Positivism reflections in Soviet cartography

There is a strong concept that Soviet cartography was driven by Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism (Ignateva, Kraak, 2023).This paper discusses that apart from ideological reverences Soviet cartography was mostly positivist science in epistemological sense.An attempt has been made to rely on English-language articles by Soviet cartographers (mostly translated from Russian-language sources).In the 1940s, in the Soviet Union the concept of cognitive cartography was formed.It defined cartography as "the science of cognition of ambient reality through cartographic modeling" and a map as "a graphic-symbolic model of reality" (Salichtchev, 1970, p. 83; Berlyant, 1994, p. 280).Even these definitions make it possible to consider cartography as a positivist science (Park et al., 2020).