Soviet Writers, Moscow Institutions, and the Spread of Nationalist Environmentalism during Glasnost’

• In Event: Cultural Transfers: How Discourses, Forms, and Literature Moved within the Soviet Union and across Its Borders

Abstract

This paper analyzes the ways in which Soviet cultural institutions based in Moscow facilitated the spread of nationalist environmentalism across republican borders during the period of glasnost’. During the late 1980s, Soviet intellectuals famously mobilized around environmental causes. Writers’ efforts to draw attention to the impact of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the pollution of Lake Baikal gained widespread attention. Writers from rural backgrounds played a particularly important role in bringing environmental issues to the forefront of public debate in the second half of the 1980s. This paper will examine the involvement of three writers from rural backgrounds—Oles’ Honchar (Ukraine), Ion Druță (Moldova), and Valentin Rasputin (Russia)—and their involvement in Soviet environmental activism during glasnost’. Moscow-based publications and institutions played a key role in facilitating the spread of their ideas across the Soviet space, helping to make their particular brand of environmentalism a pan-Soviet phenomenon. Rural writers' environmental advocacy attacked Soviet government institutions and ministries as indifferent to the health of ordinary Soviet citizens. As faith in the Soviet government evaporated, many began to present the nation as a viable alternative project to the Soviet state. This paper will show how the environmentally-based nationalism that emerged from their activism was, ironically, a product of the same Soviet empire they ultimately sought to dismantle.

Author

• Erin Hutchinson, U of Colorado Boulder