Soviet Environmental History and the Cultural Turn

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method III: Neoliberal/Cultural Turn in Histories of Socialism

Abstract

While the Soviet Union struggled to stem the tide of social crisis and a fledging economy, emerging environmental movements in the late 1980s, activated in part by the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and the influx of Western NGOs, married environmental concerns to their bid for national self-determination. Around the same time, in our field, the publication and then translation of Andreas Kappeler’s “The Russian Empire” signified a transition from structural and social history to a new kind of cultural historicism that focused on national identities, the creation and contestation of national cultures, and the role of nations within empires. The emerging field of Environmental History fit nicely with this transition in so far as the analysis of the USSR’s relationship to nature suggested something about its moral economy. The geopolitical changes wrought by collapse and economic disintegration begged to be analyzed in terms of environmental destruction, negligence, and state hubris in order to put a final nail in the coffin of positive assessments of the largest Socialist experiment in world history. This paper explores the confluence of these changes at the “end of history” and asks environmental historians 1) whether getting back to material history provides a way of challenging some of the preconceptions we have about the USSR’s relationship to nature, 2) whether the conditions of economic collapse in the 1990s prepared us to accept only declensionist narratives, 3) to critically consider these questions in light of our reading lists in graduate studies, and 4) the role of liberal-leaning academic presses and how our scholarship appeals to that market as a requisite to career consolidation.

Author

• Alexander Thomas Herbert, Worcester Polytechnic Inst