A renowned authority on the geography of the Soviet Union, David Hooson profoundly influenced scholarship both within and beyond Russia. Having learnt Russian to qualify for a university lectureship in the 1950s, he rapidly became familiar with, then a participant in, the intense dispute between traditional party-line determinists long dominant in academic Moscow and Leningrad, and postStalin humanists.

Doctrinaire communists had disowned Russia’s rich tsarist human geography legacy, dismissed cultural and historical understanding as counter-revolutionary, reduced geography to the study of the physical environment, and enthroned resource development as its sole purpose. Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s reforms gave Soviet scholars what Hooson termed a shot of adrenalin in a climate of confidence and optimism that newly emboldened them to question old dogmas.

The only Western scholar involved — as well as being that rara avis, a Soviet specialist who was not a Cold Warrior — Hooson revealed to the world the continuing conflict between the old guard, headed by the autocratic I. P. Gerasimov, and the rebels, led by N. N. Baransky, Y. G. Saushkin and V. A. Anuchin. The neophyte Hooson — modestly terming himself a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind — became both a flashpoint of Soviet controversy and an invaluable adviser to Western strategists.

Arriving in the US in 1956, by the next year he was lecturing American military leaders dismayed by Sputnik on how the Soviets had achieved orbital space flight. Coming from a Britain where food rationing had finally been lifted only in 1954, Hooson was amazed alike by the huge servings of roast beef in the Pentagon cafeteria and by the deference paid him by his audience of generals and admirals.

But he found them well versed in the Oxford geographer Sir Halford Mackinder’s 1904 heartland theory, which predicted the shift from imperial maritime to land power through the growth of rail transport, making Germany and Russia rulers of the world. Gospel both in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Mackinder’s thesis remained hugely influential in postwar Russia.

Several visits to the Soviet Union, including the Far East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, generated a dozen essays and two major books, A New Soviet Heartland? (1964) and The Soviet Union: People and Regions (1966). Hooson showed how resource exploitation east of the Volga, together with a Chinese alliance and hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe, had created a golden age of Soviet power stimulated by “palpably increased confidence, enthusiasm and efficiency”.

But the enthusiasm and openness of the early 1960s waned under Brezhnev, and Hooson’s attention shifted from what he termed Soviet “morbidity” towards regional development, the history of geography and rival national frames of reference.

In his edited Geography and National Identity (1994), a path-breaking comparative text, Hooson noted that Soviet disintegration required redrawing “mental maps of this enormous slice of the earth’s surface”, paying special heed to the regional attachments that were people’s “life blood and collective soul”.

A decade after glasnost he lamented the “aching vacuum of the spirit, born of disillusionment not only with communism and the betrayal of its ideals” but also with the way that Russia’s Western-style market economy had brought “great riches for the very few and deepening poverty for the many”.

Hooson termed geography a “broad-ranging perspective on humans seen as inhabitants and transformers of the Earth”. Resurgent national identities the world over made the geographical dimension “fundamental, ultimately and increasingly inescapable, and to be ignored at our peril”. Despite the prevalent cynicism, malaise, anxiety and anger, he viewed former Soviet peoples — notably in Central Asia — as being “in some ways better in touch with their own history, their own geography, than we are with ours”.

David Hooson was born on a farm in the Vale of Clwyd, in North Wales, where his father’s devotion to agricultural reform had made him inescapably “aware of geographical realities, from climate to marketing”. Happy with his Welsh heritage, Hooson nonetheless found his valley “claustrophobic as well as beautiful”. His passionate curiosity about the world beyond the mountains was further stimulated by a memorable visit from the geographer-anthropologist H. J. Fleure.

After two years’ wartime service in the Fleet Air Arm, as a weather forecaster in monsoon-affected South-East Asia, Hooson took a degree in geography at Hertford College, Oxford, in 1948, and a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1955. After two years as a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, he went in 1956 to the University of Maryland, moving in 1960 to the University of British Columbia, and to the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. He was chairman of Berkeley’s centre for Slavic and East European studies, 1967-70, and chaired its geography department, 1970-1975. He was dean of social sciences from 1977 to 1980.

Berkeley was congenial to Hooson both climatically, its fog-bound summers mitigated by Welsh-type drawing-room fires; and intellectually, its geography department uniquely historically minded, humanistic and holistic, under the legendary aegis of Carl O. Sauer and Clarence Glacken.

Even after his retirement in 1997, he continued to mentor staff and students, and at his death (drowning during his regular swim at Tomales Bay, northwest of San Francisco) he was teaching a course at the Fromm Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of San Francisco, entitled “What Does it Take to Dominate the World?”

Hooson chaired the Commission on the History of Geographical Thought, jointly sponsored by the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and the International Geographical Union. Awarded fellowships by the Institute of International Studies in 1968 and 1973, the Guggenheim Foundation in 1976 and the Mellon in 1984-85, Hooson was made Honorary Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 2000, and received the University of California Meritorious Service Citation in 2001.

Beyond his seminal scholarship, scintillating teaching and benevolent but exacting mentoring — he was proud that none of his students failed to complete a dissertation — Hooson’s legacy endures in the extraordinary warmth and compassionate generosity of his relations with colleagues, students, family, and neighbours. He claimed that his exuberant beard, admired by Russians on recent visits there for its likeness to that of Karl Marx, led some to see him as Darwin, others as Santa Claus. “If I can achieve such virtual fame simply by not shaving,” he told graduates at a recent convocation, “think what you can do.” His delight in life, his sense of fun and his kindness endeared him to every community he touched.

Hooson is survived by his wife, Cariadne Margaret, and by a son and daughter of a previous marriage.

Professor David Hooson, geographer, was born on April 25, 1926. He died on May 16, 2008, aged 82