Soviet Environment Research Articles

Formation of the “chinese” segment among the uyghurs of Kazakhstan in the context of the adaptation of immigrants from China to the USSR in the 1950-1960s

The article examines specific features of adaptation of migrants, focusing on the case of the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan who moved from China to the USSR in the 1950-1960s. Migration from China to the USSR of that period was a top-down process; it was carried out according to an agreement between the governments of the two countries and in line with a general plan within the framework of repatriation campaign pursued by the Soviet government. It also was directly linked to the virgin-and-fallow-lands development campaign in Kazakhstan and was supposed to alleviate labor shortages. Adaptation of migrants to the Soviet environment was shaped in different ways and was specific for each ethnic group. For the Uyghurs, one of the important consequences of the adaptation was a formation of the “Chinese” segment in the Uyghur community of Kazakhstan.

Stones at War: The Chelyabinsk War Exhibition of 1946 and Soviet Environmental Thought

Abstract One year after the German surrender in World War II, an exhibition about the “Great Patriotic War” opened its doors in the regional museum of Chelyabinsk. The curators presented the visitors with a geological take on the war events: the exhibition employed a geological time frame, which started with the genesis of planet Earth, and displayed a large introductory section on natural resources of the southern Urals, the museum’s home region. The exhibition makers reasoned that the Soviet war effort was inextricably linked to the region’s inanimate environment with its rich deposits of minerals and metals. Based on archival documents and published sources, this article explores how a narrative focusing on minerals and metals could find a place in an exhibition about the Soviet war effort. It argues that the museum director’s personal background as an earth scientist, the short-lived regional diversity of war memory in the postwar Soviet Union, and a particular vein of environmental thought that was widespread in Soviet and international geology influenced this remarkable exhibition.

“The Stone Master”: On the Invisibility of Women’s Writing from the Soviet Ukrainian Periphery

Until the last decade of the Soviet state’s existence, only very few Ukrainian women writers achieved literary fame. This study sheds new light on Soviet Ukrainian political, historical, and social contexts that contributed to the invisibility of Ukrainian women’s writing by examining the case of Lviv-based author Nina Bichuia (b. 1937). Bichuia’s career and the publication history of her works illustrate several characteristics and paradoxes of Soviet literary politics concerning the Soviet periphery—i.e., the non-Russian republics, such as Ukraine. In particular, this article analyzes the differences in permissible literary expression between Moscow the metropole, Kyiv, the centre of the Ukrainian periphery, and Lviv, the Western Ukrainian periphery. It considers gender politics and biases in the Soviet Ukrainian literary establishment and the strictures of the Soviet “Friendship of Peoples” discourse, which had a provincializing effect on Ukrainian literary production and the tastes of the reading public. The article offers a close reading of Bichuia’s last short story, “Kaminnyi hospodar” (“The Stone Master,” 1990), which reflects this author’s “final word” on the Soviet environment for writing literature in the Western Ukrainian periphery. By analyzing Bichuia’s use of important literary intertexts and employing recent theorizations about Soviet state discourse, I demonstrate how “The Stone Master” imaginatively represents and criticizes the regime of discursive monopoly established by the Soviet system. This regime is shown to force a Ukrainian female writer into silence, which can be strategic, but cannot result in greater literary visibility.

