Paper short abstract:

Report's based on two contradictions: State nature protection ignores local communities’ interests for the benefit of country's citizens. But nature preservation only fuels the decay of Soviet infrastructures, which are not maintained because they are dangerous to the pristine purity of nature.

Paper long abstract:

The preservation of landscapes combining different historical layers, traces of decayed infrastructures, is intricately linked to the natural dominants of these landscapes, through which they initially acquire symbolic significance. This tangle of the natural and socio-historical confuses formerly simple premise: what is the state tries to preserve? The pristine nature or those traces of adaptation to it? The first paradox of my report is that in remote villages of Western Siberia, the preservation of man-made elements of the landscape is actually the preservation of the "ruins" of the Soviet past.

Conservation policy here involves not so much the allocation of special zones of nature reserves, but the recognition as protected of those places that were previously saturated with transport and industrial infrastructure and were embedded in the history of the settlement in a special way. Such a preserve "absorbs" ruins and works in a new way with temporalities: it supports the decay of settlements, and the flourishing of nature that recovers from anthropogenic stress of the Thaw period.

Thus, conservation policy involves maintaining and nourishing simultaneously the germination and the final decay of the remains of the Soviet. That’s why wild in this case must be substantially reconsidered and a slightly different optic must be found. The second paradox shows that State protects nature for the whole country, ignoring the importance and resourcefulness of nature for the local community. This is made possible by the downscaling of the map, which lies at the heart of the imagination generated by governmentality.