The Russian Antarctic Expedition under the command of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and its reception in Russia and the world

Abstract

The existence of an icy continent around the South Pole is known to everybody today. But it is common to ascribe this kind of modern knowledge to navigators sailing in southern polar waters in the 19th century. A good illustration of this is the Russian Antarctic expedition (1819–1821) under the conduct of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (Russian version Faddej Faddeevich Bellinsgauzen), the reception of which in Russian society of the 19th and 20th centuries is analysed in this article. During the cold war, beginning at the end of the 1940s, the question of who discovered Antarctica turned from being a scientific problem into a subject of political struggle between the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. This article provides an analysis of the Russian discovery in the area, while at the same time, attempting to give an answer to the main question of the history of Antarctic exploration which is: is it well-justified to establish the first discoverer of Antarctica? All the dates in the text are according to the Gregorian calendar.

Baltic Germans in the Russian Imperial Navy: Navigators, Explorers, and Contributors to Place Naming

“…Von Bellingshausen was appointed to command a Russian circumnavigation of the globe in 1819-1821 (Armstrong, 1971;Tammiksaar, 2016). Rather than heading for Alaska and the Northern Pacific, he headed for the Southern Pacific and the Antarctic area.…”

Estonian Modern History in the Twenty­-First Century

“…Their expeditions have been studied by Erki Tammiksaar. 71 The idea that due to the local German heritage the Estonian past has access not only to "Western" European culture but also to its bleaker aspects such as colonialism is quite new, but a recent exhibition in the Estonian Art Museum KUMU made exactly this point in juxtaposing an installation by a Maori artist, Lisa Reihana, about the first contact between colonizers and colonized with ethnographic sketches of varying peoples of the Russian Empire produced by expeditions led by Baltic German explorers. 72 No doubt, the global conjuncture for topics such as colonialism and racism will lead to further research in this direction.…”