Soviet Environment, Capitalist World

Soviet Environment, Capitalist World Bathsheba Demuth Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. 288pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1107144712. $99.99. In the 1970s, a small group of historians began writing about how ecological context shaped human lives, and how human actions shaped the natural world. They called themselves environmental historians. Most wrote about the United States. Behind the particulars of the Dust Bowl, the metropolitan appetites of Chicago, or the damming of the Columbia River lurked capitalism, the economic form that drew people’s ideas and material life together. In its early days, the field was a referendum on the American way of wealth: does it destroy, or does it enlighten, enrich, and enable? As William Cronon long since pointed out, environmental historians answered with two dominant narrative arcs: one a story of decline, of manmade exodus from Eden through consumptive degradation; the other progressive, a line of expanding environmental knowledge that leads society up and out of its own excess.1 Although environmental history has become temporally and geographically capacious, its modernists are often still bards of capitalism, writing of its development and the ethical consequences for men, beasts, [End Page 225] and lands. Environmental historians speak of the past while also offering prognoses on a market-driven future. The Soviet Union had no markets and now has no future. What, then, might the Soviet case offer environmental history, and what does environmental history bring to the study of the Soviet Union? Andy Bruno’s The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History is a welcome, and sophisticated, answer. By examining the challenging terrain and climate of the Kola Peninsula, Bruno argues that the natural world “both enabled industrial livelihoods and curtailed socialist promises” (6–7). To demonstrate the ways in which nature was an active participant in the Soviet project, the book details five industries: railroads, chemical fertilizer manufacturing, reindeer farming, nickel and copper smelting, and the development of energy production. In each, Bruno shows how bureaucrats, engineers, scientists, and laborers forced or otherwise brought north a dualistic understanding of nature. Drawing on ideas that predated the Soviet Union, some saw the environment as an adversary to be conquered; others as a source of riches that once assimilated would make a more harmonious world. Differentiating between these different intellectual motives makes The Nature of Soviet Power significantly more nuanced than prior environmental histories of the Soviet Union. Not all Bolshevik development was inspired by “a Promethean antipathy for nature” (76). Instead, the Soviet relationship with the environment emerged in the vacillations between optimistic technocrats eager for holism and wartime plans to subjugate all resources. The resulting “Stalinism as an Ecosystem” was a mode of development that often destroyed the lands and waters it tried to assimilate, only to then retaliate with a renewed emphasis on conquest. Across the 20th century, both visions radically transformed the Kola Peninsula. The railroad began the transformation of a remote territory into one of the most populous and industrialized places in the Arctic. Bruno’s chapter on its development offers the clearest example of how the “relationship between assimilation and conquest was not evolutionary but instead characterized by fits and starts” (32). The idea of connecting the Murman coastline to the rest of Russia was originally an imperial design, motivated by technocrats eager to assimilate fish and forests. In practice, the railroad became a reality only during World War I, under circumstances brutal to men and nature alike; these wartime conditions emerged again under Stalin. Both ideas met with a “rocky and swampy landscape and seasonal fluctuations in weather” that “undid previous work and caused significant delays” (72). [End Page 226] Arctic complications were also rife in the construction of the first major industrial project on the Kola Peninsula. In the third chapter, Bruno examines efforts during the First Five-Year Plan to mine a phosphorus-rich mineral from the Khibiny Mountains. Blending “holism and heavy-handed control in relations with the Khibiny environment” produced constant setbacks, supply issues, avalanches, and great loss of human lives—especially among special settlers—to disease and exposure (97). Yet the state also managed to drag...

Makeshift Modernity. DIY, Craft and the Virtuous Homemaker in New Soviet Housing of the 1960s

In cities across the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, new housing developments of plain five-storey apartment blocks mushroomed thanks to an intensive programme for mass industrialised housing construction launched by the Party-State in 1957. Modern living conditions were to be created for millions, it was promised, through state planning and investment in the modernisation of construction, making maximum use of technology and factory prefabrication in place of bricklaying and other artisanal methods. Drawing on oral history and material culture, this article attends to some contradictory, seemingly unplanned and un-modern aspectsof popular agency entailed in producing the modern Soviet environment, including the role of local improvisation, DIY and manual craft. These were not necessarily resistant to or subversive of the socialist state's modernisationproject but had a more complex and ambivalent relation to it, as complementary or compensatory accommodations thattuned universal modelsto local contingency.

