He was a member of the Russian Geographical Society and convened the ethnographic sub-section of the 12th Congress of Russian Natural Scientists and Physicians held in Moscow in 1909. Here he pushed for the professionalisation of ethnography as compared to missionaries and amateurs. However he opposed Lev Sternberg's call for the establishment of an imperial bureau of ethnography, fearing that the discipline would become too tied up with the Tsarist bureaucracy.