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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the rise of the concept of economic growth in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the environmental contours of how socialist economists thought about growth, and the role of these professional discussions in the eventual decision to embrace rapid industrialization under Stalin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the environmental dimensions of discussions among economic thinkers in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as they developed ideas about how to industrialize their new country and expand its economy under an avowedly socialist system. The history of the rise of national income accounting both in the United States and internationally has been well-examined by scholars, including those who have underscored the perverse environmental logic of measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a catch-all priority of state policy. However, much less attention has been paid to the alternative economic thinking that attached many state-socialist countries of the twentieth century just as firmly to an imperative for continual growth. As it turns out, Soviet economists were some of the first to develop a concept of economic growth during the period of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks returned to a mixed economy with markets dominating in many spheres. Their ideas played a fateful role in the decision to embark on a project of rapid industrialization and building “socialism in one country” in the late 1920s. Historians have recently rethought and nuanced our assessment of the environmental impacts of Stalinism in important ways. Nevertheless, this paper maintains that the introduction of an economic growth imperative into Soviet socialism via central planning and a command economy had long-lasting consequences for the treatment of the natural world. This history remains relevant today in debates among eco-modernists and advocates of degrowth.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper scrutinises goals and practice of governance in the north of the European part of the Soviet Union through export oriented timber industry and both voluntary and coerced colonisation between 1920s and mid-1930s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper scrutinises goals and practice of governance in the north of the European part of the Soviet Union through timber industry and colonisation between 1920s and mid-1930s. Timber exports were the specialisation of this region for decades before the Soviet rule. Since 1920s these exports became particularly important for the young socialist state as a source of hard currency needed for industrialisation and acquisition of critical materials and goods. 1920s and 1930s saw two major resettlement campaigns, one voluntary and another coerced, launched by the state aimed at population of the northern fringes of what just recently used to be the Russian Empire. The former was conducted by the Karelian-Murman railway colonisation combine and the latter in the interests of the timber exporting trust Severoles. These campaigns showed novelties in approach to nature and resources extraction along with imperial continuities. The latter were embodied in the very experts planning and executing resettlement and global demand for timber. The paper also examines the roles timber as a commodity played in power relations and building of a regional economy, while being not only a ‘green currency’, but also a bureaucratic one. Ultimately, the case of northern timber extraction shows the Soviet power not as a given autarkic dictatorship, but a system in the making. It reveals how universal ideals of progressivism and modernity born in the previous epoch were adopted by the new power and gradually evolved into their opposites while serving the state and global economy.

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Paper short abstract:

My paper is based on my new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology” (MIT Press, 2024). It examines the complex relationships between technology and nature under state socialism and tell how it developed industrially embedded ecology.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will be based on my new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology” (MIT Press, 2024).

I will discuss the complex relationships between technology, nature and humans under state socialism. Looking at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood, I argue, demonstrates how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project, giving rise to new paradigms designed by engineers and industrial scientists. Emphasizing the technological and environmental impacts of the Cold War, my paper will invite readers to reconsider the socialist experience of industry-nature relations in critical dialogue with the history of capitalism. It advances a fresh, under-explored perspective in considering interactions between socialist industry and nature. I will go beyond the binary oppositions often touted between industrialism and environmentalism to argue that state socialism was capable of producing specific industrial ecology even though it always remained within industrialism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses land to juxtapose two visions of development: the building of a dam and a reservoir in the grand project of electrifying Yugoslav socialism in the 1950s, and the post-socialist profit-driven investments in renewable energy that have been unfolding in the same region since 2010s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses land to understand the continuities and differences between two visions of development: the building of a dam and a reservoir in the grand project of electrifying Yugoslav socialism in the 1950s, and the post-socialist profit-driven investments in renewable energy that have been unfolding in the same region since 2010s. Understanding land as being multiply productive and consisting of overlapping material and immaterial relations, I show how different developmental imaginaries make their claims to territory, and ways in which those claims affect people living in them. These spatial claims—here as elsewhere in the world—are made possible by formulating a connection between land not able to produce and the supposedly backward populations that live on it. The first part of the paper zones in on the incommensurability between official efforts to remunerate the expropriated land by making it commensurable with either different plots of land or monetary values, and the ways in which the karst landscape and the peasants challenged these efforts. The second part of the paper then examines how different forms of violence inflicted upon this land—the 1950s flooding and the 1990s war—reverberate in struggles around developmental imaginaries today.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the troubled trajectory of a failed Romanian-Bulgarian Cold War project, a joint hydropower plant on the Danube's lower course. It investigates why the project failed and what this failure can reveal about the relationship between communism and environmental management.

