Song of the Forest. Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953 by Stephen Brain (review)

The Song of the Forests, as Stephen Brain reminds us at the start of this inspiring book, is a composition written by Shostakovich and played for the first time in November 1949. It extols Stalin as a “great gardener” in the context of the newly launched Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. This title retains much of the epic sense that pervades Brain’s narrative on the history of late tsarist and Soviet forestry. His fundamental argument contests the traditional view of Soviet environmental practices. Whereas previous works emphasized communist neglect for the environment, Brain points at a new interpretation, by contending that the top Soviet leadership embraced a rather conservationist approach in forestry and overall opposed the industrialist lobby, with the exception of a few years at the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan (1929–31). Brain calls the peculiar set of environmental conceptions developed in Russia at the time Stalinist environmentalism, to distinguish it both from conservationism and preservationism as they developed in Europe and the United States in the same period. Brain builds upon previous work by Douglas Weiner,¹ who focused on the institution of zapovedniki, nature reserves created at the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s. These reserves, which embodied wilderness and unviolated nature, were designated solely for scientific research. However, Brain questions the idea that the Great Turn meant a radical disruption in environmental practices and presents it rather as an interlude when industrials temporarily gained the upper hand.

The book follows a chronological outline, and each chapter focuses on an important moment in the history of Russian forests. The first two chapters cover the tsarist period, reviewing forestry policies since the eighteenth century, paying special attention to debates in the early 1900s. The next two chapters describe the transformations entailed by the Bolshevik Revolution and the rapid industrialization surge of the first Five-Year Plan. The final two chapters sketch out the forestry policies of late Stalinism, starting from the 1930s, and the history of the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Primary sources used in the book are essentially drawn from central Russian archives, above all the GARF and the RGAE. They reflect the point of view of central Soviet institutions involved in forest management, and are complemented by journal articles and books published at the time. Secondary literature referred to in the book is relatively limited and comprises standard works on environmental and Soviet history.

Brain’s analysis of forest management in the late tsarist era pays particular attention to the problem of cultural transfers between Germany and Russia. As he reminds us in Chapter 1, since the reign of Peter the Great Russian forestry had found inspiration in German initiatives. Germans occupied key positions in the forestry administration well into the nineteenth century. Training in a German university was considered a must for Russian forestry experts until the end of the tsarist era. The attraction of German forestry was largely due to its mathematical and abstract dimension, which purported to categorize any forest in the same conceptual frame. It proposed uniform solutions as far as possible and privileged a low level of ecological and biological diversity. At the end of the nineteenth century, Chapter 2 argues, the threat of deforestation and, above all, the decrease of forest variety was recognized as central by Russian forestry experts, and the German approach to forestry was subjected to growing criticism. A key proponent of this turn was Georgii Fedorovich Morozov (1867–1920), who occupies a prominent place in the book. First a defender of German theories, he turned against them in 1899. He was influenced by the work of the soil expert Vasily Dokuchaev, but of no less significance was the influence of Populist and Slavophile ideas about the uniqueness of the Russian landscape.

For Morozov, forests became a...