Cold War Ecology: Forests, Farms, and People in the East German Landscape, 1945–1989 (review)

Fifteen years have passed since John Gaddis produced a scathing critique of international relations theory for its failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. In an article titled "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," appearing in the Winter 1992/1993 issue of International Security, Gaddis threw into question the basic worth of the discipline because, in his view, its practitioners did not fulfill the criterion that defined their purpose: namely, to forecast future trends in the Cold War. Of course, no one anywhere predicted with certainty the end of the Cold War, and this academic controversy remains an instructive reminder that the forces governing international relations are notoriously unwilling to conform to behavioral models. But looking back, what if there was another determinant, far removed from the radar of political theory, that offered clearer signs of impending doom in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc?

For Arvid Nelson, the enormously destructive environmental policies of the USSR and its East European satellites lay at the heart of the Communist experiment that was bound to fail: plummeting forest resources, sterilized farmland, poisoned water supplies, cities deprived of fresh air, and a diseased citizenry are not the stuff of enduring empires. Nelson's incisive focus on the forty-year crumbling of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—long considered by Western observers as the ultimate marriage of Soviet productivity and German ingenuity—demonstrates that Marxism-Leninism was unsustainable as both a political and an environmental system. In fact, Nelson's study shows that the two cannot be separated: Fundamental to the Communist worldview was the subordination of political as well as ecological diversity to the will of the state in its relentless pursuit of a classless society through centralized industrial planning. Ecologists have long understood that the health of a given ecosystem depends on the diversity of species living in it. Nelson's study surveys the environmental destruction of East Germany mandated by a totalitarian command economy. Nelson traces the impulse to impose order on the natural environment to Karl Marx himself, whom he calls the "consummate Christian missionary bearing an ideology of progress locked in inevitable triumphant conflict with custom and nature" (p. 15), thus dispensing quickly with the classic argument over whether Communism as implemented during the Cold War represents a distortion or an extension of Marx's philosophy.

Although the political and chronological backdrop of Nelson's study is the Cold War, the tension that drives the narrative is only tangentially related to the Soviet-American competition. In World War II the most hostile ideological clash pitted Soviet Communism against German Nazism, and postwar Soviet-German relations proved no different. In contrast to the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany in nearly every other realm, environmental policies in the Third Reich, according to Nelson, displayed "remarkable care for long-term values and the natural landscape" (p. 36), including German-occupied land in the Soviet Union during the war. The Soviet occupation of eastern Germany in the immediate postwar era did not return the favor: Nelson's description of Soviet clear-cutting of vast swaths of East German forests (known as "reparations harvests") might be considered the ecological analog to the systematic raping of German women by Soviet soldiers, as documented by Norman Naimark and others.

Although the destruction of German forests demonstrated the punitive power of the Soviet postwar occupation, land reform and forced collectivization in the newly created GDR were what finally extended the Bolshevik Revolution into Central Europe. It is not surprising that official attempts to reorder rural life around the collective were met with resistance at nearly every turn. What is revelatory is Nelson's explanation of the furtive migration of East Germans to the West (and consequent construction of the Berlin Wall) as a major response to the environmental upheaval mandated by the Sovietization of agriculture.

Nelson locates the beginning of...