Translation of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union: How Pinocchio Got a Golden Key

This article analyses ideological influence on the translations of children's literature in the Soviet Union where translation was seen as an ideological tool and was expected to promote ideological values. Changing and adapting the source texts according to the newly established ideological demands was a common practice. Soviet children's literature was also used as a means of propaganda and a strong pedagogical instrument of education of new Soviet citizens. To explore how the Soviet ideological message was promoted within children's literature, I will analyse Alexei Tolstoy's adaptation of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), entitled Zolotoi kliuchek ili prikliucheniia Buratino [The golden key or the adventures of Buratino]; henceforth The Golden Key), published in the Soviet Union in 1935. In Tolstoy's version the original underwent direct ideological changes. As one of the most successful children's stories introduced into the Soviet environment, The Golden Key depicts the values of the system under which it was written, including abolition of private property, the importance of collective labour, and the idea of equality and socialisation.

Sovietinės Lietuvos inteligentija : savivokos konstravimas

This paper deals with texts about the intelligentsia in Soviet Lithuania; the texts were written in 1950–1989 in Lithuania and the USSR. In this period the intelligentsia was considered to be a social stratum specializing in mental work. While used in the Soviet environment the term intelligentsia was often replaced by the terms staff (cadre) and specialists. This tendency reveals an attempt to view the intelligentsia in a manpower context. A great deal of research is reviewed in this article. The texts were written and published by a variety of researchers: historians, economists, demographists, and sociologists, all dealing with the engineering, technical, scientific, medical, artistic, educational, and administrative intelligentsia, both urban and rural. Little of the analysis was original; these studies were supposed to serve as evidence for and to bolster Marxist-Leninist schemes of societal development. Only a few sociologists were capable of producing an “allusive” if semiofficial sociology. The construction of party discourse in late Soviet socialism was secret, classified, and ossified linguistically: some made-up phrases were wandering from one text to another. Humanitarian and sociological discourses were affected by these alterations as well. Statistical data and party resolutions were circulating round and round. Topics of graduation dissertation often were similar, or even analogous to each other, so the illusion of originality was obtained by manipulating statistical data.

Statistique et revolution en Russie: Un compromis impossible (1880-1930), and: L'anarchie bureaucratique: Statistique et pouvoir sous Staline (review)

Reviewed by: Statistique et révolution en Russie: Un compromise impossible (1880–1930), and: L’anarchie bureaucratique: Statistique et pouvoir sous Staline Michael D. Gordin Martine Mespoulet , Statistique et révolution en Russie: Un compromise impossible (1880–1930) [Statistics and Revolution in Russia: An Impossible Compromise (1880–1930)]. 337 pp. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001. ISBN 2868476120. €20.00. Alain Blum and Martine Mespoulet , L’anarchie bureaucratique: Statistique et pouvoir sous Staline [Bureaucratic Anarchy: Statistics and Power under Stalin]. 372 pp. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. ISBN 2707139033. €29.00. Numbers are indispensable to understanding the history of late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. This is not just because it is important to know such data as rates of economic growth, urban population, war casualties, and so on, in order to tell a detailed and nuanced history of the period from 1850 onward, but also because the late tsarist and nascent Soviet regimes saw much of their governance as about numbers. Figures such as census data, iron output, and net revenues do not just enable historians to evaluate these regimes; these data represent, to a degree, how these regimes evaluated themselves. The extent to which Russia was successful as a European power was tied to these figures, and the very nature of the Soviet economy—under war communism, the New Economic Policy (NEP), or Stalinism, to constrain ourselves to the period before 1940—demanded numbers for the sake of planning and for propaganda to demonstrate the victories of socialism over the reign of Nicholas II or the bourgeois West. Given the centrality of numbers to Russian statecraft, historians to date have shown remarkably little sensitivity to how those numbers were produced and what the process of their production can tell us about the state and polity in which those numbers were so centrally embedded. The two books under review, therefore, both expose a lacuna in the set of questions historians have asked about the period from 1880 to 1940—and go a long way toward completely closing the gap with detailed, perceptive analysis of the importance of statistics as a lens for examining the rise of Soviet governance. As such, they are vital reading for anyone interested in how the Soviet state built itself out of pieces from the ancien régime, and for anyone who craves a rich account of the interior workings of a crucial but strangely invisible organ of government. These two books form an almost continuous narrative from the beginning of the reign of Tsar Alexander III (1881-94) to the outbreak of World [End Page 803] War II, with a substantial overlap during the NEP of the 1920s, when both Mespoulet and Blum and Mespoulet see a deep—and disastrous—transformation in the role of statistics and the fate of statisticians in Russia. Mespoulet's book, Statistique et révolution en Russie, is largely a history of the statistical profession in Russia, told from the perspective of those specialists who worked gathering data for the zemstvos, the rural councils established by Alexander II as one of the Great Reforms in 1864.1 Her narrative is one of professionalization and then what she terms "deprofessionalization" as the statisticians were forced to adapt to the increasing control of the Soviet environment. Blum and Mespoulet, however, begin L'anarchie bureaucratique after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and are primarily interested in what the fate of statistics can tell us about the nascent Stalinist state. Both works are thoroughly researched, well argued, and nuanced in interpretation; and they leave one with a sense of despair at what became of the statisticians. The picture of a "lost world" that flourished under tsarism and then was crushed by the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the Party, and the security organs underlies the overwhelming strengths of these works, as well as the relatively slight missteps and paths not taken in their analysis. By looking at both books together, one can see the illumination they cast, as well as the shadowy spots where their viewpoint will not let them travel. For the story of the Old Regime, one must turn to Mespoulet, who offers in this work the only sustained study...

