles. In this climate, German scientists and governmental representatives sought to expand historical cultural connections with their Russian counterparts, fostering a steady exchange of ideas, books and personnel between the two pariah nations.Footnote ²⁸ The German delegation was, in fact, the largest and the most representative of those at the bicentennial celebration of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1925.Footnote ²⁹ Furthermore, scientific contacts established at the celebration led to further exchanges, including Russian science weeks in Germany in 1927 and 1928 and Soviet–German medical collaborations from 1922 to 1932.Footnote ³⁰ At the same time, the Soviet Union had not yet descended into the internal paranoia and repression that would later hinder international collaboration. And although some Soviet commentators expressed their unease about inviting German participants to an expedition that promised geographical discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, the Soviet lack of experience in conducting research at high altitude and the shortage of specialized equipment made the rapprochement with German science necessary.Footnote ³¹ Foreign specialists were thus to play a vital role in making the Pamirs legible: by providing technical expertise, they would ultimately enable the transformation of unknown terrain into administratively and ideologically manageable Soviet space.

The Soviet Union’s reliance on foreign specialists was especially acute in the emerging field of glaciology. While glaciology had begun to emerge as a distinct scientific discipline in Western Europe by the late nineteenth century, in Russia it remained less formally developed and was often pursued in conjunction with other fields. As T. Saburova notes in her contribution to this issue, figures like V. Sapozhnikov – originally trained as a botanist – took on glaciological research as part of their broader scientific exploration of mountainous regions, gradually contributing to the formation of glaciology as a hybrid, field-based discipline. Furthermore, nineteenth-century Russian explorers of Central Asian glaciers, such as A. Fedchenko, I. Mushketov and V. Oshanin, had limited experience with mountaineering or sustained scientific work at high altitudes – something noted by A. von Meck, one of Russia’s first alpinists and the founder of the Russian Alpine Society. Meck insisted on the need to develop the mountaineering skills essential to the exploration of the border territories that remained out of reach to Russian scientists.Footnote ³² The celebrated Russian explorer of Central Asia I. Mushketov echoed these concerns in 1895, noting that glaciological research in Russia remained in a preliminary phase of ‘discovery rather than systematic observation’, the process hindered by the remoteness and inaccessibility of glacier sites, the scarcity of local knowledge, and the high costs of expeditions. Mushketov observed that Russian explorers, in fact, were more familiar with the glaciers of Switzerland than with those of Turkestan, the Caucasus or Siberia, underscoring Russia’s peripheral status in the global geography of ice science and the episodic nature of glacial studies.Footnote ³³

In contrast, the European Alps were located within easy travelling distance of the European scientists’ home institutions and often near huts maintained by the German and Austrian Alpine Club, one of the leading institutional sponsors of glaciological research.Footnote ³⁴ Most members of the German team in the 1928 expedition were affiliated with the Alpine Club, including their leading glacial cartographer, Richard Finsterwalder, who emerged from what can be loosely described as the Bavarian school of glaciology led by his father Sebastian Finsterwalder, a professor of analytical geometry and calculus at the Munich Technical University. Sebastian Finsterwalder dedicated years to the study of the mountain glaciers of the eastern Alps, where, by adapting recently developed photogrammetric technology to glacial surveying, he produced the first modern topographic map of any glacier in its entirety, from the high accumulation zone all the way down to the ablation zone, tongue and terminal moraine. Published in 1895, this landmark map of the Vernagtferner in the Ötzal Alps captured the glacier as a complete, contained, precisely defined and measurable object, one available for all-important longitudinal studies. His son Richard was now to apply his father’s research methods and photogrammetric techniques to the glaciers of the Pamirs. Other members of the German team had different levels of scientific preparedness, but all were accomplished mountaineers and highly adept at navigating the most challenging terrain.

