Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953

Conclusion

168 Civilizations are like forests. They grow and change over time; they expand, and they contract. Neighbors invade them, and natural calamities alter their composition. Yet at the same time they are embodiments of continuity, and they create conditions that promote their own survival. They generate unique subcultures that defend the collective against incursion, and given favorable circumstances, they produce self-propagating entities capable of surviving for millennia. When they are knocked down, they grow back—but they do not grow back as they were before. Anxiety that the Russian national culture was failing to regenerate itself drove a wide array of writers to express their worries in print at the end of the imperial period. Anton Chekhov famously worried in The Cherry Orchard that the aristocracy, so instrumental in molding the Russian cultural ecosystem into a phenomenon of world significance, was self-destructing. At almost the exact same time, Georgii Morozov made an essentially identical observation in reference to the forest itself and urged forest managers to embrace his new theory of the forest lest the Russian forest be transformed into something less valuable and less beautiful. Both Chekhov and Morozov lamented the fact that the venerable communities that surrounded them, that formed their identities and provided their lives with meaning, were fading from view, subject to the seemingly irresistible pressures of modern life. Morozov went one step beyond Chekhov, however; while Chekhov expressed concern that something vital to Russian civilization was being lost, Morozov sought to provide a soluCONCLUSION Z co nc l usion • 169 tion to the problem. If Chekhov resigned himself to the inevitable advance of European concepts like capitalism, materialism, and egalitarianism, Morozov believed the battle for Russian cultural independence might still be won—that the European invader might be defeated or at least tamed. This belief lay at the heart of Morozov’s theory of the forest, and it was his belief that Russia was capable of organizing itself according to different principles that ultimately made his theory so popular. Although it would be too simplistic to label Morozov’s theory as purely Slavophile in inspiration, because of its debt to Western science and especially Darwinism, Morozov did offer a scientific system infused with Russian Orthodox piety and mysticism. It was the Russianness of Morozov’s theory that first brought it great acclaim , and it was also its Russianness that allowed it to endure in the Bolshevik cultural ecosystem, eventually a cornerstone for Soviet forest policy. Although Bolshevism was a self-consciously Westernizing political movement, one that revered the German ideology of Marxism and sought to install egalitarianism, rationalism, materialism, and industrialism, it was impossible for the Bolsheviks to disregard fundamental aspects of the Russian cultural heritage entirely, including the beliefs and concerns that inspired Morozov to formulate his theory , because self-propagating aspects of Russian culture continued to operate in the minds of Soviet policy makers.1 Morozov’s supporters were able to convince the party leadership to embrace a very Russian idea: that healthy landscapes included forests and thus that sustainable Soviet economic development could not proceed without forest protection. After a brief period of dominance from 1929 to 1931 , the most radical and mechanistic Bolshevik ideas about forest management were relegated to the outlying “Type III” forests of Siberia and the far north, while Morozov’s vitalistic concepts about forests as living entities gained dominance in the forests of the Russian heartland. In fact, Morozov’s reputation grew to such size that in 1968, the Soviet Union created the Georgii Fedorovich Morozov Prize to recognize exceptional achievements in forestry . The surprising influence of romantic conceptions of forest management despite official and often fierce ideological hostility, and the eventual recognition of Morozov as a Soviet hero, demonstrates the power of cultural continuity to influence and even trump political considerations. The Russian cultural ecosystem continued to support ideas about the central role that forests play in healthy landscapes, regardless of ephemeral political shifts and even the upheaval of Stalin’s Great Break. The Soviet appropriation of Morozov’s theories led to t he creation of a unique, distinctly Soviet form of environmentalism, herein called Stalinist environmentalism. (Here the descriptor Stalinist is used, not because Soviet forest protection used coercion to achieve its ends, as is sometimes the implication of the word, but instead to echo Stephen Kotkin’s use of the word Stalinism in Magnetic Mountain—Stalinism as a unique civilization with its own customs, mores, and values.)2 Concerns about pollution, aesthetics...