Paper long abstract:

In April 1978, the president of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, symbolically laid the first stone of a new hydropower plant on the lower course of the Danube, between the cities of Turnu Măgurele (Romania), and Nikopol (Bulgaria). Ceaușescu hailed the new plant as a symbol of the unshakable friendship between the two countries. Despite the impressive premises, however, the project never saw the light of day. Bucharest and Sofia could not find common ground not only on the features of the whole infrastructure but also on the overall management of the river. Moreover, in Bulgaria, the exploitation of the Danube for energetic purposes stirred the harsh opposition of various actors, worried about the effects of the plant on the river. Amid growing skepticism, the project was progressively abandoned in the late 1980s. By tracing the troubled trajectory of the Turnu Măgurele-Nikopol hydropower plant, the proposed paper pursues two major objectives: 1. analyse how two communist states attempted to manage and transform jointly common natural resources, and why these attempts ultimately failed; 2. Highlight how competing visions of environmental management competed not only internationally but also at the national level.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper is devoted to the interdisciplinary expertise developed by Polish scientists on ecological challenges faced by the socialist state, especially to the attempts at adapting a socialist economy, system of values and lifestyle to be more environmentally sustainable.

Paper long abstract:

The widespread stereotype of socialist authorities as neglecting ecological questions in pursuit of economic development based on heavy industry obscures the more nuanced reality of the environmental debates and struggles in the Polish People's Republic. These were based on well-developed expertise, exceeding the narrow, short-sighted, technocratic approach sometimes attributed to socialist states. Scientists representing official institutions, collaborating with international organisations, were well aware of the global ecological crisis. They also noticed the potential environmental consequences of a new economic strategy based on higher economic growth rates, introduced in Poland at the beginning of the 70s. In my paper, I focus on the debates by scientists representing diverse disciplines [architecture, urban planning, medicine, engineering, sociology, economics, etc.] circulating in the experts’ milieu [especially publications by the Committee of Research and Prognosis “Poland 2000” at the Polish Academy of Science] and presented to lay public in popular science magazines [Aura]. I am especially interested in their attempts at conceptualising the model of what they called “a socialism harmonised with nature”: how they perceived the advantages of the socialist model in fighting the ecological crisis; what were, in their opinion, its main contradictions in this regard; what adjustments were required to adapt the socialist system to ecological challenges. I also reconstruct the dynamics of relations between the scientists and the authorities at the local and state levels to better understand the tensions, conflicts and challenges connected with implementing their proposals.

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Paper short abstract:

I am going to investigate the meanings, politics and economics of nature in the allotment gardens of Nowa Huta under socialism. I am going to base the paper on extensive fieldwork with the original, eldest allotment gardeners.

Paper long abstract:

Nowa Huta was built as a model industrial, working-class factory town of the Lenin Steelworks in post-war Poland. Under state socialism, local workplaces founded 30 allotment gardens there. They organised and divided the land and distributed the plots among its workers. The allotments were lent to them free of charge as a form of subsistence support. The gardeneers built altany (small garden houses), cultivated plants and bred animals there, for both their own consumption and an additional income.

In the paper, I am going to investigate the meanings, politics and economies of nature in the allotment gardens in Nowa Huta. Firstly, I am going to study peasant identities, agrarian knowledge and rural practices of the gardeners, almost all of whom came to Nowa Huta from the countryside. Secondly, I am going to conceptualise the relationship between the gardens and the Steelworks as interconnected commons. Thirdly, I am going to describe the practices, discourses and concepts of the allotment gardeners which relate to nature.

I am going to base the paper on material collected during nine months of fieldwork in Nowa Huta. Within its framework, I am interviewing, working, resting and socialising with and learning from the eldest, original allotment gerdeners and retired steelworkers. I am also conducting archival research of the boards of the gardens. I am learning about the socialist past by studying continuity and change in the material, bodily, affective and discursive cultures of the allotment gardens.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the Tatras as a space where the conflict between nature, man, and technology takes place in the era of state socialism. Technocrats wanted to carry out plans to transform nature into a tourist landscape and scientists pointed to the irreversible destruction of the environment.

Paper long abstract:

During the 1960s, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, as part of the Eastern Bloc, gradually emerged from international isolation and began to open up to foreign tourists. Tourism profits became an important source of foreign convertible currencies compared to exporting goods. So, the state was interested in maximizing the number of visitors to Czechoslovakia, especially so-called 'dollar tourists.' The number one tourist destination became the Tatras. Ever since the 19th century, its crystal-clear lakes, lush forests, and unpolluted air have been highlighted by travelers and hikers. That is why the socialist technocrats wanted to carry out experiments and megalomaniac plans to transform nature into a tourist landscape. New car roads, campsites, cable cars, and hotels were built. Some futuristic technologies such as Alweg monorail were planned. After the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in 1970, however, the technocrats came into open conflict with scientists and environmentalists, who pointed to the irreversible destruction of the natural environment of the High Tatras and Štrbské Pleso. Scientists warned against similar projects in national parks and started talking about sustainable tourism. The conflict came to a head in the early 1980s when an Olympic complex was to be built in the Tatras for Czechoslovakia to host the 1984 Winter Olympics. The paper will analyse the Tatras as a space where the conflict between nature, man, and technology takes place in the era of state socialism.