Preparations began with a preliminary meeting in Berlin in June 1926, where Ficker was charged with drafting the expedition’s general plan.Footnote ³⁵ Over the next two years, discussions refined the expedition’s goals, culminating in a May 1928 visit by the German delegation to Moscow to finalize details, followed by close coordination through ongoing correspondence.Footnote ³⁶ The Soviet scientific contingent was charged with mineralogical, geodetic and astronomical research. Gorbunov, a biologist and chemist, but also an active participant in the Bolshevik Revolution and at one point a personal secretary to Lenin, was appointed leader. Those under him included, among others, geologist Scherbakov, deputy head of the expedition; geographer N. Korzhenevskii, a veteran explorer; astronomer Ia. Belyaev; surveyor and geodesist K. Isakov; military topographer I. Dorofeev; zoologists A. Reinhardt and G. Sokolov; and meteorologist R. Zimmerman. The German team, led by Rickmers, who shared overall leadership responsibilities with Gorbunov, was assigned to glaciology, geology, cartography, surveying and linguistics. Notable members were R. Finsterwalder, the deputy leader, glaciologist and photogrammetrist; his assistant, H. Biersack; linguist W. Lentz; geologist L. Nöth; zoologist W. Reinig; and medical doctor F. Kohlhaupt. Accompanying the German scientific team was a group of mountaineers who hoped to conquer some of the region’s mighty peaks but were also expected to act as scientific assistants. These included E. Schneider, K. Wien (a physics student who became a part of Finsterwalder and Biersack’s photogrammetric team), E. Allwein, and climbing leader Ph. Borchers. The Soviet side of the expedition also featured a small contingent of climbers who caught up with the caravan a few weeks later. This group included N. Krylenko (at that time a deputy people’s commissar of justice of the RSFSR and senior assistant prosecutor of the RSFSR); his wife, E. Rozmirovich, a member of the Collegium of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin); O. Schmidt, a mathematician, the editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and a future polar explorer, at the time the deputy people’s commissar of statistics; and E. Rossels, a medical doctor.

The German scientific gaze

Scheduled to depart in June 1928, the expedition was a rare example of international cooperation during a politically tense era. But behind this joint effort lay two very different traditions of scientific practice. While both sides shared a commitment to empirical research, the methods, values and institutional cultures they brought into the mountains diverged sharply. For the German team, one of the most formative influences was their long-standing affiliation with the German and Austrian Alpine Club – a connection that shaped not only their approach to fieldwork but also their understanding of the Pamir region itself.

Historically important to this world view was the notion that the Pamirs were not remote or peripheral, but rather a geological and conceptual extension of the Alps. This vision had long circulated within Alpine Club circles and was articulated most clearly during the earlier 1913 expedition by German geologist Raimund von Klebelsberg, who saw the Pamirs as the eastern terminus of a vast, interconnected mountain system stretching from Central Europe into the heart of Asia. The Alps, he argued, were a fragment of this larger whole, with the Pamirs forming a crucial nexus where the world’s major ranges converged.Footnote ³⁷ In Klebelsberg’s view, this nexus held a key to understanding the fundamental processes of erosion, formation, climate and, critically, the role of glaciers in shaping landscape. ‘Only on the basis of comprehensive knowledge’, he wrote, ‘will we be able to draw further conclusions and come closer to the big questions that the Alps have in common with the high mountains of Central Asia’. Klebelsberg’s argument was clear: it was only when mountains were considered holistically – comparing ranges across continents – that they could be fully understood.Footnote ³⁸ In this global vision of mountains, glaciers played an essential role, not just in the Alps, where glaciological research had begun, but also in the Pamirs, where the massive scale and complexity of the region’s glaciers could offer new insights.Footnote ³⁹ Rickmers, reflecting on the findings of the 1928 expedition, echoed these views when he noted that the Pamir glaciers were important ‘ice laboratories’ deserving continuous, systematic observation. Unusually exposed and exhibiting strange contrasts between desert and polar conditions, they would eventually, Rickmers believed, ‘throw fresh light on the history of Alpine glaciation’.Footnote ⁴⁰

This vision exemplifies the German scientific gaze, practised by earlier scientists, such as Alexander Humboldt and the Schlagintweit brothers: expansive, comparative and rooted in a drive to synthesize global patterns through meticulous observations.Footnote ⁴¹ This gaze sought to map or measure – and to integrate distant geographies into a unified scientific framework. By positioning the Pamirs a key site for glaciological insight in the Alps, German scientists of the 1928 expedition – most of them shaped by the ethos of the Alpine Club – projected a form of knowledge that was at once empirical and quasi-colonial, asserting intellectual mastery over remote terrains by embedding them within a European scientific frame. But this projection was not only cartographic or conceptual; it was also embodied.

