Description
Book Synopsis Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and in so doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time frame well beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.
Trade Review “Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally is a work of bold vision, grand synthesis, and fine detail in creative combination by an outstanding team of editors and authors. Making productive use of a growing body of international and domestic scholarship on Russian internal imperialism, infrastructures, industrial pollution, disasters, environmentalists, exotic animals, and natural resources from fish to fossil fuels this rich volume illuminates and opens up to global comparison a history that for a long time seemed both enclosed, enigmatic and exceptional.” • Sverker Sörlin, Professor of Environmental History, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
AcknowledgmentsNotes on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon
Part I: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ITS ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 1. Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry of the White Sea Area in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Alexei Kraikovsky and Margarita Dadykina
Chapter 2. Early Russian Industrialization: An Environmental Perspective
Catherine Evtuhov
Chapter 3. Seeing Oil: Isaak Levitan and the Industrial Volga
Jane Costlow
Chapter 4. Kazan’ Citizens Against Air Pollution: The Case of the Ushkov & Co. Chemical Factory (1893-1917)
Andrei Vinogradov
Chapter 5. “Environing” the North: Fishing and Hunting in the Industrial Development of Khanty-Mansi Okrug, 1960-1975
Evgenii Gololobov
Part II: HUMANS AND ANIMALS
Chapter 6. Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge
Anna Olenenko
Chapter 7. Public Health Across Species: Domestic Animals and Sanitary Reforms in Imperial Russia
Anna Mazanik
Part III: ENVIRONMENT AND POLITICS IN THE LATE SOVIET SPACE
Chapter 8. How Wetlands Entered the Transnational Spaces of Late Soviet Environmentalism
Katja Bruisch
Chapter 9. “You ought to love nature!” Peoples’ Control Committees – Environmental Whistleblowers and West Siberian Oil in the 1970s
Valentina Roxo
Part IV: GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENT PAST AND PRESENT
Chapter 10. Empire, Settlement and Environment: The Russian Empire and Donald Meinig’s “Macrogeography of Western Imperialism”
Denis Shaw
Chapter 11. Tracks across the Tundra: Making a Living from Nature in the Borderland of the Russian Northwest
Urban Wråkberg and Peter Haugseth
Afterword
J.R. McNeill
Glossary
Index
