Long description:

Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia?s History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and in so doing, highlights the unexpected importance of  Russian environments across a time frame well beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.

?Thinking Russia?s History Environmentally is a work of bold vision, grand synthesis, and fine detail in creative combination by an outstanding team of editors and authors. Making productive use of a growing body of international and domestic scholarship on Russian internal imperialism, infrastructures, industrial pollution, disasters, environmentalists, exotic animals, and natural resources from fish to fossil fuels this rich volume illuminates and opens up to global comparison a history that for a long time seemed both enclosed, enigmatic and exceptional.? ? Sverker Sörlin, Professor of Environmental History, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations

AcknowledgmentsNotes on the Text

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon

Part I: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ITS ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTS

Chapter 1. Natural Resources and Management Expertise in the Monastic Salt Industry of the White Sea Area in the 16th and 17th Centuries

Alexei Kraikovsky and Margarita Dadykina

Chapter 2. Early Russian Industrialization: An Environmental Perspective

Catherine Evtuhov

Chapter 3. Seeing Oil: Isaak Levitan and the Industrial Volga

Jane Costlow

Chapter 4. Kazan? Citizens Against Air Pollution: The Case of the Ushkov & Co. Chemical Factory (1893-1917)

Andrei Vinogradov

Chapter 5. ?Environing? the North: Fishing and Hunting in the Industrial Development of Khanty-Mansi Okrug, 1960-1975

Evgenii Gololobov

Part II: HUMANS AND ANIMALS

Chapter 6. Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge

Anna Olenenko

Chapter 7. Public Health Across Species: Domestic Animals and Sanitary Reforms in Imperial Russia

Anna Mazanik

Part III: ENVIRONMENT AND POLITICS IN THE LATE SOVIET SPACE

Chapter 8. How Wetlands Entered the Transnational Spaces of Late Soviet Environmentalism

Katja Bruisch

Chapter 9. ?You ought to love nature!? Peoples? Control Committees ? Environmental Whistleblowers and West Siberian Oil in the 1970s

Valentina Roxo

Part IV: GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENT PAST AND PRESENT

Chapter 10. Empire, Settlement and Environment: The Russian Empire and Donald Meinig?s ?Macrogeography of Western Imperialism?

Denis Shaw

Chapter 11. Tracks across the Tundra: Making a Living from Nature in the Borderland of the Russian Northwest

Urban Wr?kberg and Peter Haugseth

Afterword

J.R. McNeill

Glossary

Index