Events

1-2:15 pm ET

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Russia has more than one-fifth of the world’s forest areas, which contain more than 55% of the world’s conifers, and 11% of the world’s biomass. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, their forests are "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Historian Elena Kochetkova will help us better understand this important part of the Russian economy and the world's ecosystem. Elena will discuss how the Soviet economy developed a unique approach toward forest resources after the Second World War. Looking at the materiality and dreamscape of Soviet industry through forests and wood, my talk will demonstrate how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project, which saw the rise of new industry-ecology paradigms designed by specialists. It will also discuss how the industry neglected socialist experience after the demise of the USSR and has been revived in post-Soviet countries in recent decades. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the presentation (and book) invites readers to re-evaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry.

Elena Kochetkova is a historian of the economy, environment, technology, and state socialism at the University of Bergen in Norway. Elena’s new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology”, published with MIT Press in 2024, examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests.