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 ReviewSearch for other papers by Laurent Coumel in
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In 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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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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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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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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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 ReviewSearch for other papers by Laurent Coumel in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Marc Elie in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
In 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 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2200 | 403 | 32 |
| Full Text Views | 431 | 28 | 5 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 666 | 63 | 1 |
