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Journey to Inner Asia: P. K. Kozlov’s Mongolian-Tibetan Expedition, 1923-1926

Issue 2 from 01.06.2001

The article sheds light on the hitherto unstudied aspects of the expedition to Mongolia and Tibet headed by an out standing Russian explorer of Central Asia, Petr Kozlov. Organized under the aegis of the Russian Geographical Society and supported by the Soviet government, this journey was to fulfil his life-long dream of exploring the upper basins of the Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers in the highlands of Tibet and reaching its capital, Lhasa, which the Europeans had previously been forbidden to enter. Eventually, however, the expedition had to change its destination from Tibet to Mongolia, and the reasons for this shift have long remained obscure. It is only recently that the documents relating to its organization (kept in the Archive of the President of Russian Federation) have become available to historians, providing some clues to this change. The major reason seems to have been an intrigue against Kozlov, launched in the fall of 1923 by a fraction of top bureaucrats, including the head of Soviet secret police, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, G. V. Chicherin. Apart from that, the newly discovered materials reveal the many other complications involved in the organization of the expedition. The multi-stage process of its project approval (involving such agencies as the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, State Planning Committee, Committee for Scientific Research, and the Council of Soviet Commissars), the intervention of the Academy of Sciences into Kozlov’s plans with a view to take the expedition under its own control, the cancellation of the project and its subsequent revival under the new guise of “Mongolian expedition” provide an opportunity to re-examine the history of Kozlov’s last journey, taking account of the complex relationships between science and politics in early Soviet history.

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