Oldfield, Jonathan D. and Shaw, Denis J. B. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 543 One failing in the volume is that not all of the potentially interesting material is identifiable in the (generally good) index. For example, on page 30 Rady observes that several of the earliest surviving Hungarian wills are by women, a fact which he ‘suggests that they felt especially vulnerable to coercion but also to convenient lapses in the [non-textual] memory of kinsmen’. This is something of a throw-away remark, but there is obvious potential for further consideration from a gender history perspective. But the index has no entry for ‘women’, so one cannot always find such points without reading through the book. Unsurprisingly, there are also challenges in handling legal terms in a different language. This is to be expected. Legal terms are often specific to particular (geographic or cultural) communities, which have no ready alternatives to hand. But using technical English terms might mislead. For example, the protonotaries are described as linked with ‘inns’ (pp. 54, 55 and 122), with the index even referring to ‘inns of court’. Lawyers are described as being trained by ‘pupillage’ (pp. 159 and 161). I am not sure whether these English terms, associated with barristers, accurately describe the Hungarian model or not. These are important qualifications, but they should not detract from the achievement of this volume. Hungarian legal history has become much more accessible. It is thought-provoking, provides new insights and is full of material which should stimulate historians from a wide variety of perspectives. Rady has shown that the history of customary law in Hungary is central to the history of Hungary. Faculty of Laws, UCL Ian Williams Oldfield, Jonathan D. and Shaw, Denis J. B. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2015. xv + 196 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£95.00: $160.00. Russian scientists have developed distinctive ways of conceptualizing the natural environment over the past century and a half. Their ideas have drawn on diverse disciplinary traditions — everything from black earth pedology to early adventures in thinking about the cosmos — and traversed a fraught ideological terrain of statism, utilitarianism and Marxism. For Jonathan Oldfield and Denis Shaw these theories coalesced around the field of geography: a science with a rich and underappreciated past in Russia. The primary mission of their deeply researched and contemplated monograph is to SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 544 demonstrate the complexity and sophistication of these ideas and reveal their pertinence for the broader study of beliefs about the natural world in Russian and Soviet history. As historical geographers well-immersed in the fields of environmental history and the history of science, Oldfield and Shaw succeed in providing an informative and valuable synthesis for an interdisciplinary audience. The authors approach their topic chronologically, beginning with the appearance of the sciences in Russia in the era of Peter the Great and concluding with the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule. Such an organization allows them to chart the origins, developments and shifts in geographical thinking. For instance, they highlight how the genetic soil science of Vasilii Dokuchaev and his followers in the late nineteenth century played a significant role in the rise of ideas about natural complexes, physical-geographical regions and natural zones. Near the end of the book, Oldfield and Shaw also argue that geographers after Stalin were able to more effectively make the case for the rational application of science as a necessary means of both transforming and protecting the natural world. In doing so, they helped curtail the rampant Prometheanism of the Soviet Union in earlier periods. Throughout their chronological overview, the authors foreground three dominant concepts that developed in the Russian geographical sciences: landscape, geographical envelope and geographical environment. Attention to landscape as the key unit of geographical study preoccupied Lev Berg (1876–1950) in particular. He drew directly on German ideas from the tsarist era and indirectly on the soil science of Dokuchaev to theorize that specific formations on the earth’s surface were the proper unit of study for physical geographers. The broad range of natural processes and phenomena active in particular places gave rise to landscapes that...