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.

However, in 1915 he did become involved with the Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces (KEPS) which assisted in the wartime mobilisation of resources in the Russian Empire.

He argued for a second government-sponsored commission to study the population along the lines of the American Bureau of Ethnology.

The Russian Academy of Sciences dismissed his proposal as unrealisable, but did establish within KEPS a Committee for the Description of Russia by Region.

This turn around has been explained as arising from the situation when there was little scope for ethnographers to do independent research as many had been drafted into military hospitals and similar institutions to help with the war effort.