While still a student, our hero got involved in politics. The security service fought this rebel for a long time. After the revolution, he found peaceful application of his knowledge and talents.
He is called the father of Soviet economic geography, and his methodology is being studied and applied today in Russia and abroad. The recognized classic and great scientist in his youth was still that bully. He was attracted not by dangerous adventures, but by the dream of creating a just state.
Childhood
Kolya was born in July 1881 in Tomsk. His father was a school teacher. The Baransky family lived well by the standards of the Russian province. The parents wanted their heir to receive a good education and continue the dynasty of teachers.
From an early age, the boy showed a keen interest in science. In the Tomsk gymnasium, he surprised everyone with his successes. Papa was very pleased that his child was in good standing with the mentors. When the teenager began to visit the printing houses of the city, the adults did not suspect anything bad. Surely Nikolai wants to keep abreast of new products that are coming out of print. No one suspected that the schoolboy was attracted not by books, but by the conversations of the workers, in which they discussed the current political situation and criticized the government.
Youth
The boy graduated from high school in 1899 with a gold medal. This allowed him to easily enter the Imperial Tomsk University. The excellent student was already a member of an underground organization. In 1901 he took part in an anti-government demonstration. For such a trick, the student was expelled from the university. The incident did not cool the young man's love for science. He took up a case study. Soon from under his pen came out a work dedicated to the welfare of the peasants of the settlers of the Barnaul district.
Nikolai Baransky did not stop political activity either. In 1902, he gathered like-minded people who became the basis for the creation of a cell of the RSDLP in Siberia. The following year, the former student was elected to the regional leadership of the party. The comrades sent a competent guy on a tour of the cities of Russia to agitate young people. Kolya visited Samara, Yekaterinburg, Perm and attracted the attention of the secret police. I had to return home, but I could not sit still. In 1905, our hero moved to Chita, where he continued his revolutionary work.
A series of failures
The gendarmes were not going to put up with the fact that opponents of the monarchy were walking right under their noses. In 1906, the underground organization in Chita was defeated, Baransky managed to escape to Ufa. there he was arrested and sent to jail. There were not many clues about him, because soon the young man was free again. He went to Kiev, where he was again detained and imprisoned. The authorities tried to arrest the unreliable citizen in advance, and in 1908 they solved the problem by exiling him to the Ufa province.
Nothing is known about the personal life of our hero. He did not have a wife, a biography spoiled by constant arrests scared away girls from decent families from him, he did not make a career, he did not make wealth. In 1910, Nikolai Baransky settled down. He entered the Moscow Commercial Institute. After receiving his diploma in 1914, the young economist joined the main committee of the Zemsky and City Unions.
Share your experience
The revolution of 1917 returned the rebel to the ranks. Nikolai Nikolaevich sympathized with the Menshevik internationalists, but when disputes began among their ranks about the possibility of uniting with the Bolsheviks, he joined the RCP (b). In 1920, the famous underground worker was sent to the Siberian Higher Party School to teach economics. A year later, he returned to the capital, where he continued to lecture to students. There he met Sergei Bernstein-Kogan, who organized the Department of Economic Geography at Moscow University. The learned husband easily attracted a new friend to his work.
In 1929, Professor Baransky organized the Department of Economic Geography at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University, which he headed until 1946. Here our hero engaged in scientific work and the development of his own concept for assessing various regions in terms of their economic activities. I had to try my hand at literary creativity - Nikolai Nikolayevich wrote textbooks for students himself.
Achievements and memory
In the nature of this man there was a thirst for justice. In 1939 he received the title of Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. After 7 years, the respected scientist could be elected an academician, but he himself refused to nominate himself in favor of his colleague Lev Berg, whom he considered more worthy of the high title. The freethinker did not remain without awards, he was awarded a number of high orders and medals, including the Stalin Prize and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
A country with a one-party system of government needed the formation of a specific, its own scientific concept of social sciences. Nikolai Baransky's ideas soon became a unified version of economic geography. This could not but affect the attitude to his work of the forces that seized power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During his life, which ended in 1963, the professor wrote about 500 books, his name was known not only in the Land of the Soviets. Baransky's approach to economic geography was not rejected, his theories are still being studied today.
