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Paper short abstract:

This project is aimed at demonstrating the formation of the colonial practices of the USSR in pumping resources from the periphery. Case - a collection of waste - rags, and bones for recycling in Ukraine 1920-1930s.

Paper long abstract:

In the early Soviet Union, the collection of various waste materials was of strategic importance, as significant resources were required to rebuild the Soviet economy and carry out industrialization. As early as the 1920s, the USSR began large-scale programs to collect waste, particularly rags and bones. These wastes proved to be crucial resources for the development of a number of industries, including paper, chemicals, construction, luxury goods, cooking, fertilizers, and others. The scarcity of these wastes due to the lack of materials, underdeveloped economy, poverty of the population, collectivization, and Holodomor, as well as the impossibility of meeting normative targets, led to the emergence of colonial practices of their removal from the population, including the inhabitants of peripheral regions. These practices will be examined by taking the example of Ukraine in the period from the 1920s to the early 1930s.

The report will disprove the popular idea that recycling began to develop in the USSR and its republics, particularly Ukraine, only during the Cold War and demonstrate the perspective field of development of Ukrainian environmental history, demonstrating the national context of waste recycling activity.

This paper will be constructed on the basis of archival materials from Ukrainian archives that have not been previously introduced into scholarly circulation. This contribution will contribute to the decolonization of sources used by Western academia and thus help to bring Ukrainian environmental history from the periphery.