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

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Z The Song of the Forests, Dmitrii Shostakovich’s seventh choral piece and his first oratorio, debuted in Leningrad on 15 November 1949. The Moscow debut, eleven days later, so delighted the Party’s cultural arbiters that they awarded Shostakovich the Stalin Prize the next year. The oratorio’s success was scarcely accidental, as the project had been designed specifically for propaganda purposes . The score, soaringly harmonious and studiously accessible, used folk themes to e voke patriotic fervor, while the libretto unself-consciously celebrated Stalin’s brilliance: In the Kremlin, the first rays of dawn shone. The Great Leader, in wise contemplation, went up to a great map. About the glorious deeds, about the invincible homeland, about the people’s happiness, our beloved Leader thought. And with his strong hand, which had led regiments to victory, he took the pennants from the map.1 In accordance with Stalin’s conviction that the country must be reforested in order to save it, the oratorio called upon listeners to “dress the homeland in forests,” thereby creating a new national guard of maples, beeches, and oaks.2 The obviously calculated nature of The Song of the Forests brought Shostakovich personal anguish—he is said to have returned home and collapsed in sobs after the first performance, having compromised himself with such blatant and unseemly propaganda—but it raises a curious question: why would eulogizing the forest represent an effective means of currying the favor of 2 • int r oduc t ion Joseph Stalin? The most direct answer points to the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, a vast effort to establish millions of acres of forests in southern Russia, which had been announced the year before. Yet this explanation leads to another question: why did Stalin’s government, so often described as hostile to environmentalism and wild nature, see afforestation as a worthy aim and trees as possessing the power to cure Soviet ills? A complete answer to this question reaches back to the first decade of the twentieth century, long before the Soviet era, when there emerged alternative environmental ethics linking Russian identity, forest health, and sustainable economic development. These ethics gained great popularity before Bolshevik policies, and especially the policy of rapid industrialization, made such ideas irrelevant. However, forest conservation soon reemerged as an item of active concern in Stalin’s Soviet Union, precisely because proponents of conservation were able to convince the Party leadership that a healthy Russian landscape, one that would sustain intensive economic development, required the preservation of forest cover. Forest conservation returned to prominence, and the Soviet Union in the 1940s went about protecting from exploitation more forested land than any other country in history. Accordingly, it is accurate to say that the Soviet Union developed a real and effective environmentalist program, although an unusual one. In the United States and in Europe, environmental protection evolved in the nineteenth century to promote either conservationism (the belief that natural resources are scarce and special steps need to be taken to make them last in perpetuity) or preservationism (the belief that untouched nature possesses an inherent value and thus should be set aside for human enjoyment). But environmentalism reaches beyond preservationism and conservationism; if environmentalism is defined as the political and philosophical program that seeks to impose limits on human activity so as to preserve the integrity of the environment—a definition that encompasses public health initiatives as well as conservationism and preservationism—then the Soviet Union did indeed pursue environmentalism . In the story told here, Stalin emerges as a peculiar kind of environmentalist : although not apparently driven by conservationist or preservationist concerns, his policies withdrew millions of hectares from economic exploitation on the grounds that this would improve the hydrology of the Soviet Union. These millions of hectares were left more or less untouched, in keeping with the supposition that complex, wild forests best regulated water flows, and thus one may conclude that Stalin’s policies were steadfastly environmentalist —and because of the way they were carried out, preservationist as well. Such an assertion, clearly, represents a significant revision to the existing consensus about Soviet environmental politics, which holds that Stalin’s government was implacably hostile to environmentalist initiatives. This consensus emerged for good reason: by the late 1980s, scholars of Soviet environmental history had documented a number of grave environmental problems in Russia, int r oduc t ion • 3 many of...