For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change? This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansion of the mining industry and disasters such as the Chernobyl explosion, Anna Barcz opens up new understandings of local political traditions and examines how they might be harnessed in the cause of contemporary environmental activism. The book covers works by writers such as Christa Wolf, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.

Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.

This book explores the interconnections between climate, policy and agriculture in Russia and the former Soviet Union between 1900 and 1990. During this period there were several periods of grain and other food shortages some of which reached disaster proportions resulting in mass famine and death on an unprecedented scale. traditional official and other sources have been used to explore the extent to which policy and vagaries in climate conspired to affect agricultural yeilds. Were the leaders (Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev) policies sound in theory but failed in practice because of unpredictable weather? How did the Soviet peasants react to these changes? What impact did Soviet agriculture have on the overall economy of the country? These are all questions that are taken into account in this book. various political eras. In each the policy of the central government is discussed followed by the climate vagaries during that period. Crop yeilds are then analysed in the light of policy and climate. these factors from such a wide range of sources in the last century.

With a new afterword by the authorA study of the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement. Focusing on the period from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s (from Lenin's rule to the rise of Stalin), Douglas R. Weiner studies the divergence between the growing ecological movement in the country and the state's social and economic policies. The book offers a view of both sides of this dispute: scientific conservation movements on the one hand and an industrializing nation's attitude toward science, scientists, nature, and massive development on the other. Weiner explains the development of pioneering conservation institutions, state practices, and ecological theory in the Soviet Union during the 1920s , and why those developments were sidelined or quashed by Stalin. The book provides a telling example of the social construction of science, showing how the perceived political implications of rival ecological theories influenced Soviet scientists, and chronicles the nature protection movement's conflicts with both the vigilantes of the Cultural Revolution and Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, which blatantly ignored potential environmental consequences in its quest to industrialize on a large scale.The new afterword reflects upon the study's impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published. Now in paperback, this classic text is well suited for course use in Russian history, environmental studies, and history of science.

Explores specific environmental problems and examines the attitudes of policymakers toward the environment, and toward environmentalists, in the U.S.S.R., Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.