The German team operated within a model of knowledge production in which scientific authority derived as much from mountaineering prowess as from academic training. The German fusion of science and mountaineering had a long history. Long before the 1928 expedition, the careers of such figures as Sebastian and Richard Finsterwalder exemplified how glaciology in Western Europe had evolved within – and been sustained by – the cultural institutions of elite alpinism.Footnote ⁴² Both father and son were not only accomplished scientists but also seasoned climbers and active members of the German and Austrian Alpine Club, which played a crucial role in supporting their research. Within this milieu, scientific exploration of high mountain regions was never merely technical but was framed as a disciplined and orderly pursuit that aligned physical endurance with intellectual mastery, so that the identities of scientist and mountaineer frequently overlapped – often merging entirely – within a distinctly Humboldtian vision of science that equated physical immersion in the landscape with epistemic authority, a vision that profoundly shaped the work of the Finsterwalders.Footnote ⁴³

In this tradition, ‘travel [made] truth’: a first-hand experience of remote and difficult terrain granted the scientist–explorer credibility not only as an observer but as a man of endurance, discipline and courage, as ‘the essence of the explorer’s claim was to be trusted as an eyewitness to a world that few or no others had seen’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This fusion of physical and epistemic labor was gendered from the outset. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, such figures as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Louis Agassiz, James Forbes and John Tyndall bolstered their scientific credibility by invoking their mountaineering exploits. Scientists who lacked such physical credentials – those who had not tested themselves against the sublime hostility of glacial terrain – often saw their authority questioned.Footnote ⁴⁵

In fact, within this broader drive to test scientific authority through physical experience, glaciers came to hold a distinctive place. As Bruce Hevly has noted, from early on ‘the physical properties of ice became simultaneously the stuff of science and the stuff of adventure’, for to earn authority as a glaciologist took becoming a mountaineer and putting one’s body on the line as a vicarious scientific instrument.Footnote ⁴⁶ This ethos persisted into the twentieth century, shaping the identity of the 1928 team as physical fitness, technical climbing skill and masculine self-mastery remained integral to the production of credible scientific knowledge. ‘Bodily fitness and energy, and mountaineering knowledge’, stressed Richard Finsterwalder, ‘all played important parts’ in glacial mapping.Footnote ⁴⁷

Richard Finsterwalder’s emphasis on the glaciologist’s hardiness signals the centrality of the male scientific body to the shaping of the German scientific gaze – one that relied on physical presence in extreme environments as a precondition for knowledge production. The glaciologist’s body was not merely a vehicle for transporting instruments but became, in effect, an instrument itself.Footnote ⁴⁸ To map glaciers and survey remote peaks, scientists had to haul themselves – and their equipment – to forbidding heights, using their own embodied experience to anchor their claims to accuracy and truth. In her work on the Enlightenment, Dorinda Outram identifies this merger between male bodies and scientific authority, noting that ‘the oldest locus of authority is the human body. And it was on this that the authority of the explorer was ultimately based’. The authentication of the explorer’s discoveries stemmed from ‘the trials of his body’, she argues, and ‘the cognition of distant, new, and unseen things gains authority and reality from its incorporation in the bodies of particular men’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This bodily investment remained a hallmark of early ice scientists who, like the English alpinist and author Leslie Stephen, ‘measured’ the mountains and glaciers ‘in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical units’.Footnote ⁵⁰