Company performance in Ukraine: is this a market economy?

This paper examines empirically the responsiveness of firm performance to ownership and market structures, sector and regional specificity, and varying degrees of soft budget constraints. It does so by providing a “snapshot” of the economy. For cross-sectional data on Ukrainian firms in 1998, the paper presents evidence that the firms in the snapshot behaved more as if they were still in a loosely reformed Soviet environment where exchange via interpersonal connections, rather than the price mechanism, determined the allocation of resources.

Soviet and Post-Soviet Environmental Management: Lessons from a Case Study on Lead Pollution

Soviet and Post-Soviet Environmental Management: Lessons from a Case Study on Lead Pollution

Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions

What led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union? Steven Solnick argues, contrary to most current literature, that the Soviet system did not fall victim to stalemate at the top, or to a revolution from below, but rather to opportunism from within. In three case studies on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription, Solnick makes use of rich archival sources and interviews to tell the story from a new perspective, and to employ and test Western theories of the firm in the Soviet environment. He finds that even before Gorbachev, mechanisms for controlling bureaucrats in Soviet organizations were weak, allowing these individuals great latitude in their actions. Once reforms began, they translated this latitude into open insubordination by seizing the very organizational assets they were supposed to be managing. Thus, the Soviet system, Solnick argues, suffered the organizational equivalent of a colossal bank run. When the servants of the state stopped obeying orders from above, the state's fate was sealed. By incorporating economic theories of institutions into a political theory of Soviet breakdown and collapse, this book offers an account of the most important international political event of the later 20th century.

Book Reviews

Book reviews in this article: The Economics of Organic Farming: An International Perspective Edited by N. H. Lampkin and S. Padel Wallingford. Agricultural Management Economics: Activity Analysis and Decision Making Allan N. Rae Wallingford. Environmental Problems in the Shortage Economy: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Policy Ann‐Man Sätre Ahlander Hampshire.

Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Book Reviews: D.J. Peterson Troubled Lands: the Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Book Reviews: D.J. Peterson Troubled Lands: the Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

