An Environmental History of the Soviet Arctic - TIB AV-Portal

An Environmental History of the Soviet Arctic

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Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC)

Josephson, Paul

Formal Metadata

Title

An Environmental History of the Soviet Arctic

Author

Josephson, Paul

Contributors

Szczesny, Bartosz (Musik)

License

CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Identifiers

10.5446/4452 (DOI)

Publisher

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC)

Release Date

Language

Producer

Niepytalska, Marta

Production Year

2011

Production Place

Munich

Content Metadata

Subject Area

Genre

Abstract

German

German

Carson Fellow Paul Josephson erforscht Russland nach dem Sturz des Zaren und die Umwandlung des Landes. Den Mittelpunkt stellt die Industrie dar, welche durch die Erforschung der Arktis und die neuen Ressourcen wiederbelebt werden soll. Josephson erforscht, wie die Sowjetunion die Ressourcen genutzt und dabei die Landschaften der Arktis verändert hat. Positive Leistungen wurden erbracht, im Hintergrund stehen aber immer Opfer, die von den Menschen und der Umwelt gebracht werden mussten. Carson Fellow Paul Josephson unterrichtet die Geschichte von Russland und der Sowjetunion in Maine.

English

English

Carson Fellow Paul Josephson investigates the transformation of the Soviet Unions Arctic lands. In addition to the conversion of Czarist institutions, scientists and government leaders supported research into the Arctic conditions, leading to its industrialization. Josephson examines both the achievements of the Soviet Unions Arctic conquest and its extraordinary environmental and human costs. Prof. Dr. Josephson is a professor of history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Keywords

German	German Umweltgeschichte Zarenreich Sowjetunion Veraenderung der Staatsform Erforschung der Arktis
English	English Soviet Russia Arctic industrialization environmental history Soviet Arctic conquest

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Transcript: English(auto-generated)

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I'm Paul Josephson, a professor of history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society here in Munich, doing research on an environmental history of Soviet Arctic conquest. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Soviet leaders were faced with immense problems

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that required them to consider how to transform the Tsarist Empire with its religious institutions, with its capitalism, with its poverty, with its illiteracy into a modern people, into

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a working class, into illiterate people, capable of creating an industrial superpower. At first, however, they had to focus on controlling the central regions of the country and resurrecting industry that had fallen to pre-1913 production levels. So the Arctic was an important part

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of their interests in the 1920s, but only to have individual researchers or small groups go into the Arctic and find out, what does it look like? What's there? Only under Stalin in the 1930s did the Soviets, both scientists and leaders, begin to support

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extensive research and development of Arctic resources. So my work focuses on the period 1930 to 1990 and the efforts to understand Arctic resources, Arctic weather, Arctic regularities,

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Arctic difficulties, and to move people into the Arctic, to create an urban Arctic, to create an industrial Arctic, of which there was none, to create cities in the tundra, to create lumbering operations in the taiga, to transform rivers into hydroelectric power

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stations, and so on. And so I've looked at this in my research, this heroic effort, it really is a heroic effort, but it's also an effort that had great human and environmental costs. And so in my research at the Rachel Carson Center, I'm focusing both on the heroic

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aspects, what the Soviets managed to achieve in 60 years, and the environmental and human costs of this effort, which involved slave laborers connected with the gulag, it involved

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vast tracts of spoiled land, it involved destruction of ecosystems, it involved ignorance, ignorance on the part of party leaders who refused to pay attention to these costs so that the entire industrial transformation of nature could continue.