For Richard Finsterwalder, too, bodily experience was inseparable from scientific method. His mountaineering expeditions served both as routes to sites of data collection and as integral components of the map-making process itself. Photogrammetry relied on stereoscopic photography rather than plane table sketch surveys, but in mountainous terrain its success depended on physical stamina and climbing skill. Achieving usable results required lugging cumbersome phototheodolites and fragile boxes of glass exposure plates to great heights, waiting in freezing conditions for a break in the clouds, and capturing images from precisely calculated observation points. Equally important was the mountaineer’s embodied familiarity with the terrain – his capacity to read and interpret the landscape through physical experience – which enabled him to fill in the gaps left by the photographic data and to render the surveys intelligible. On level ground, photogrammetry was primarily a technical process; in the high mountains it became a bodily ordeal and embodied scientific practice. Thus, despite its technological modernity, photogrammetry remained deeply entwined with a masculinized scientific gaze – one that cast the male mountaineer–scientist as both observer and incarnate proof of the validity of his observations. This was vividly demonstrated during the 1928 expedition, when Finsterwalder and his assistant, Hans Biersack, completed more than fifty climbs, including thirty ascents above five thousand meters and one reaching six thousand meters. All the work was done, stressed Gorbunov, almost entirely by the two of them, with little or no help from porters.Footnote ⁵¹

The result of these efforts was a comprehensive map of the Fedchenko glacier, a masterpiece of a modern glacial cartography that turned the glacier into a laboratory specimen, or a laboratory itself, depending on the nature of the interaction. Converted to a collection of hundreds of thirteen-by-fifteen-centimeter glass plates and then later, in Munich, to a map, the glacier became a portable object: a controlled, visualized and stylized representation of the high mountain landscape, available for further analysis within the ordered space of academic institutions. Yet this transformation did not erase the traces of bodily struggle and physical immersion. The map – and especially the accompanying onion skin overlay indicating the high-altitude points of photogrammetric observation – encoded the physicality of the process within the authority of the final product, lending weight to the map not just as a technical achievement but also as the distillation of disciplined labour, masculine endurance and epistemic conquest.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, given this context of endurance and challenge, the German mountaineer–scientists rejected, at least on the surface and in their self-representation, the romantic and adventurous ethos of heroic science that marked many earlier scientific endeavours. In 1889, Sebastian Finsterwalder’s published diary stressed that his readers would be disappointed to find no descriptions of risky adventures for, as he added,

These views were shared by Rickmers, whose introduction to his 1928 expedition report noted the absence of sensational events, since ‘there simply had to be no adventure if our task was to be done thoroughly and in time’. Adventures worth writing about, he continued, were a result of a failure of organization – and were, therefore, a thing of the past, the time when ‘discoverers went out in search of adventure, for they opened up new ways across oceans and continents, and an unknown road always means adventure’. Now, he continued, ‘Instead of the sensational fight with unexpected obstacles there is the noiseless war with detail, with equipment, tactics, and accounts.’Footnote ⁵³ This insistence on the non-heroic and non-adventurous nature of their work seems at odds with the practice of their fieldwork, which required putting their bodies in potentially dangerous and explicitly demanding situations – the very experiences that have given rise to narratives of heroic science.Footnote ⁵⁴

To be sure, the German scientists did not deny the bodily toll of their labor. On the contrary, they regularly acknowledged their exhaustion, cold and physical strain.Footnote ⁵⁵ What they rejected was the idea that hardship in and of itself conferred glory. In deliberately disavowing heroism, they crafted a particular scientific persona: one grounded in empirical rigour, technical competence and the quiet authority of a disciplined, trained body operating in the field. Naomi Oreskes offers a helpful explanation for this desire to downplay the heroic ethos when she notes that the ‘element of danger that makes for heroics also potentially undermines the scientific credibility of the work. The ideals of objectivity and the ideals of heroism do not entirely mesh. The value of self-sacrifice is ideological, not epistemological’.Footnote ⁵⁶ That is, Oreskes’s observations also suggest, the heroic ethos is not fixed; it can be reconfigured and integrated into the scientific ethos in a different degree at different times. And, indeed, in the context of early twentieth-century German ice science, as represented by the Finsterwalders and their milieu, the ideological and heroic element appeared less prominent than it would become later, in the 1930s, after the Nazi seizure of power.Footnote ⁵⁷