Books of Note

Abstract Abstract The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness: A Comparative Study of the Environmental Movements in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands by Andrew Jamison, Ron Eyerman, and Jacqueline Cramer; Columbia University Press, New York, 1993; xiii + 216 pp., $25.00 paper. Reviewed by John Pierce. Climate and Sea-Level Change: Observations, Projections, and Implications edited by R. A. Warrick, E. M. Barrow, and T. M. L. Wigley; Cambridge University Press, New York, 1993; xvi + 424 pp., $69.95 cloth. Reviewed by Robert Dickinson. The Ecology of War: Environmental Impacts of Weaponry and Warfare by Susan D. Lanier-Graham; Walker S. Co., New York, 1993; xxx + 185 pp., $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Arthur Galston. Voices from Africa: Local Perspectives on Conservation edited by Dale Lewis and Nick Carter; World Wildlife Fund, Washington, D.C., 1993; 216 pp., $19.95 paper. Reviewed by Jennifer M. Olson. Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources edited by Peter H. Gleick; Oxford University Press, New York, 1993; xxiv + 473 pp., $29.95 paper, $55.00 cloth. Reviewed by James L. Wescoat, Jr. Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land by John Opie; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebr., 1993; xxi + 412, $35.00 cloth. Reviewed by Kenneth D. Frederick. Climate System Modeling edited by Kevin E. Trenberth; Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992; xxix + 788 pp., $49.95 cloth. Reviewed by Robert Dickinson. Coastal Erosion: Has Retreat Sounded? Rutherford H. Platt, H. Crane Miller, Timothy Beatley, Jennifer Melville, and Brenda G. Mathenia; Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo., 1992; 195 pp., $59.95 cloth. Reviewed by Orrin H. Pilkey. The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies, and Politics edited by John Massey Stewart; Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992; 245 pp., $64.95 cloth. Reviewed by Marvin S. Soroos. Vegetation Dynamics & Global Change edited by Allen M. Solomon and Herman H. Shugart; Chapman & Hall, New York, 1993; xii + 338 pp., $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Reviewed by Robert Dickinson.

The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies and Politics

Notes on contributors Preface 1. Environmentalism and nationalism: an unlikely twist in an unlikely direction Marshall I. Goldman 2. The environmental basis for ethnic unrest in the Baltic republics Philip R. Pryde 3. Political participation, nationalism and environmental politics in the USSR Charles E. Ziegler 4. BAM after the fanfare: the unbearable ecumene Victor L. Mote 5. The massive degradation of ecosystems in the USSR Zeev Wolfson 6. The new politics in the USSR: the case of the environment Joan Debardeleben 7. Water management in Soviet Central Asia: problems and prospects Philip P. Micklin 8. Perestroika: how it affects Soviet participation in environmental cooperation Elena Nikitina 9. US-Soviet cooperation for environmental protection: how successful are the bilateral agreements? Kathleen E. Braden 10. US-USSR nuclear safety cooperation: prospects for health and environmental collaboration Michael Congdon 11. The global impact of the Chernobyl accident five years after Zhores Medvedev 12. Glasnost, perestroika and eco-sovietology Igor I. Altshuler, Yuri N. Golubchikov and Ruben A. Mnatsakanyan 13. Environmental issues in the Soviet Arctic and the fate of northern natives Alexei Yu. Roginko 14. Air and water problems beyond the Urals John Massey Stewart Index.

Reviews: Elephants in the Volkswagen: Facing the Tough Questions about Our Overcrowded Country: Elephants in the Volkswagen: Facing the Tough Questions about Our Overcrowded Country, South East Asia in the World-Economy: A Regional Geography, Alternative to Deforestation: Steps towards Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rainforest, Fractured Cities: Capitalism, Community and Empowerment in Britain and America, the Dynamics of Cities: Ecological

Reviews: Elephants in the Volkswagen: Facing the Tough Questions about Our Overcrowded Country: Elephants in the Volkswagen: Facing the Tough Questions about Our Overcrowded Country, South East Asia in the World-Economy: A Regional Geography, Alternative to Deforestation: Steps towards Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rainforest, Fractured Cities: Capitalism, Community and Empowerment in Britain and America, the Dynamics of Cities: Ecological

The Soviet environment: problems, policies and politics

Journal Article The Soviet environment: problems, policies and politics Get access The Soviet environment: problems, policies and politics. Edited by John Massey Stewart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. 245pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 521 41418 0. Caroline Thomas Caroline Thomas 1University of Southampton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 1, January 1993, Pages 148–149, https://doi.org/10.2307/2621154 Published: 01 January 1993

Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction

The air the water the land solid and hazardous wastes government institutions and environmental policy the environmental movement and green politics constraints on protecting the environment.