Ukrainian Waste for the Soviet Economy: Shaping the National Narrative

Abstract

The environmental history of Ukraine in the twentieth century is replete with various and still understudied facets. However, contemporary research predominantly employs imperial narratives, which elucidate it through the prism of Soviet history, depriving it of subjectivity and the uniqueness of the local context. This essay proposes an alternative approach. Through the example of waste recycling in the Ukrainian SSR, which was one of the Soviet republics from 1922 to 1991, we aim to demonstrate the importance of reinterpreting its environmental history by studying multi-vector centre–periphery relations in the Soviet Union. This case seeks to demonstrate not only the formation in the 1920s of Soviet colonial practices of resource extraction, including that of waste, from the periphery – the Soviet republics – but also attempts to resist these in the first decade of the Soviet totalitarian regime’s formation. This essay is based on documents from Ukrainian archives, which are introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, and on statistical collections of documents from the USSR.