In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 5 Dictators like trees. Perhaps the appeal lies in the fact that forests vibrate with a kind of cultural resonance most helpful to authoritarian political actors, tying a dictatorship to the nation’s distant poetic past and creating an impression of stability for the future. The Nazi regime famously endorsed green politics in general and Dauerwald in particular, mouthing the rhetoric of forest conservation even after war demands made Dauerwald’s tenets impractical.1 Benito Mussolini created a “National Forest Militia,” a black-shirted paramilitary group under the direction of the General Command of the Voluntary Militia for Natural Security, to assist in “technical work, reforestation . . . and propaganda in the field of silviculture.”2 Communist China placed considerable emphasis on afforestation in the early years of its existence and, after a hiatus during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, rededicated itself to forestry projects in 1978 with the Three North Shelterbelt Development Program, the “Green Great Wall,” which increased the forest cover of China’s northern regions from 5 percent to 9 percent. The Three North program was followed by nine other programs to increase forest cover throughout China, and efforts have extended into the twenty-first century.3 In short, although environmental preservation has frequently been linked with quality of life in liberal democracies, environmentalism , and forest conservationism especially, can produce benefits that redound to the collective just as much as to the individual. Hitler, Mussolini, and the heirs of Mao all enacted policies designed to expand forest cover, not for the enjoyment of individuals but to increase the power of the state.4 5 REGENERATION ForestConservationismReturnsto theSovietUnion Z 5 116 • re g ene r a t ion Stalin also actively promoted forest environmentalism for the benefit of the state, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world, but in a unique form, strongly influenced by prerevolutionary ideas about the Russian forest. Stalin’s environmental policies codified into law an assumption that healthy land was forested land and that deforestation represented serious environmental dangers to the state’s larger project of modernization, in the form of droughts, floods, hydrological disturbances, and crop failures. Accepting an argument made by forest ecologists struggling to recover from the setbacks dealt to conservationism in 1929 and 1930, Stalin’s government reversed course and in the 1930s and 1940s set aside ever larger tracts of Russia’s most valuable forests as preserves, off-limits to industrial exploitation. Forest protection ultimately rose to such prominence during the last six years of Stalin’s rule that the Politburo took control of the Soviet forest away from the Ministry of Heavy Industry and elevated the nation’s forest conservation bureau to the dominant position in implementing policy. The results of this struggle for supremacy in the forest, which pitted the Party leadership against those very bureaucratic interests assigned to carry out the Party’s industrial ambitions, provides another example of a rapidly industrializing, authoritarian regime endorsing environmental protection, if provided with a suitably collectivist rationale. Indeed, forest protection had l ong enjoyed sustained institutional support in the Soviet Union, but it found a secure place in Stalin’s system only after conservationists began to stress the practical significance of the forests in rapid industrialization. In the 1920s, conservationists promoted the concept of sustainable yield for its own sake, and the Soviet government tended to support this view. However, industrialists and student activists, acting in concert with the industrializing push of the first Five-Year Plan, were able to label such concepts as bourgeois. In response, advocates of conservationism regained the upper hand in the 1930s by citing the theories of the prerevolutionary soil scientist V. V. Dokuchaev, who linked the hydrological stability of Russia to the maintenance of permanent forest cover.5 By arguing that deforestation would increase the silt load of the rivers, and thus decrease the life span of the regime ’s hydroelectric dams, conservationists provided an argument that industrialists never successfully rebutted, thereby enabling the institutionalization of environmentalism.6 After 1931 , hydrological concerns became the justification for the creation of a vast forest preserve in the center of European Russia, at the time the largest in the world. The decision to create an enormous forest preserve represented a compromise , advanced by Stalin himself, to settle the long-standing dispute between conservationists and industrialists about what form socialism would take in the forest. As previously described, the Soviet leadership attempted to pursue the ideals of both forest conservation and aggressive industrialization in the 1920s and...

Share