Lighting Fires over the Taiga: Symbolic Geographies of Siberian Hydroelectricity

• In Event: Soviet Energy Humanities: Resource Extraction in the Russophone Imagination

Abstract

Siberian hydroelectricity played a defining role in official Thaw-era Soviet discourse and state energy policy, becoming a ubiquitous image of Soviet technological prowess in films, literature, and songs of the era. This paper examines images of the Angara river in Thaw-era lyrical depictions of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Station (GES): Alexandra Pakhmutova’s Komsomol songs, Alexander Tvardovsky’s Distance Beyond Distance, and Evgenii Evtushenko’s Bratsk Station. These works generate a distinct symbolic geography of the dammed watershed, wherein the hydrological features of the river and the subsequent “Bratsk Sea” reservoir become a means for processing the ideological and existential concerns of de-Stalinization and Thaw-era idealism.

Author

• Maria Karen Whittle, UC Berkeley