Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History(Russian and East European Studies)

Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.

About the Author :
Nicholas B. Breyfogle is professor of history and Director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (2005), which was awarded the Ohio Academy of History Outstanding Publication Award, 2006; and editor or coeditor of Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History (with Philip C. Brown, 2023); Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (2021); Nature at War: American Environments and World War II (2020); Readings in Water History (2020); Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (2018); and Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (2007). He is also the recipient of the Herbert Feis Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public History from the American Historical Association.

Review :
This kind of expansive and comparative volume, one that tackles 300 years of Eurasia’s ecological history under first the Russian, then Soviet empire, is sorely needed and long overdue in the field of environmental history. Eurasian Environments not only offers a great diversity of approaches to environmental history but also displays new ways of making Russian imperial and Soviet history from the study of human and nonhuman worlds, local knowledge, cultures, and practices that reveal the great potential for enhancing multidisciplinary research in this field. This innovative collection explores the specific varieties and unifying themes of three centuries of Imperial Russian and Soviet environmental history. By examining political, economic, and cultural experiences in the multiple limiting contexts of climate, flora and fauna, it offers fascinating insights into major themes in Russian and Soviet history, including empire-building, socialist construction, industrialization, relations between dominant and sub-altern groups, and more. Authored by an international cast of leading scholars, it functions both as an introduction to the field and a general overview of the latest research. Whereas many earlier studies of the Soviet environment focused on national-level policies and decision-making emanating from Moscow or the capitals of the Soviet republics, the cases presented in this volume bring to light how societies were transformed and affected in their interactions with the natural environment. Many of the essays underscore the tension between imperial goals and the environmental realities faced by the different populations.