Call for Papers
Resistance, protest and criticism in the name of nature: USSR and post-Soviet states, 1950-2010
Conference in Moscow, 8-9 October 2015
This conference will look at resistance in the name of nature against
industrialist and transformist projects in the Soviet and post-Soviet space
from the 1950s to the present. How did people at local and regional levels
mobilize nature in their practices of discontent (open protests, passive
resistance, lawsuits and others) when confronting industrial interests, state
projects and rampant transformations that impacted their lifestyle and violated
their conception of a proper environment?
In the environmental history of the Soviet Union we usually emphasize
the unstoppable bulldozer of progress that turned the rivers into dam cascades,
irrigated dry steppes, drained peat bogs, placed nuclear power stations and
highly polluting industries near densely populated areas, and destroyed natural
and traditional landscapes. Most of the time we present the productivist thrust
of the Soviet state as advancing unchallenged, with the force of
quasi-historical necessity. Although ecological activists from urban areas have
been closely studied by historians (Weiner, Josephson), we have little research
on the protest culture of the people affected by these transformations and how
they confronted the risks and nuisances associated with them in the Soviet and
post-Soviet world: peasants and landowners, indigenous peoples, nomad herders,
workers at polluting plants, inhabitants of contaminated areas, hunters and
fishermen, “unorganized” tourists and so on.
We wish to put three groups of actors to the fore: first, we want to
give a voice to those social actors who refused the obligatory direction of
history toward the industrial control of nature (understood as natural
resources) and cherished modes of interacting with their local or regional
environment other than what “modernization” dictated, or more modestly tried to
avoid the most disastrous transformations. How did they express their concerns
and what alternative conceptions of nature did they defend?
Second, we study the interaction of state actors informed by visions of
a tamed and useful nature with the people who felt directly concerned by their
projects. How did Party leaders and state administrators take these challenges
and checks into account if at all, whether crushing, ignoring, compensating or
integrating them? What compromises in their initial plans were they prepared to
make in the name of differing conceptions of the use of nature and a healthy
environment?
Third, scientific and technical experts played an important mediating
role between local people and decision-makers. How did they create, frame and
advocate environmental issues? Or alternatively, how did they make
environmental change appear acceptable and desirable to the people it affected?
By drawing attention to bottom-up resistance on behalf of nature from
the 1950s and how it was suppressed, incorporated or bypassed in the USSR and
its successor States, we hope to go some way in explaining the upsurge of
environmental activism in the perestroika
years and understanding the significance and limits of its decline in the
post-Soviet period.
Here is a
non-exhaustive list of possible topics:
·
What role
did international contacts and globalized environmental concepts play in
formulating ecological issues and mobilizing opinion around them?
·
How did
industrial pollution impact workers and their families?
·
How did
opposition to nuclear power and other industrial sites arise, up to the mass
rallies of the 1980s?
·
How did
usage conflicts develop, especially in the agricultural and tourist sectors
(soils, forest, water, pasture)?
·
How did
state actors take account of the risks of progress in planning?
·
How were
nature and related concepts (landscape, life, environment, ecology) mobilized
in the negotiations around industrial implantation and transformist projects?
Organization
The conference will
be held on 8-9 October 2015 in Moscow (exact location will be announced
later). Working languages will be Russian and English.
Abstracts (in Russian or English, no more than
400 words) should be submitted by email to in-the-name-of-nature@ecoglobreg.org by 15 March 2015. The organizers will respond
by 15 May 2015.
All queries should be sent to Melanie Arndt and Laurent Coumel.
The selected speakers
will have their travel and accommodation expenses covered.
Papers will be
requested by 15 September 2015 so as to be circulated among speakers in
advance of the conference.
Institutional
and financial support
The German
Historical Institute (www.dhi-moskau.org)
and the French-Russian Research Center (www.centre-fr.net)
in Moscow contribute to financing the conference and provide essential
organisational support.
Initiators
EcoGlobReg is a joint French-German historical research project financed
by Agence National de la Recherche (ANR) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG). It is devoted to understanding how ecological concerns shaped society
and politics in the late Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space. We analyse the
sometimes tumultuous processes associated with the ecologization and
de-ecologization of politics and society in the last three decades of the 20th
century. By “ecologization” we mean the social dissemination and deepening
political use of scientific knowledge on the state of the environment. We
isolate three main vectors for spreading ecological preoccupations in society
and political discourse: social activism and protest for the protection of landscapes
and life conditions; environmental disasters understood as catalysts of
discontent and revealers of failed relationships between society and nature;
and sensitization and popularization (in the media and education) of nature
seen as threatened by economic development.
The project takes ecologization and de-ecologization to be essentially
globalized processes. It shows how environmental issues acquired a global
character at the turn of the 1960s-1970s and what role Soviet citizens played
in this process. From there the project moves to asking whether the Soviet
Union entered an “environmental turn” comparable to the one identified for
capitalist countries. But transnational and globalizing trends are only one
aspect of ecologization. The project pays attention to the regionalization of
power dynamics: strengthened national and regional identities fired ecological
mobilization in the perestroika
years; well before that point in Soviet history, they played a major role in
shaping environmental protest. Last, the apparent de-ecologization of public
discourse in the post-Soviet era, marked by green activists withdrawing from
the political scene, will be examined to see how environmental practices have
evolved and taken on new forms.
EcoGlobReg’s Team:
Alexander
Ananyev
Melanie Arndt
Laurent Coumel
Marc Elie
Klaus Gestwa
Raphael Schulte-Kellinghaus
