Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History ed. by Nicholas Breyfogle (review)

Most edited volumes aren’t worth reading in their entirety, but Eurasian Environments is an exception to this rule. This kind of expansive and comparative volume, one that tackles 300 years of Eurasia’s ecological history under first the Russian, then Soviet empire, is sorely needed and long overdue in the field of environmental history. However, Eurasian Environments is not explicitly a book about the history of technology. How much here is relevant to scholars of this discipline? The short answer is plenty. Of the fifteen essays in this collection, five explicitly reference the history of technology, with case studies focused on technology-centric topics such as dams, central Asian irrigation projects, and the increasing mechanization of the fishing industry. Several other chapters embrace an envirotechnical perspective, examining the rise of scientific, industrial, and state networks that have impacted Eurasia’s diverse environments, including Pei-Yi Chu’s history of permafrost research as a narrative of state-sponsored environmental transformation during the Soviet period.

Nicholas Breyfogle has capably edited the volume. The book emerged from a conference he and U.S. colleagues organized in 2011. His introductory chapter provides a clear overview of overarching themes around which the book is organized. These include emphasizing the diversity of Eurasian environments, explaining how scientific knowledge about these environments was created, how ecology influenced empire building, and how environmental conservation remained a core value of both Soviet and imperial regimes, even as the depredations of rapacious industrialization contradicted this value. Breyfogle is also at pains to stress the inclusive nature of environment in this book, which embraces histories of science, technology, agriculture and food production, the impact of political power on the environment, and the long-term effects of industrialization. Wrangling fifteen separate essays from contributors could not have been an easy task, and the seven-year delay between the conference and published book occasionally shows. Several younger scholars featured in this series, notably Andy Bruno and Sarah Cameron, both graduate students in 2011, have gone on to publish excellent (and frankly better argued) first books on parallel topics to those featured here. Likewise, most footnotes do not cite scholarship produced after 2013. This is a shame, since there has been a veritable explosion of good work on comparative environmental and enviro-technical histories in the past five years. These are minor issues and do not significantly detract from the strength of the volume.

There are many gems in this book; I’ll highlight three that may be of particular interest to historians of technology. Marc Elie’s contribution tells the history of Soviet climate scientists who mistakenly (and perhaps even disingenuously) blamed underperforming farms on the Kazakh steppe on droughts and climate change during the 1970s. Meteorologists and climatologists struggled to link crop failures with erratic weather patterns in an attempt to save face in from for the state. Secondly, Christian Teichmann’s study of hydraulic empire building along the Amu Darya links Soviet engineering projects with global themes of state and power. Teichmann puts the state-building theories of Karl Wittfogel, James Scott, Kenneth Pomeranz, C. A. Bayly, and Stephen Kotkin into conversation with the correspondence of hydraulic engineers and kolkhoz bureaucrats, ultimately concluding that the vast majority of construction and state- building that occurred at the Soviet Union’s fringes was the result of “arbitrary mobilization by violent means,” reliant on the same primitive forms of limited and restricted state authority that hindered imperial projects globally in the nineteenth century. Finally, Pey-Yi Chu writes about the early history of permafrost science in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. Her work provides a smart new “alternative to the rhetoric of the conquest of nature” by reframing Soviet scientific interactions with permafrosts as experiments in adaptation rather than mastery. This is a confident, well written analysis that will pair well with earlier writings by Loren Graham...