Join the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies for the Graduate Student Lecture. The spring 2025 lecture entitled "Soviet Environmentalism and Agroecology: A View from the Tajik SSR" will be given by Nicholas Seay (Department of History).
A light lunch will be provided to attendees, please register for this talk using the link below. Registration will close on Wednesday, February 26.
Abstract: Was the Soviet Union environmentalist? And if so, what kind of environmentalism can it be said to have practiced? Cold War-era scholars labeled the USSR as a perpetrator of “ecocide” and cast nature as the final victim of the totalitarian state. Early post-Soviet scholarship first challenged the notion, arguing that Soviet-era scientists continued the tsarist-era legacy of conservation-mindedness. More recent scholarship has shown how Soviet experts in industries such as timber promoted ecological principles in industrial planning, subverting the typical narrative of consumer-led anti-industry conservation. This talk builds on recent scholarship and takes the exploration of Soviet “environmentalism” to the cotton fields of Tajikistan and shows how key environmental initiatives paradoxically emerged out of a desire to maintain the monoculture of the Union’s “dirtiest” crop – cotton.
In this presentation, I will introduce cotton monoculture and its development in Soviet Tajikistan. I will then turn to my first case study and talk about the rise in use of harmful pesticides like DDT and their impacts on public health and the environment. I will then explain how Soviet Tajik entomologists first realized how these pesticides had unexpectedly contributed to pest resistance in cotton fields. In the final part of this section, I will tell the surprising story of how the Moscow Metro’s state-construction company used controlled explosives to irrigate new lands in central Tajikistan and laid the foundation for the same entomologists to test their new system and produce the data necessary to prove it’s efficacy. Getting Moscow’s support to adopt the new methods would be more difficult.
The second half of the lecture will turn our attention to another industrial site closely linked to the cotton industry – a large nitrogen fertilizer factory in southern Tajikistan. Construction began in the early 1960s and was completed a few years later; only in 1972 did geologists discover systematic pollution of the nearby underground water table. These problems affected not only the surrounding environment, but also directly impacted the drinking water for nearby residents. It was only a decade later that serious solutions were adopted and again involved the intervention of Moscow-based organizations like the Ministry of Chemical Industries of the USSR.
I will end with broader conclusions about the nature of environmental protections in the Soviet Union and reflections on the breakthroughs and limits of late-Soviet environmentalism vis-à-vis its production goals and increasing economic problems. I will also use this as an opportunity to think about the nature of state-led environmental interventions and the historic relationship industries and environmental movements.