UA News

Did the communist government of the former Soviet Union, ignore its own environment and ecology? History Professor Douglas R. Weiner says yes, but probably to good effect.

When Weiner arrived at UA in 1988, his first book, "Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia," had just been published. The book stemmed from his doctoral thesis at Columbia University chronicling the rise of the nature-protection movement in Russia during the Stalin years.

In 1999, his follow-up study of the movement from the 1930s until the waning of the Soviet era under Gorbachev was published by the University of California Press. "A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev," continued the research he had begun ten years earlier. But the first book, translated in Russian in 1991, rattled what was known about dissident movements during the Stalin-era on both sides of the ocean.

The 1988, "Models of Nature" brought Weiner both critical acclaim and criticism among Russian intellectuals. The Russian translation won Weiner a Russian book prize from the USSR's oldest scientific organization, the "Moscow Society of Naturalists." He is the only American to ever win this prize, and it propelled the him into the forefront of an on-going movement to re-write what the West understands about the history of the old "Evil Empire."

The book was also denounced in 1994 by Aleksandr Prokhanov, editor of the xenophobic weekly newspaper, "Zavtra," as bringing down the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Weiner knows his research is helping readers to understand a dark period of world history through the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Weiner acknowledges his research and grant-driven trips almost annually to Russia are not as immediately measurable as projects like the Hubble telescope, but it does have benefit.

"It's kind of an indirect utility to the University in that it enhances our profile; it also increases my capacity and my profession's capacity to teach well, as well as our collective understanding of the human condition," he says.

With Russia encompassing a sixth of the world's surface, Weiner says its important for students to understand the far side of the world in an increasingly shrinking global community.

"You can't just write it off. It's still a dangerous place; it's still a troubled place; it's an important place."

While Weiner teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th century Russian history, his Russian historian counter-part, Fred Kellogg, teaches pre-1900 Russian history. But Weiner is also pulling double-duty in teaching global environmental history at UA, and has recently been elected vice president and president elect of the American Society for Environmental History.

"I was trained as a Russian historian at Columbia. But when I got involved in this dissertation, I realized that I needed to acquire a dual-literacy in the science of ecology in order to decode why it was that particular models of nature were chosen by scientists and opposed by the State, and how those scientific debates either could or could not be resolved."

According to Weiner's research, it is that scientific debate, and the early Soviet concept of "scientific public opinion," that is at the core of how the Russian nature-protection movement survived the Stalin-era and became a vehicle for attempted social change.

"They were using ecological theory to do that," says Weiner, "What's interesting is that the ecological theory used to protect the movement was basically flawed because it proposed that humans had no place in a healthy, natural ecosystem."

Using recently opened archives, as well as information supplied by Russian activists, Weiner's latest study, presented in the 1999 "A Little Corner of Freedom," explores the Soviet nature-protection movement from the 1930s through the fall of communism in 1991. Focusing on organizations such as the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP) and Soviet nature preserves or zapovedniki, what his research uncovered was that a movement existed to set-aside nature preserves for scientific study as "baselines" to measure how developed areas nearby were being degraded by humans who, they believed, had no place in natural ecological systems. The concept was to use these zapovedniki to determine the most resource-friendly way the State could proceed with future industrialization, agriculture and other activities.

According to Weiner, much of the science of ecology of the day was based _ like much of science _ on untestable and unprovable propositions based primarily on their fit with a particular set of practical applications.

"And that's the story here," says Weiner. "It loaned credence to the scientists' claims that nature was so fragile that only experts like themselves should be able to make final decisions about the appropriateness of one or another form of land-use or resource extraction."

In the 1920s it was an easy sell to party leaders in Moscow since the regime was based on a commitment to science while it was conducting campaigns against religion.

"Everything, including social science, needed to be based on a scientific world view. They thought that Marxism was that scientific view to describe human social relations. And then they committed themselves to supporting natural and physical sciences to describe everything else in the world. And so science was the only possible vehicle by which you could actually oppose any policies," says Weiner.

