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?
Paul Josephson discusses the project he worked on during his Carson Fellowship, from August to December 2011: an environmental history of the Soviet Arctic.
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.
This essay discusses methodological difficulties of the established concept of social memory for the analysis of energo-political discourse. It examines the case study of the German-Russian energy cooperation on the natural gas market which began with the discovery of the Urengoi gas field in 1966.
This article analyses the contribution of the Austrian-born Russian scientist, Franz Joseph Ruprecht (1814–70) to the development of geobotany in general and to the controversial issue of the origins of the very fertile chernozem (Black Earth) of the steppe region of the Russian Empire.
