Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History by Breyfogle Nicholas B. (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 559 effect two Russian laws — but a spectrum of situations in which Russian law operates more or less (and the gradations are important) as other developed legal systems (or not), and if not, why? The success or failure of law reform lies not in the number of reform enactments adopted, but in their substance and the extent to which they truly replace earlier legislation adopted on a fundamentally different ideological and conceptual basis. Estimates vary, but upwards of 20,000 enactments survive from the Soviet period; that is, remain in force and have not been supplanted. These cannot fail to affect the mentality and legal consciousness of the Russian legal system. This is a volume well worthy of adoption for advanced undergraduate courses on Russian affairs and an excellent addition to a promising series. One minor reproach: the author repeats (as have others recently) the anecdote of Peter the Great having but two lawyers in his country, one of whom he meant to hang upon his return from England (p. 14). This is pure fiction, invented by Jacob von Stāhlin (1709–85) in his Original Anecdotes of the Russian Empire (London, 1788). Dickinson Law W. E. Butler Pennsylvania State University Breyfogle, Nicholas B. (ed.). Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018. xx + 401 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Acronyms. Glossary. Notes. Index. $34.95 (paperback). This book, which began life as a conference at Ohio State University in 2011, is a collection of seventeen essays which examine varied aspects of the environmental history of the territory of imperial Russia and the USSR between the late seventeenth century and 1991. The contributors are largely junior and American though some room is found for a handful of senior American, Russian and European scholars. The essays are subdivided into five sections plus an introduction and a conclusion. The sections are entitled: ‘Steppe Environments’ (with essays on steppe forestry; nomads and settlers on the Kazakh steppe in the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries; stock raising on the Kazakh steppe; and droughts and climate change in the steppe, 1960s–80s), ‘Water Engineering’ (two essays on irrigation in Soviet Central Asia), ‘Land, Rocks, Soil’ (Liebig and Russian/Soviet soil science; nepheline in the Soviet North; permafrost), ‘Fruits of the Waters’ (fisheries and the environmental ethic of the Pomors (two SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 560 essays);fishingandconservationintheRussianFarEast;andwhalinginthelate imperial and Soviet periods), and ‘Bodies, Disease, Health and Environment’ (essays on the Crimean health resorts; and mosquito control in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1920s and 1930s). All the essays are supported by extensive notes with many archival and bibliographical references. Unfortunately no overall bibliographies are provided, a substantial disadvantage for scholars. Though not all the essays are of a uniformly high standard, this collection includes numerous valuable contributions. The relative youthfulness of many of the authors is no doubt one factor — proximity to one’s PhD thesis and a good knowledge of the principal sources make for originality and critical acumen. Overall the collection makes the important point that the Russian/ Soviet imperial experience was by no means exceptional and had many environmental parallels in other empires and extended states. The idea of Russia as a ‘tribute-taking’ state and empire is adopted by a number of authors but with the important rider that this was also true of other empires, with indigenous peoples and even the empires’ own ethnicities being the chief victims. The notion that the desire to improve the lot of the people was superseded, especially under Stalin, by the determination to modernize as quickly as possible to fortify the state (to the detriment of the mass of the population) is widely acknowledged. However, the geopolitical realities which confronted Russia/the USSR are not fully recognized by all the authors. Russia/ USSR as a relatively backward state overtly or covertly threatened by more advanced states, especially those to its west, is the geopolitical context against which its rulers operated. This may still be true today. For the present writer, the one major disappointment of the present volume lies in the exaggerated claims which are made for the originality of the ‘environmental history approach...