But in 1928 Rickmers still disavowed the heroic ethos, insisting, as we saw above, that adventure was a relic of the past – a feature of an era of ‘unknown roads’ – thus signalling, for the moment, a rejection of the romantic explorer–hero in favor of a new scientific persona defined by discipline, foresight, logistical control and precision. He articulated his view in a series of articles and lectures, arguing that ‘today we live in a transitional period’ in the way science was made, where there was ‘no time for adventure’.Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Today the world is discovered’, he continued elsewhere; ‘Bold sketching no longer helps … The finder is being replaced by the examiner, the prospector by the sinker of shafts, the eye by the instrument, the storyteller by the measurer and statistician.’Footnote ⁵⁹ In short, ‘the modern exploring party shows the inevitable evolution from the journey of discovery to the journey of study or committee of investigation’.Footnote ⁶⁰ For Rickmers, this transformation demanded new tools and new forms of training and embodiment: ‘natural science is becoming more and more a statistical science’, he wrote, and ‘obtaining measured values is becoming more and more skilled work, requiring intricate precision equipment and long training courses on the use of the equipment’.Footnote ⁶¹ In this model, scientific legitimacy derived not from individual daring but from rigour, expertise and standardized methods.

Rickmers’s insistences were not merely a rhetorical shift but a strategic recalibration of previously conceived scientific credibility: the heroic narrative, associated with risk and individual glory, threatened the emerging ideal of science as systematic, objective, precise and reproducible. Rickmers’s ‘noiseless war with detail’ exemplified the early twentieth-century recasting of science as a matter of method rather than myth, framing the bodily hardship of fieldwork not as evidence of courage but as an unavoidable, carefully managed cost of empirical rigour. In distancing themselves from the thrill of conquest, they redefined the legitimacy of exploration in professional, rather than heroic, terms.

This identity recalibration was made visible in the mapping of the Fedchenko glacier during the 1928 expedition. Although their work required strenuous physical effort and bodily endurance in demanding environments, German scientists presented their fieldwork as disciplined, technical labour rather than heroic adventure. The glacier was made legible through methodical measurement, patient observation, and careful organization – embodied practices that aligned with the new ideal of science as sober and objective. But while rejecting overt romanticism in their self-representations, German scientists like the Finsterwalders nonetheless enacted a deeply masculinized form of knowledge production – one that privileged first-hand, bodily engagement with remote landscapes as a prerequisite for legitimate science. In this sense, the German scientific gaze operated as a powerful instrument of epistemic control, disavowing ideology or heroism, even as it enacted both through its methods and assumptions.

The Soviet scientific gaze

If the German project aimed to master and imagine the glacier through bodily discipline and technical control, the Soviet approach to the 1928 expedition operated in a different register: openly ideological, explicitly heroic and grounded in a revolutionary imaginary. Their vision of masculinity was performative and political: the heroic Bolshevik scientist established legibility not through precision but through the act of overcoming hardship. Where the German members of the expedition stressed discipline, restraint and precision, the Soviet participants embraced spectacle. The narrative genre of their accounts aligned with these aims: their dramatic tone, didactic structure and emphasis on heroic struggle reinforced the political function of the expedition and made the scientific work legible within a broader revolutionary imaginary.

This epistemic and ideological contrast was partially shaped by a difference in the teams’ preparedness and institutional backgrounds. The German scientists arrived in the Pamirs with extensive mountaineering experience and a deep reservoir of glaciological expertise. By contrast, the Soviet relationship with the region’s glaciers developed more gradually and often improvisationally. Although there was some initial interest – Korzhenevskii, for example, attempted to build on his 1927 work Muksu and Its Glaciers – glaciology was not the central concern of the Soviet expedition. Instead, its agenda was shaped primarily by the demands of socialist modernization. As the awareness of glaciers as potential reservoirs of water grew, so did the expedition’s scientific interest in them.Footnote ⁶² The Soviets, too, came to regard glaciers as scientific laboratories and as objects that required careful study and monitoring, as Gorbunov noted: ‘I think we need to organize constant monitoring of the glacier. There is so much water accumulated in it that it should be enough for many years, even if the glacier is losing stored ice. We need to think about its future. I will most definitely consult the scientist about how to do it best.’Footnote ⁶³

But the Soviet view of glaciers also differed from the German in key respects, shaped by both historical context and ideological commitments. Soviet scientists of the 1928 expedition approached glaciers not as familiar terrain to be mastered through embodied expertise, but as unpredictable and unfamiliar obstacles that complicated rational planning. Topographer Ivan Dorofeev and his team, for instance, found the ice’s groaning, cracking and shifting behaviour disorienting and even threatening – a natural force that resisted and appeared to hinder scientific work.Footnote ⁶⁴ Glaciers’ ‘character’ was unknown to Soviet explorers.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a result of this unfamiliarity, the Soviet team’s early encounters with the glaciers were marked not by confident planning, but by improvisation and uncertainty, combined with a growing awareness of the need to integrate this volatile terrain into the broader project of Soviet control and transformation.

