Russian environmental history at the 8th
Conference of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH, Versailles,
France, 30 June – 3 July 2015.
By Andrei Vinogradov, Elabuga Institute, Kazan’
Federal University
(translated by David Moon)
In 2003, John
McNeill in one of his articles characterized Russia as a region with much to
offer environmental historians, but little studied by them. In fact, for a long
time, the advance of environmental history in Russia encountered a range of
obstacles, including insufficiently developed communications between Russian
and foreign scholars and hostility to environmental questions in conservative
historical circles.
An indication
of the changes which have taken place was the latest conference of the European
Society for Environmental History, held at the University of Versailles from 30
June to 3 July 2015. The conference is held every two years and is one of the
most important academic events in the historical world. In comparison with
previous conferences, there were significantly more reports on Russian
environmental history: 17 paper presentations, 5 posters and 4 entire panels.
On the first
day of the conference a panel was held on ‘Forestry
specialists in the long 19th century and their understanding of forest
ecology’. Anastasiya Fedotova (Russian Academy of Sciences) and senior lecturer
Marina Loskutova of the National Research University-Higher School of Economics
(HSE), St Petersburg, focused on the development of scientific understandings
of the causes and consequences of deforestation and on the work of scientific
organizations. They showed that, at a time when the close mutual relationship
between many processes occurring in the environment had not yet been studied in
depth, scientific knowledge became one of the main factors that was bringing
about the interconnection between humans and nature.
Discussion of Russian environmental history continued
at a panel ‘Good or evil? The environmental history of dictatorships. The case of the Soviet Union’.
Papers were presented by Stephen Brain (Mississippi State University, USA) and
Simo Laakkonen (University of Turku, Finland). Brain spoke about the experience
of agricultural reform in the Soviet Union necessary because of environmental
factors. The introduction of new methods of farming and the restructuring of
networks of settlements led to a marked growth in economic indexes. It is
interesting that this became grounds for closing programmes, as it was inadmissible
in Soviet ideology for peasants to receive commercial income from their work.
Laakkonen showed that the ideological direction of the Soviet state on primacy
of the development of the military-industrial complex had a negative impact on
the environment of the Lithuanian SSR.
 |
| Stephen Brain's presentation |
On 1 July a
panel put together by the conference organisational committee on ‘The environmental history of Russia’
was chaired by David Moon, professor at the University of York (UK). A wide
range of questions were examined, including the formation of ‘transport
landscapes’ in Russia before the appearance of railways (Alexandra Bekasova,
HSE, St Petersburg), the utilization of water resources in industrial centres
of the Russian Empire (Aidar Kalimullin, Kazan’ Federal University),
environmental education in kindergartens in post-Soviet Yakutia (Carole Ferret,
Centre national de la recherché scientifique, Paris), and also environmental
aspects of Russian colonization of the territory of the Khanate of Kazan’
(Andrei Vinogradov, Kazan’ Federal University).
Although the
aforementioned researches were carried out on the basis of Russian materials,
they shed light on a wide range of questions in a global context. Evidence for
this is the interest shown by conference participants in posters dedicated to the
Soviet conquest of the Arctic (Ekaterina Kalemeneva), methods for
reconstructing paleolandscapes (Maxim Vinarskii) and others. David Moon in his
poster demonstrated that Russian scientific thought of the 19th
century had significant influence on understanding of ecological problems in
the Great Plains of the USA. It is clear that in this connection, studying the
environmental history of the Russian state assists in deepening our
understanding of global historical and environmental processes.
In the confines of a short report it is not possible to give
a detailed account of all the reports that attracted interest. Special
attention is deserved for the research of Olga Malinova‐Tziafeta, and Georgios
Tziafetas. A large amount of work in researching Russian environmental history
has been carried out by the Centre d'études des mondes russe, caucasien et
centre-européen (CERCEC) in France, and also by the project ‘EcoGlobReg’ with
the participation of Klaus Gestwa, Laurent Coumel and their colleagues and by
other scholars taking part in the conference. A number of actual issues of
Russia's environmental history were discussed at the roundtable dedicated to
the BRICS countries and organized by Julia Lajus (HSE, St Petersburg).
During the
conference a meeting of the members of the society was held at which they
elected officers to a new Board. Dolly Jørgensen was re-elected almost
unanimously to the post of president of the ESEH. Among her many achievements
during her previous term has been a significant increase in activity in the
field of environmental history in Eastern Europe and Russia. With the support
of the ESEH a range of events have been held, including a conference at Elabuga
Institute of Kazan’ Federal University on 13-15 November 2014. Two smaller
conferences in Zaporizhe, Ukraine, and Surgut in Siberia are taking place this
year with the support of the society.
As the 8th
Conference of the ESEH showed, the historical-environmental approach has taken
significant strides in its development in recent years. Interest in Russia
among foreign scholars has grown considerably, which inspires hope of further
dynamic growth in this area of research in the future.