Not only did the State set aside the nature preserves for the scientists to study healthy systems, it also created the Inter-Ministerial Council for Nature Protection in 1925.

"The regime also created the first, ever in world history, environmental impact procedure. The Inter-Ministerial Council for Nature Protection was suppose to have a veto which could stop development in its tracks," says Weiner. But it was short lived. When scientists attempted to use their veto power in 1931 to halt high forest product quotas during Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, Stalin shut the Council down.

Because Moscow basically ignored these scientists and dismissed them as chudak or oddballs, the scientists and nature-lover comrades were left alone to promote their ideas through "scientific public opinion."

While Stalin was cracking down on subversive writers, artists and other critics of the regime, the nature lovers were viewed as harmless and not worth dealing with. The movement, and its power based on science, continued its dissident existence within this intellectual "safe zone."

"This left the nature-protection movement, and these botanists and zoologists, as the last group of people who, on some basis, could still enunciate an opposition to Stalin's Five-Year Plan policies."

According to Weiner, what the scientists were really saying was that this wholesale destruction of nature was destroying society.

"I think they also had an understanding of the connection between the violence of Stalin's nature transformation and his violence with respect to the transformation of society. They were able to make that connection and they thought that if they could somehow cut the violence against nature based on scientific argument, they might be able to mitigate the violence against society," says Weiner.

Because of this "little corner of freedom" within the vale of scientific research, the nature-protection movement was able to openly exchange ideas and thoughts which would have gotten anyone else "liquidated." In fact the VOOP and its scientists survived such inconceivable acts as praising the American conservation movement in 1938. They also argued against collective farms (in connection with which hundreds of thousands of peasants were deported, many of whom died on trains or in camps) based on biodiversity and ecological principles which could increase productivity without the need for mass enserfment of rural society.

"The lesson here is that every regime has inefficiencies and one of the problems with this regime was that there were very few people who really understood the subversive implications of what the scientists were saying," notes Weiner. "And so the regime had a blind spot. If you don't have the right policemen, then you couldn't find the right subversives. The regime's perceptual apparatus didn't allow it to see nature-protection as political speech or having counter-culture potential."

Through the 1950s and '60s a larger movement began to emerge with the decay of Communist ideology. And though the VOOP had been taken over by the Communist Party and the earlier theories of ecology that excluded man had all but been abandoned, the nature-protection movement continued to speak out more openly. Still, no crack-down came because the earlier movement had established a "safe zone" which more people came to appreciate and colonize.

"It would have been embarrassing to the regime because nature-protection was considered such an international no-brainer. To suppress people arguing for these things would have been incredibly embarrassing."

The movement truly crossed the line in April 1986 with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, plunging openly into legal protest. For the first time, due to glasnost, industrial accidents were being publicized broadly. Ordinary people, with grievances toward the State, felt safe enough to demonstrate.

"This is when people started to take over the streets in public demonstrations and forced the regime to recognize the public's right to demonstrate. It came first with environmental protests," says Weiner.

According to Weiner, the fall of Communism in 1991 also marked the end of environmental protests and a more liberalized political arena allowed bigger issues to arise that didn't require the protective umbrella of nature-protection any more.

"The reason is that the macro-economic problems and stability of the Russian state had become so acute, that trumped the dangerous conditions under which they were living environmentally." Weiner says that you can see this today as refuges fleeing Chechnya are settling in lands poisoned by the Chernobyl accident.

The period Weiner studied has brought a new view of Stalin-era history, as well as the role that science and nature-protection played. Though the nature-protection movement evolved into a Russian environmental movement which has all but died out, Weiner notes that the re-emergence of a vocal environmental movement in Russia will probably occur "only when people feel comfortable enough about employment, survival, and the stability of the Russian state to then focus again on these quality-of-life issues."

The other alternative, according to Weiner, is if Russia reverts back to a highly authoritarian state.

"If authoritarianism comes back, the state may be wise to view nature-protection as a "little corner of freedom," and there may be a need to create a new one somewhere else."