This uneasy mix of ambition and adaptation shaped the character of Soviet fieldwork: Soviet scientists had to become mountaineers out of necessity, often learning on the job. Dorofeev himself tried to model courage to the Red Army soldiers who accompanied him: ‘I also am afraid [of falling into crevasses], but the work has to be done, and it is time to get used to crevasses,’ he told them. ‘If we walk carefully on the glaciers and on the bridges across crevasses, nothing bad will happen. But if we get cold feet, then we can’t walk on glaciers and will not be able to do our work.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Konstantin Isakov, the Soviet geodesist assigned to assist Finsterwalder with photogrammetric surveys, expressed serious doubts about his own capacity to perform as an alpinist – and, by extension, as a scientist.Footnote ⁶⁷ Dorofeev tried to reassure him: ‘Don’t you worry, we will figure out how to climb the peaks. If we don’t get the alpinists, we will climb together.’ Still, he conceded that without trained mountaineers, the scientific work would falter.Footnote ⁶⁸

These challenges did not simply reflect a lack of preparation; they gave rise to a fundamentally different scientific approach as each task – no matter how technical or routine – took on the character of a small, improvised feat, an assertion of will in the face of environmental unpredictability. This dynamic forged a new kind of heroism, one rooted not in mastery but in adaptation. ‘I was pleased with the results of our outing,’ Dorofeev recalled, for instance, continuing,

This ethos of improvised endurance brings us back to earlier reflections on the role of the male scientific body – not just as a bearer of knowledge, but as an epistemic instrument in its own right. As with the Germans who valorized mountaineering as a cultivated tradition that conferred credibility, Soviet scientists came to recognize, often through trial, that the body itself was indispensable to scientific practice in high-altitude environments. As Scherbakov, one of the expedition’s Soviet leaders, observed, unknowingly echoing the Victorian alpinist Leslie Stephen, ‘in the process of scientific work in difficult high-altitude conditions, we anticipated many moments when healthy muscles and the technique of mountaineering had to assist in the meticulous and precise work of the scientists’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nowhere was this convergence of bodily and scientific labour more evident than in Dorofeev’s own practice. At altitude, he relied not only on formal instruments like the plane table, alidade and aneroid barometer, but equally on his increasing experience of the terrain. His physical presence became an extension of his technical equipment; his body served not merely as a support for scientific tools, but as a tool of discovery itself.

Dorofeev’s dramatic rediscovery of the Fedchenko glacier in the early days of August 1928 powerfully illustrates this approach. His estimate of the glacier’s staggering length (which he concluded was seventy-four kilometres) emerged less from plane-table survey (impractical on this terrain) or photogrammetric measurement (a technique that he had not yet mastered), but from three gruelling days of bodily immersion in the landscape. Battling snow at the Tanymas Pass and descending into a vast, unmapped icy valley, Dorofeev relied on physical presence – what he could see, traverse and endure. The terrain forced continuous bodily negotiation: crossing ‘bottomless abysses of crevasses’, threading between moraines, walking on ice, all while mentally mapping the glacier’s shifting orientation. Even as he grappled with uncertainty – initially rejecting the idea that this could be the Fedchenko due to outdated knowledge about its supposed length – Dorofeev’s scientific insight was guided by embodied perception and memory. A crucial moment came when a cliff blocked his view, and he recalled earlier descriptions of the adjacent Bivachny glacier’s green lakes and vegetated slopes. Upon spotting these exact features, his physical and sensory experience aligned with cartographic knowledge, allowing him to confirm the glacier’s identity. The discovery was thus inseparable from the bodily labour that enabled it, as Dorofeev’s body functioned as a measuring device, a sensor and an epistemic filter through which the unknown became legible. The ‘second discovery’ of the Fedchenko glacier, then, was not merely the product of calculation or detached observation, but of scientific knowledge grounded in movement, endurance and situated perception.Footnote ⁷¹

