The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow ed. by Julia Herzberg, Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow ed. by Julia Herzberg, Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle Matthew P. Romaniello Herzberg, Julia; Renner, Andreas and Schierle, Ingrid (eds). The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow. The Environment in History: International Perspectives, 22. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2021. vii + 261 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $145.00; £107.00. Julia Herzberg continues to make important interventions in the field by focusing on the history of the environment and its influence over Russian and Soviet history. This new volume, edited alongside Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle, follows an earlier volume by Herzberg, Christian Kehrt and Franziska Torma — Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (New York and Oxford, 2018). The two volumes significantly overlap in their focus on the twentieth century, though the earlier encompassed a broader geography while the current volume centres on the Soviet Union in eight of its eleven chapters. The Russian Cold also contains three chapters that look back into the pre-revolutionary era — two by Herzberg on the eighteenth century and one on views of Siberia in the late imperial press by Nataliia Rodigina. The earlier chapters are an important addition here, as the themes raised demonstrate that scientific and popular conceptions of the influence of the cold have a long history, of which the Soviet iterations reflected historical developments rather than modern innovations. [End Page 568] What remains as impressive here as in the first volume is the variety of disciplinary approaches offered by the contributors. The ‘cold’ in this volume becomes an unstable category of analysis. The history of science is the focus of the first section, followed by a cultural approach including two chapters focused on Soviet cinema by Oksana Bulgakowa and Roman Mauer, and then chapters focused on the impact of climate on the Second World War (Aleksandr Kuzminykh), tourism (Aleksei Popov) and masculinity and sports (Alexander Ananyev). At times the cold is a subject of climatological inquiry, the object of exploration (Erki Tammiksaar and Denis J. B. Shaw), a visual marker in the chapters on the press and film, a sensory experience, or a location for activity. The volume offers no single concept of coldness, which may open the field to further inquiries rather than resolving the topic for future researchers. The first section offers several perspectives on the politicization of science both in the tsarist and Soviet eras. Herzberg considers the Academy of Sciences’ response to the ongoing critique of Enlightened-thinkers such Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who relied on Russia as his example of the danger of a cold climate. Experiments launched in St Petersburg and across Siberia attempted to gather data to respond to this assertion. In the Soviet era, its scientists attempt to prove imperial Russia’s breakthrough in discovering Antarctica and promoting their own Marxist-inspired analysis of geography to explain the unique features of the Subarctic to reject the popularity of landscape science offered by Western geographers. The next section focuses on representations of the cold across media and offers fresh insights into this fundamentally important symbol of Russia. Rodigina’s insightful chapter on the thick journals’ reliance on Siberia’s cold as a mechanism to create a sense of national pride over its unique geography connects to the earlier chapter on the history of science. The cold climate, for these authors, was not so much an experience than a valuable symbol for inculcating nationalism, or as Rodigina insightfully captures from these journals, a ‘poetics of a godforsaken place’ (p. 126), turning a source of criticism to one of national strength. Mauer’s chapter on cinema moves these images onto the screen, arguing that Soviet films promoted a vision of masculinity that required its subjects to demonstrate their ability to overcome ‘the national trauma of powerlessness’ through their ‘liberation from cold Siberia’ (p. 170). The final section shifts to presenting the cold climate as an opportunity, either for tourism or sport, or as an obstacle, as in the Second World War. What holds this section together is an understanding of the physical experience of cold, as it...