The Royal Geographical Society of London was founded in 1830. Russian seafarers and hiking explorers kept pace with their British colleagues. Famous Russian travelers Fyodor Litke, Ferdinand Wrangell and Ivan Kruzenshtern, naturalist Karl Baer, ethnographer Vladimir Dal and other scientists and public figures turned to Emperor Nicholas I with a request to assist in establishing the Russian Geographical Society. Their request was appreciated and the Emperor ruled to provide up to 10 thousand rubles in silver from the state treasury for Society’s needs. On October 19, 1845, Vice Admiral Fyodor Petrovich Litke opened the first meeting of the Russian Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg in the large conference hall of the Academy of Sciences. Scientists and enthusiasts were to perform titanic work. “Our fatherland with its longitude being larger than the semicircle of the Earth means a special part of the world for us... Besides, this part of the world has not been profoundly explored yet,” Litke said to encourage his colleagues rather than frighten them. However, the Russian geographers had enough enthusiasm even without that. Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, Yuly Shokalsky, Nikolay Vavilov – both these leaders of the Russian Geographical Society and their followers were the adherents of the motto inscribed above the first page of the first Charter of the Society: “Knowledge of the Russian State.”