Medvedkov, Yuri Vladimirovich

Study. Career start

Born in the city of Yoshkar-Ola . In 1950 he graduated from MGIMO and entered graduate school at the Institute of Geography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . In his student years he talked mainly in the technical environment, independently mastered applied mathematical methods . In 1953 he defended his dissertation on country studies (“ Pacific Northwest of the USA: Economic and Geographical Characteristics ” ^[2] ) and joined the VINITI , thanks to which he had unlimited access to the latest publications in foreign journals and supervised the process of reviewing them. Since the mid- 1950s, he began to engage in the then-mathematizing of the social sciences . Since 1963 he headed the geography department of VINITI. He wrote a number of country studies on the countries of East and South Africa .

Mature years

In 1962 , together with L. I. Vasilevsky, V. M. Gokhman , Yu. G. Lipets, and I. M. Maergoiz , he created a Seminar on New Research Methods in Economic Geography at the Department of Economic Geography of the Moscow Branch of the USSR Geographical Society , held twice a month. In 1964-1966 he wrote three volumes of the book “The Economic Geographic Study of the Areas of the Capitalist World ”, which became the first fundamental publication in the USSR on the application of quantitative methods in geography and the formulation of new research problems in this connection. In the third part of this publication (“ Analysis of the resettlement configuration ”), Yu. V. Medvedkov was one of the first in the world ^{[3] to} apply entropy models for studying resettlement.

In 1976 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Geography, " Modeling in the Geography of Settlement ."

In 1970, he headed the WHO Ecology Laboratory in Geneva . Work in an international organization and the possibility of traveling abroad without restrictions allowed Yu. V. Medvedkov to take an active part in international conferences and symposia, which brought his works fame and recognition in foreign science. In the early 1970s, he took an active part in the work of the International Geographical Union , made a great contribution to the organization of the XXIII Congress of the IGU in Moscow ( 1976 ).

In the 1970s, he taught the course “Foreign Theories of Economic Geography” at the Department of Economic Geography of the USSR, Moscow State University .

In 1972 , when he arrived in the USSR to participate in a meeting on the application of mathematical methods in geography, he learned that he had been made restricted to leave the country for a boycott of the First United Nations Congress on the Human Environment, which was prepared by WHO and Medvedkov personally. The continuation of his work at VINITI also became impossible.

Through the efforts of A.A. Mints, he was hired by the Institute of Geography as a leading researcher , where in 1974 he headed the new Laboratory of Human Ecology . An interdisciplinary seminar is being organized on the basis of the laboratory, the leader of which is Yu. V. Medvedkov. In 1978, he wrote the book “ Man and the Urban Environment, ” reflecting the new results obtained by him and the laboratory staff. After a while, a small laboratory (8 employees) becomes itself a productive unit of the institute.

Repression

The ongoing ban on foreign business trips limited Medvedkov’s contacts with foreign colleagues and prevented the continuation of productive projects. Classes in human ecology led Medvedkov to concerns about nuclear disarmament , which attracted close attention of state security bodies ^[4] . In 1981, Yu. V. Medvedkov and his wife Olga Lvovna submitted documents to leave the USSR , which led to the beginning of pressure on their family and the laboratory staff from part of the institute’s leadership. Links to their work in scientific articles were banned. In 1981, a working group was formed to deprive them of their scientific degrees, but the scientists included there sabotaged her work, and this attempt failed. Yuri Medvedkov was demoted to a junior research fellow, and his wife was transferred to temporary staff. The pressure on the Medvedkovs increased significantly after they joined the " Group for Building Confidence between the USSR and the USA " in 1982 ^[5] . In December 1983, O. L. Medvedkova, who was in her fourth month of pregnancy, was charged with assaulting a police officer ^[6] . At the end of the trial, after a petition by Margaret Thatcher in March 1984, Medvedkova was sentenced to 2 and a half years in prison with a 3-year probationary period ^[7] . KGB agents organized an accident when the Medvedkovs went to work at the institute in their own car, and in this accident the couple survived by a miracle ^[8] . On June 12, 1986, the Medvedkovs were fired from the Institute of Geography for their social activities ^[8] . After the dismissal, the Medvedkovs went outside in t-shirts with the inscription “I demand work in accordance with my qualifications”, for which they were sent under arrest for 10 days ^[9] . In September 1986, the Medvedkovs received permission to leave and order to leave the USSR within 2 days ^[6] .

Emigration

Since 1986, Yuri Medvedkov is a professor at Ohio State University ^[10] . The subject of his work changed significantly after moving to the United States: in the late 1980s, quantitative research went out of fashion in the mainstream of American geography ^[8] , and Medvedkov became more involved in the dynamics of post-Soviet transformations of cities and urban systems of the countries of the former USSR, geodemography , influence globalization on urban systems. Until 2005, at Ohio State University , he taught regional geography courses in the post-Soviet space and a master's course in population geography , widely used data analysis in GIS teaching. Since 2006 - Emeritus Professor ^[11] .

Books

• Medvedkov Yu.V. Economic geographic study of areas of the capitalist world. The composition of the sources. Differences in study intensity. - Moscow: INION, 1964. - T. 1. - 83 p.
• Medvedkov Yu.V. Economic geographic study of areas of the capitalist world. Applications of mathematics in economic geography. - Moscow: INION, 1965. - T. 2. - 162 p.
• Medvedkov Yu.V. Economic geographic study of areas of the capitalist world. Analysis of settlement configuration. - Moscow: INION, 1966. - T. 3. - 116 p.
• Medvedkov Yu. V. Man and the urban environment. - Moscow: Nauka, 1978.- 214 p.

Articles

• Medvedkov Yu.V. On the sizes of cities united in a system // Quantitative research methods in economic geography. - Moscow, 1964.
• Medvedkov Yu. V. The regular component in the settlement networks depicted on the map // Izvestiya AN SSSR. Geographical series. - 1966. - No. 4 . - S. 110—122 .
• Medvedkov Y. The concept of entropy in settlement pattern analysis (English) // Papers of the Regional Science Association. - 1967. - Vol. 18 , no. 1 . - P. 165-168 . - DOI : 10.1007 / BF01940320 .
• Medvedkov Yu. V. Topological analysis of networks of populated places // Questions of geography . Mathematics in economic geography. - Moscow: Thought, 1968 .-- T. 77 . - S. 159-167 .
• Medvedkov Y. An application of topology in central place analysis (English) // Papers in Regional Science. - 1968. - Vol. 20 , no. 1 . - P. 77-84 . - DOI : 10.1111 / j.1435-5597.1968.tb01389.x .
• Medvedkov Y. Entropy: an assessment of potentialities in geography (English) // Economic Geography. - 1970. - Vol. 46 , no. 1 . - P. 306-316 .
• Medvedkov Y. Internal structure of a city: an ecological assessment (English) // Papers in Regional Science. - 1971. - Vol. 27 , no. 1 . - P. 95-118 . - DOI : 10.1111 / j.1435-5597.1971.tb01506.x .