So essential did this embodied form of knowledge become for the Soviet team that expedition leader Gorbunov described Dorofeev’s body as a surrogate for Finsterwalder’s phototheodolites, enabling access to areas the photogrammetric surveys could not reach. In this formulation, the Soviet scientific body was not just a symbol of heroism, it was also a practical, necessary stand-in for technological capability, blurring the line between muscle and method, man and ideology.Footnote ⁷² Furthermore, the scientist’s body was more than a tool of observation: it became a politically legible symbol of Soviet perseverance, adaptability and conquest over nature. Knowledge was not only measured through instruments but also staged through the heroism of the socialist scientific body (incidentally, the scientific precision of German bodies was questioned by the Soviets as they insisted that German mountaineering ambitions superseded their scientific ones, in contrast to the scientifically driven Soviet alpinist efforts).Footnote ⁷³ This heroic framing was not merely rhetorical; it was enacted in field decisions and interpersonal dynamics. According to Dorofeev’s recollections, Soviet team members consistently valorized bravery and sacrifice, contrasting their fortitude with what they perceived as German caution. This ideological posture is clearly expressed in an exchange between Gorbunov and Krylenko:

In this exchange, courage emerged as more than a trait; it was an obligation. The expedition’s challenges became tests of ideological commitment as much as of physical ability, contrasting German caution and logistical foresight that were cast as signs of weakness or privilege. One conversation between Red Army soldier Nagumov and Krylenko illustrates this pointed contrast:

Physical hardship and recklessness thus become a badge of ideological honour; risk was something to be not mitigated, but embraced. In contrast to German scientific rationality, Soviet science celebrated deprivation as a sign of moral strength. The scientist’s body was not simply enduring harsh conditions; it was proving the moral superiority of the socialist project. Heroism was no longer a by-product of scientific labour; it became the very foundation of its legitimacy.

Within this ideologically framed scientific gaze, the Fedchenko glacier emerged as an especially potent transformative site. Its massive scale promised not only new data, but glory to those who first traversed its surface, mapped it and thus turned it into a tame object of both collective triumph and scientific interest.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the new Soviet socialist land where everything had to be bigger and better, the Fedchenko was a fitting symbol: it became one of the celebrated geographical ‘possessions’ of the new country – Dorofeev proudly called the Fedchenko ‘this giant among mountain-valley glaciers of our country and of the whole world’ – signalling both its uniqueness and claims to international precedence.Footnote ⁷⁷ The mighty landscapes, turned heroic once tamed by heroic Soviet scientists, confirmed Soviet superiority to the West – ‘The Alps are dwarfed by [the Pamir’s] giants’, proudly declared Krylenko, as he exclaimed, ‘like small hills appear celebrated peaks in comparison to these mountains … What does Mont Blanc amount to with its mere 4,800 meters?’ – and the Soviet scientists’ greater ability to control and manipulate nature, both human and non-human.Footnote ⁷⁸

This vision of control over nature and the ideological emphasis on the masculinist heroism of the scientists add yet another layer to Soviet scientists’ imagining of the glaciers and of the surrounding peaks: they were enemies that need to be defeated and the expedition was a military campaign.Footnote ⁷⁹ Krylenko, in fact, called regular meetings of the expedition leaders ‘general military council’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In that context, the study of glaciers emerged as a new front in the battle for Soviet Russia, a battle in which Soviet man was made. Where nineteenth-century Romantics had seen beautifully frozen rivers, frozen waves and seas of ice, the Soviet members of the 1928 expedition often saw sharp needles, yawning crevasses and ice boulders. Glaciers met the explorers by firing ‘war ammunition’ at them, setting up ice explosives, or raining boulders down on those who approached too closely.Footnote ⁸¹ The glaciers were alive, spending their lives surrounded by silence, unpredictable, always ready to attack, set up a trap, or ‘build a defense line’.Footnote ⁸² Along with the intimidating peaks, which were also at times represented as animate objects with hostile intentions, glaciers tested people and posed new challenges to those who had mastered the old ones. They were ‘countless hordes’ guarding the approaches to the impregnable fortress of the Pamir.Footnote ⁸³

