‘The Soviet Union rejected capitalism — yet, it caused huge carbon pollution'

Time of India

03-08-2025

Andy Bruno, Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History at Indiana University Bloomington
Andy Bruno is Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History at Indiana University Bloomington. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke , he discusses Soviet environmental history — and why this matters today:
What is the core of your research?
My work studies human-environmental relationships that occupied the
Soviet Union
, going back into imperial
Russia
and forward to this day.
Can you outline Kamchatka's earthquake?
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The Kamchatka region is very far to the east. It's an extremely volcanic area, sparsely populated and difficult to access. It's quite natural in terms of its ecosystems. Russia isn't necessarily known for earthquakes — so, this fault off the coast of Kamchatka is interesting.
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You've studied Tsarist Russia becoming the USSR — did views about nature also change?
There were continuities and disruptions. Imperial Russia had a strong modernising impulse, a desire to conquer nature and put it under human economic dominance. However, the Soviet project was framed as a departure from capitalism — it aimed to get rid of exploitations Soviet leaders believed existed in the Tsarist era. There were two impulses — the first was the Soviet desire to conquer the natural world. The second was to establish a balance where Soviet society could have a lot in common with what we call 'sustainable development' now — here, humans could somehow take from nature while having it flourish as well by being rational agents.
What were interactions with industrialising places like the
Kola
Peninsula like?
Other than a few Sami groups, Kola hadn't had people for millennia. It had less than 10,000 people at the 19th century's start — yet, it became the most built-up Arctic region in the world during the Soviet era. Nuclear power plants, hydroelectric facilities, copper mining, phosphates, rare earths, etc., developed. An entire militarised infrastructure took root — Kola was almost a microcosm of the developmentalist vision of the Soviet Union because you had a place with very little going on, where they developed a particular socialist type of industry.
Were there similarities and differences on the environment between the Soviet Union and the United States as they grew?
They both put growth and the economic use of nature first — conservation was a second-tier priority. Hence, they both went through the great acceleration of ramped-up production and environmental impacts post-WWII. They both thus enter the Anthropocene as active agents.
However, there was a rationale behind the Soviets that gave them a different texture. Everything, from the nature preserves across the USSR, which were more about science than tourism compared to the US, to environmentalist discourse becoming widespread in the 1960s1970s, shows how ecology was thought about. There was a good deal of embracing nature rhetorically — but also not necessarily embracing the strictest conservation measures. The Soviet Union had rigorous environmental laws — which were often not enforced. Everyone was supposed to help nature, an aim propagandised all over the place — but very little happened to people who didn't follow that. This was different from the polarised debate on environmentalism which emerged in the United States.
Did Chernobyl have a legacy?
There was a major change with it — they first tried to keep it secret, then, it became open to the public. Chernobyl single-handedly helped to turn the world away from nuclear energy for a while. It also led to many exposes. There had been nuclear disasters earlier, like 1957's explosion in Mayak — those were kept secret. Of course, Chernobyl happened in 1986, shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It seems impactful — but, if the USSR survived, it might have been more of a blip.
Can you tell us about animals in Russia?
For a long time, there's been a fascination with various animals, from bears, which have a common connotation for Russia, to birds in
Siberia
, tigers, reindeer, etc. There's also been hunting culture in the Tsarist and Soviet eras. Overall though, the landmass was so big, there were places different species could remain relatively unperturbed by humans.
Today, the state focuses its conservationist energies on 'charismatic megafauna' — it decides, for instance, 'We're going to save the tiger' and creates a reserve. This shows an environmental politics but one less threatening to economic interests because these activities are in distant locations. That happened in the Soviet Union too — many activist efforts were around things like shaming poachers and not criticising big polluting factories.
How is Siberia viewed?
There is interesting thinking about the Siberian landscape — it's seen as both a heaven and a hell, a place of natural abundance and of exile and punishment, whether in the Tsarist period or the gulag camps of the Soviets. I've written about the site of the 1908 Tunguska explosion in remote Siberia. Here, the largest asteroid explosion in modern times occurred — it fascinated generations of Soviet researchers who thought it was a meteorite, a comet, aliens. They created this whole culture of voluntary expeditions spending time in Tunguska, looking for clues. A very distinctive environmental relationship emerged, also shaping Soviet science, amateurism and voluntary effort.
What role do indigenous groups play?
Some have a voice with organisations speaking for them. Sometimes, those are captured by the state but they still have representatives. During the Soviet period, there was this dual sense of thinking, 'We must uplift these people but also modernise them.' Earlier, the Soviet authorities didn't look at indigenous populations as an enemy. But then, their politics forced them into collective farms, reduced their cultural autonomy and, in the 1930s, oppressed some.
Through these experiences, indigenous groups developed different politics — some aligned with the Soviet system, feeling, 'Well, at least, we have some social security in this.' Things were certainly different in the 1990s when the Soviets collapsed and economic precarity arose. Today, the indigenous peoples of Siberia have less of a sense of being part of a global indigenous movement and more of being their own groups.
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Can you discuss climate change in Russia today, Siberia being among the fastest-heating regions on Earth?
There are some renewable energy campaigns. Importantly, Soviet scientists played a very important role in helping to understand global warming worldwide and within Russia itself. There is wariness though about being too worried —
Vladimir Putin
apparently joked that we'd like it if it was a little bit warmer here. That shifted the discourse to some concern but not in a very radical way.
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Why is the environmental history of the Soviet empire important today?
It connects with the ways market eco-nomies and capitalism are organised today, the systems of our world which are structured towards certain kinds of energy politics and economic policies. The Soviet Union was a state that was trying to not put profit over everything — yet, it ends up becoming one of the biggest carbon polluters on Earth. There's much to be gained from thinking about what state socialism was earlier for where we might go today.
Views expressed are personal