"Nature Mastered by Man: Ideology and Water in the Soviet Union"
The vision of a new kind of society without private ownership, and thus profit interests, of natural resources had promised a utopia of man and nature in harmony. What went wrong?
The vision of a new kind of society without private ownership, and thus profit interests, of natural resources had promised a utopia of man and nature in harmony. What went wrong?
For nearly a century, we have relied increasingly on science and technology to harness natural forces, but at what environmental and social cost?
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.