Thu 03/05 2009
Andy Bruno, from HDES and the Department of History at the University of Illinois, presented "Soviet Modernization and the Arctic Environment: A Case Study of a Stalinist Mining Town"
This presentation will examine the environmental history of Soviet efforts to create a modern industrial world in the far north. I will tell the early history of the town of Kirovsk (Khibinogorsk) on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. The town came into existence during the Soviet Union's first five-year-plan (1928-1932) as a new socialist city aimed at mining and processing apatite for phosphate fertilizers. I will seek to demonstrate the omnipresence of environmental factors in this project of Stalinist modernization. I will reflect on how centralized planning sought to grapple with environmental impediments and innovate ways to establish less wasteful and destructive industrial technologies. I will delve into the experience of the thousands of forced peasant migrants for whom harsh northern nature often served as a punitive agent. I will further explore the cultural representations of nature during the project, revealing how multifarious discourses coexisted in ostensible contradiction with a grand narrative of the conquest of nature. Within these three spheres of a new industrial civilization planning, social, and cultural central interpretation will emerge: Stalinist modernization here entailed an unsuccessful attempt to transform inhospitable natural environments into realms where humans and nature could abide in harmony. The uniqueness of this claim is that intentions, ignorance, and pure neglect were not totally to blame for the poor environmental legacy. Instead, the recalcitrance of the natural world exacerbated the failings of revolutionary optimism, chaotic central planning, and an abiding reliance on forced labor in Russia.
This presentation will examine the environmental history of Soviet efforts to create a modern industrial world in the far north. I will tell the early history of the town of Kirovsk (Khibinogorsk) on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. The town came into existence during the Soviet Union's first five-year-plan (1928-1932) as a new socialist city aimed at mining and processing apatite for phosphate fertilizers. I will seek to demonstrate the omnipresence of environmental factors in this project of Stalinist modernization. I will reflect on how centralized planning sought to grapple with environmental impediments and innovate ways to establish less wasteful and destructive industrial technologies. I will delve into the experience of the thousands of forced peasant migrants for whom harsh northern nature often served as a punitive agent. I will further explore the cultural representations of nature during the project, revealing how multifarious discourses coexisted in ostensible contradiction with a grand narrative of the conquest of nature. Within these three spheres of a new industrial civilization planning, social, and cultural central interpretation will emerge: Stalinist modernization here entailed an unsuccessful attempt to transform inhospitable natural environments into realms where humans and nature could abide in harmony. The uniqueness of this claim is that intentions, ignorance, and pure neglect were not totally to blame for the poor environmental legacy. Instead, the recalcitrance of the natural world exacerbated the failings of revolutionary optimism, chaotic central planning, and an abiding reliance on forced labor in Russia.
