Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials

Russian Environmental History

Directions and Potentials

Just think about how nature abounds in Russian history. The prefatory remarks that many historical surveys make about the harsh climate and geographical conditions of the country, the famous importance of black-earth regions for agriculture, the acerbic debates about land repartitioning at various noteworthy moments, the romance of the forest and the steppe in both elite and popular culture, and the noted disregard for environmental stewardship by both the communist and the post-communist regimes constitute just a few instances of how the natural world already imbues our understanding of the Russian past. A branch of historical research that specifically devotes itself to integrating the natural world is environmental history. Emerging with the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, environmental history encompasses a large range of work addressing conservation movements, conceptions of nature, the ecological dynamics of frontier settlement, and the impact of agricultural and industrial development on the natural world and human societies (to offer only a few examples). In it the natural world is not simply a background but a dynamic force, treated on the register of interaction.

Though this field of study has become quite well established among historians of the United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and other regions, environmental history remains in a paradoxical situation in Russian historiography: Russianists have been at the forefront of the field in terms of its antecedents, its creation, and its development, but currently an undeniable dearth of literature exists on a region that by the size of its territory alone carries global significance in environmental history. The first side of this parity seems to have gone unnoticed, so it is worth briefly remarking on it here. Environmental historians of America and Europe have looked to Frederick Jackson Turner and Annales historians such as Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as influential predecessors.¹ However, our eminent academic ancestors—Sergei Solov´ev and Vasilii Kliuchevskii—also elaborated on the effects of the natural environment on humans and specifically on Russian national character and development.² Additionally, none other than Richard Pipes earned himself a place on an early environmental history bibliography for his theorizing about the effects of geography on Russian political development in Russia under the Old Regime.³ Scholars also have produced strong work in the discipline of historical geography, which is quite closely related to environmental history, and there has been no shortage of literature exposing Soviet environmental damage.⁴

Futhermore, since the self-conscious emergence of the subfield, historians of Russia have played an active role. Kendall Bailes, perhaps best known to this audience for his 1978 book, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, helped organize and host the first conference of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) and later edited a collection of essays introducing the field.⁵ Douglas Weiner, the most prominent practitioner of Russian environmental history, not only recently served as president of the ASEH but also expressed similar reservations about essentializing tendencies in environmentalism several years before the volume Uncommon Ground, edited by William Cronon, pushed environmental historians to be more critical in analyzing inherently contested meanings of nature.⁶

Despite these accomplishments, work on Russian environmental history is still just beginning to accumulate. Little more than a...