A Society of Green Friends?: Civic Engineering, or the Urban Roots of Soviet Environmentality

• In Event: Legacies in Leaf: A Century of Making and Mapping Greenery in Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines the confluence of social and environmental epistemologies in Soviet urbanists’ efforts to liberate the built environment from imperial and capitalist antecedents through greening. Abundant green plantations in and around cities were expected to ameliorate industrial living conditions, while also signaling differences vis-à-vis capitalist models of urbanization and land use. Throughout the Soviet period, urban greening efforts enrolled both professionals and populace in the attempted realization of distinctively socialist ambitions for city-nature relations. These ambitions—for cities that were “hygienic, cultured and green;” for a pliant and eager population; for unified Soviet or socialist space—were rarely realized. That does not make them inconsequential, however. In tracing the development of the "Society of Green Friends" and other institutional and disciplinary sites of Soviet nature relations from the 1930s to the 1970s, this paper argues that state-sponsored efforts to standardize and popularize the greening and beautification of cities had unexpected effects. In particular, efforts to create green cities across the USSR meant adapting standardized planting schemes to an immense range of climate zones, and addressing the persistent mortality of the “green friends” themselves, the trees. Eventually, I argue that participation in urban greening and tree-protection campaigns grew into the late Soviet mass environmental movement, which some political scientists credit with de-stabilizing the USSR prior to its 1991 dissolution. When the trees intended to mitigate industrial hazards perished, so did the state-socialist political project of civic engineering.

Author

• Maria C Taylor, Cornell U