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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the coevolution of industrialization and ecotourism in the Russian Far East. It argues that the massive decline of manufacturing in the region since the 1990s has given rise to a peculiar ecological imagination that fuses critiques of extraction with hopes for industrial revival.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on the case of Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a planned city built in the 1930s, to explore interwoven moral imaginaries of industrialization and nature in Russia’s Far East. Widely celebrated in the Soviet press as ‘the City of Youth’ built by communist volunteers who traveled from all over the USSR to construct an urban socialist utopia in the taiga, Komsomolsk’s mythos has historically been defined by the trope of triumphant subjugation of unruly wilderness. During the 1960s, when love of one’s region and its natural splendor became central to Soviet patriotic visions, Komsomolsk’s hinterland witnessed a rapid development of ecotourism meant to provide residents with local recreational alternatives to far-away resorts in the Western part of the USSR. The city’s enterprises, including shipbuilding and aviation plants played key roles in financing and maintaining ex-urban summer camps, sanatoria, and skiing resorts. Dramatic economic decline and massive depopulation since the 1990s, however, have left the city’s (peri-urban) infrastructures in ruins. Consequently, local activists often cast industrial production as a precondition for ecological conservation, arguing that an expansion of manufacturing can preserve existing infrastructures and replace environmentally hazardous timber and coal extraction. I argue that these visions of nature represent a shift from late Soviet anti-modernization discourses to modernist nostalgia that retains a moral critique of extraction, while holding out hope for industrial revival in a new socio-ecological balance. This example of entangled municipal and grassroots environmental activism in Russia thus invites us to rethink the antinomy of ecotourism and industrial development.