An Interview with Kate Brown

One of the most distinctive and important voices in our field, Kate Brown has crafted a unique place for herself as a scholar able to traverse disciplinary and geographical boundaries and to flourish in borderlands, both literal and figurative. She began her career as a student of Russian literature at the University of Wisconsin before ultimately choosing to specialize in history at the University of Washington, where she continued to read novels and received her PhD in 2000. Since then, she has published four books, over two dozen scholarly articles, and two special issues of International Labor and Working Class History, while actively engaging a broader audience in mass media.

After just under two decades at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Brown has recently taken up a new post as professor of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches both history and creative nonfiction history writing. As she recounts in this interview, finding her own narrative voice as a historian required her to disregard, at times, the advice of her advisers (not to neglect the often staid conventions of our field), but the result has been a body of work that combines rigorous research (both in and well beyond the conventional archive) with innovative, engaging, and highly engaged and honest writing. Not surprisingly, she has already won a wide array of the most prestigious fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the European University Institute.

Inspired in part through her own experiences growing up in the American rust belt, Brown has privileged neglected and liminal places—from borderlands to modern industrial and nuclear wastelands—seeking to give voice and history to people too often overlooked. Following her first monograph on eastern Ukraine, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, which won the George Louis Beer Prize (American Historical Association, AHA), the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, ASEEES), and the Heldt Book Prize (Association for Women in Slavic Studies, AWSS), Brown has been increasingly drawn to environmental history.¹ Her second book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, which won eight major prizes, presents what she describes here as the "spliced" histories of two nuclear communities, Richland in eastern Washington and Ozersk in the Soviet Urals, both of which were built around plutonium processing plants—Hanford and Maiak, respectively—that caused vast, ongoing, and largely hidden environmental disasters, each significantly larger in scope than Chernobyl.² A major contribution to both US and Soviet history, Plutopia deliberately subverted Cold War tropes that perpetuate binary notions of systemic difference, instead tracking the many commonalities in these two histories and rejecting simplistic explanations based on commonplaces about political-ideological systems or national cultures. Following her third book, a collection of essays titled Dispatches from Dystopia: Writing History in Places Not Yet Forgotten, Brown has just published an important and sometimes controversial new monograph, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future.³ While this book has been extensively discussed outside the United States, especially in the United Kingdom, with editions forthcoming in France and Poland, its initial reception in this country has been more muted, raising questions about media, politics, and corporate power. Nevertheless, the unexpected success of the recent HBO series Chernobyl has increased the public's interest, which makes the appearance of Brown's book particularly timely.

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How did you get into the field of Soviet history? What were the most influential books you read as an undergraduate and/or graduate student?

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, he reignited rhetoric about the "Evil Empire" and the need to build more nuclear weapons. US engineers dusted off mothballed nuclear bomb production plants and started them back up. The United States and the USSR were engaged in proxy conflicts in Afghanistan and Angola. Reagan, with a mind to the polls, showed US power by invading tiny countries such as Grenada to defeat "communism." It...