The curious case of the marginalisation or distortion of Russian and Soviet environmental history in global environmental histories

Abstract

For too long, ‘global environmental history’ has not been truly ‘global’, but has been shaped by the perspectives and linguistic skills of its practitioners, who have generally, but not solely, been based in the Anglophone world. This is evident until recently in the relatively limited consideration of the environmental history of Russia and the Soviet Union—the largest country in the world—in works on global environmental history, and in the distorted or unbalanced treatment of that country’s environmental history in such works. The article first briefly reviews ‘global environmental history’, and then considers how and why so many global environmental histories have marginalised or distorted Russian environmental history. It points to reasons relating to language, periodisation and biases. The essay concludes by assessing the prospects for further integration of Russian environmental history into global histories. Show more