The notion of nature as an enemy or an obstacle to be conquered was neither new nor exclusive to Soviet science.Footnote ⁸⁴ But it became particularly pronounced in the context of Soviet science, state planning and industrial development.Footnote ⁸⁵ Crucially, however, the narratives of Soviet glaciologists reveal that the rhetoric of conquest was both a tool of the socialist industrial project and a means of constructing Soviet male identity – casting scientists as ideological heirs to the Bolshevik struggle and framing their scientific labour as a continuation of revolutionary heroism. Nature functioned as a site where the new Soviet heroic masculinity – and with it, Soviet power – were (re)produced while the rhetoric of ‘conquest’ and ‘defeat’ served as strategies of that power (re)production process.Footnote ⁸⁶ In this context, scientists and alpinists were military leaders who led an army of Red soldiers, porters and local guides to storm and conquer a new front and a new frontier: a front that called for military determination and a frontier that needed scientific insight to be explored and understood as the ‘unexplored territory’.Footnote ⁸⁷ A victory over the unexplored region was akin to that of socialism over tsarism, both ostensibly bringing a previously unknown reality into existence. The speech by Gorbunov, blending the rhetoric of a military commander and that of an explorer, made this very clear:

This paradigm of military conquest, however, coexisted with that of the ‘mysteries of nature’. The narratives of the Russian participants of the expedition convey a clear sense that nature often could not be defeated; it frequently had a surprise for someone who thought they had overcome it.Footnote ⁸⁹ The peak that was scaled one day becomes unassailable the next because of a change in weather; crevasses appear out of nowhere to threaten an inattentive explorer. The explorers, rather than defeating nature, strove to gain its respect and willingness to reveal its mysteries and secrets, which then could be used to change that nature. The rhetoric of conquest and jointly shared mysteries coexists in many of the accounts.

Of course, in a true military campaign there can be only one winner. Given the ideological importance of the expedition, the Soviet participants repeatedly expressed concerns about sharing the spoils of their anticipated victories and discoveries with their German counterparts – and some of them (Dorofeev, in particular) accused the Germans of sabotaging Soviet efforts, supposedly by either refusing to follow their proposed plans, denying them access to food or other supplies, or even stealing Soviet food supplies (a Soviet participant complained in one of the notes circulating between camps that Birsak, taking advantage of the fact that he was alone in the camp, ‘stuffed his tent with our [Soviet] food supplies’.)Footnote ⁹⁰ Though the spirit of the expedition was generally collegial and mutually supportive, it nevertheless became an important site for ‘national rivalry and national identity formation’.Footnote ⁹¹ Although assured by Scherbakov that the German presence was essential to Soviet success, Dorofeev continued to see every Soviet contribution as a military triumph. Every disagreement with German colleagues came to be interpreted as the latter’s displeasure at the Soviets for ‘being ahead and making more geographical discoveries’, which were attributable to Soviet stamina and courage in the face of difficulties.Footnote ⁹²

This expected stamina – often veering into recklessness – was repeatedly cast in ideological terms as a defining trait of the Soviet man, a heroic quality compensating for material and technical shortcomings. In response to a local elder’s admiration and surprise that a Soviet group had been able to cross mountains that the locals considered impassable, Krylenko stated, with much pathos, ‘Thank you very much, father; you correctly understand what Bolshevik–Leninists should be like.’Footnote ⁹³ Rossels echoed these ideological clichés in his memoirs: ‘The slogan “Dare! Despite all the obstacles, follow the goal and win!” was our inspiration.’Footnote ⁹⁴ This ethos of fearless resolve was more than rhetoric; it defined the very conditions under which the glacier would yield its secrets. The glacier demanded not cautious observation but bold action, requiring a reckless disregard for comfort and prudence, pushing bodies to their absolute limits, to the point where they transformed the landscape by making it legible, and were thus transformed themselves.