Transforming nature: The Russian forest and the Soviet state, 1900--1953

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian foresters began to notice that forest management concepts borrowed from Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrought terrible damage when applied to Russian forests, as vast tracts of valuable woodlands turned to swamps, sandy wastelands, or tangles of softwoods. In response, an influential but heretofore undescribed effort to craft specifically Russian forest management techniques arose, built around sustainable use, small economies of scale, intuitive experience, and the cultural connection between the Russian people and the forest.;The attempt to pioneer a new relationship with the natural world took two forms. The more scholarly of these, formulated by Georgii Fedorovich Morozov, located the root of the crisis in the failure to recognize the forest as a living organism, and held that forest exploitation should be predicated on an empathetic connection with the land. The other sought to restore the forest's vitality by democratizing access and integrating the peasantry into day-to-day management. Both approaches, though outwardly concerned with the seemingly abstruse problem of forest regeneration, resonated with a broader societal wish to regenerate Russian society; both were economic reflections of the idea, developed in the nineteenth century by numerous artists and writers, that the Russian forest and people were metonyms for one another, so that preserving the Russian forest was equivalent to protecting the Russian nation.;Most evaluations of Soviet environmental management have made little space for the survival of pre-revolutionary environmental movements, or have described a sharp discontinuity at the time of Stalin's accession to power, but an analysis of the period shows that Stalin expended considerable political and economic capital to safeguard the Russian forest. In the early 1930s, industrial interests and zealous forestry students attacked and officially defeated sustainable management, alleging its incompatibility with socialist construction, but Stalin's government steadily pushed back, ultimately protecting more forest than any other country in the world. Stalin's environmental initiatives foundered, however, with the ill-starred Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature---the first attempt to reverse human-caused climate change---when the contradictions between Stalinism's political underpinnings and environmentalism led to the plan's collapse.