The Laboratory in the Clouds: Approaching the Museum of Zemlevedenie at the Moscow State University

Abstract This article examines the Museum of Zemlevedenie at Moscow State University as a late-Stalinist knowledge-production site in which an integrative yet conceptually heterogeneous vision of Earth sciences was made authoritative through spatial, visual, and pedagogical means. Located on the seven highest floors of the main MSU building, the museum—founded in 1951 by the geographer and writer Georgy K. Efremov and opened in 1955—was embedded in postwar triumphalist culture and in the monumental architecture of the Stalinist “skyscraper university.” Drawing on museum guidebooks (1955–1978; English edition 1973), the museum’s periodicals ( Zemlevedenie ; Zhizn Zemli, 1955–2011), catalogues of paintings and exhibition materials, institutional narratives, seven site visits (2020–2022), and interviews with directors and curators, the article analyses how Zemlevedenie —a weakly bounded, synthesis-oriented formation associated with physical geography and the study of interconnections within the geographical envelope—was operationalised in exhibitionary form. The analysis shows that the museum resolved conceptual plurality not through disciplinary texts, but by translating it into an experiential worldview organised “from cosmos to microcosmos.” Its durable vertical sequence structured Earth sciences into a hierarchical narrative spanning the origin and structure of the Earth, endogenous and exogenous processes, mineral resources, and landscape zones of the USSR and the world, while also projecting Soviet knowledge claims beyond national territory to a planetary and near-cosmic scale. A second argument concerns the museum’s distinctive visual regime: through nagliadnost’ and a carefully engineered synthesis of specimens, explanatory graphics, and socialist realist landscape painting—produced at scale by major artists under institutional coordination—the museum rendered scientific relations self-evident and politically legible. Situating these findings within scholarship on Soviet science, spatial imaginaries, and museum studies, the article demonstrates how late Stalinist institutions stabilised integrative natural-science projects through architecture, display, and visual authority, linking the ordering of nature to postwar narratives of mastery and global stature.