A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s*
In: The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewIn the late Soviet period, environmental issues gained an unprecedented media resonance and dramatic socio-political importance. The “Ecological Revolution” took a tragic turn in the Soviet Union, against the background of high-impact industrial and natural disasters. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station (Ukraine, 1986) and in a context of increased free-speech, Soviet citizens seized on new and old, covered up or forgotten environmental issues and demanded that a hesitant government put them on the political agenda. In a mixture of media revelations, mass demonstrations, and intense voluntary-sector activity, environmental issues of local, national and global significance ranked high among the main preoccupations of the Soviet population. In this introduction to a special issue of SPSR on the environmental history of the late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, we explore new avenues of understanding the upsurge of ecological perestroika from the 1960s to the 2010s.
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5)
Andy Bruno, “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 635–650, here 636.
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7)
Gestwa, “Ökologischer Notstand,” 368; Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Island Press, 2002), 163–203; Christopher J. Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly: the Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 12–41; Gestwa, Stalinschen Großbauten, 537–542; Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 355–373.
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12)
V. Larin et al., Okhrana prirody Rossii: Ot Gorbacheva do Putina (Moskva: KMK, 2003); Douglas Weiner, “The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History,” in Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 276–315.
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13)
Julia Obertreis, “Der ‘Angriff auf die Wüste’ in Zentralasien : Zur Umweltgeschichte der Sowjetunion,” Osteuropa 58, no. 4–5 (2008): 37–56 and “Von der Naturbeherrschung zum Ökozid? Aktuelle Fragen einer Umweltzeitgeschichte Ost- und Ostmitteleuropas”, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online Version, 9 (2012), 1, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Obertreis-1-2012.
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16)
Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature. Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
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A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s*
In: The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewIn the late Soviet period, environmental issues gained an unprecedented media resonance and dramatic socio-political importance. The “Ecological Revolution” took a tragic turn in the Soviet Union, against the background of high-impact industrial and natural disasters. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station (Ukraine, 1986) and in a context of increased free-speech, Soviet citizens seized on new and old, covered up or forgotten environmental issues and demanded that a hesitant government put them on the political agenda. In a mixture of media revelations, mass demonstrations, and intense voluntary-sector activity, environmental issues of local, national and global significance ranked high among the main preoccupations of the Soviet population. In this introduction to a special issue of SPSR on the environmental history of the late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, we explore new avenues of understanding the upsurge of ecological perestroika from the 1960s to the 2010s.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 995 | 354 | 26 |
| Full Text Views | 282 | 54 | 4 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 230 | 131 | 8 |