We warmly invite you to a seminar “Nature and socialist states” that will be focused on the environmental history of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The aim of the seminar is to reflect on the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between state socialism and the natural environment: the negative impacts of industrialization, the management of land and forests, the development of ecological expertises and environmentalist movements, the attempts to reconcile economic development with the needs of nature preservation and the artistic representations of these processes.
The program of the seminar:
Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, University College London
Merging the Unmergeable: Environmentalism in the Late Socialist Industrial Landscape
In a 1977 monograph devoted to the work of Ural Tansykbayev (1904-74), it was reported that the celebrated Uzbek artist witnessed with pride and joy the transformation of his native land by the Soviet people and sought through his painting to capture the “merging of the unmergeable.” In this presentation we will consider the extent to which the merging in socialist art of the infrastructures of industrial modernity – the proliferating mines, factories, railroads, pylons, dams and canals, with the remains of the natural environment – solitary trees, retreating lakes and distant mountains, constituted a latent form of ecological critique. How far did the emergence of more equivocal and conflicted depictions of the industrial landscape reflect growing ecological awareness, serving also as unwitting documents of the distinctive environmental histories of the Socialist Anthropocene?
Dr Maja Fowkes is an art historian, curator and co-director of the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. Her publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar(Sternberg Press, 2021) and The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde and Ecology under Socialism (2015). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions ‘Colliding Epistemes’ at Bozar Brussels (2022) and ‘Potential Agrarianisms’ at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). She is Principal Research Fellow for the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), a research project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.
Dr Reuben Fowkes is an art historian, curator and co-director of the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. His publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar(Sternberg Press, 2021) and a special issue of Third Text on ‘Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism’ (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions ‘Colliding Epistemes’ at Bozar Brussels (2022) and ‘Potential Agrarianisms’ at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). He is a Research Fellow on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), a research project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.
Elena Kochetkova, University of Bergen
Forests, Wood, and Industrially Embedded Ecology in the late Soviet Union
The presentation is based on my monograph „The Green Power of Socialism: Forest, Wood and the Making of Soviet Industrial Ecology during the Cold War”, forthcoming with the MIT Press in 2024. It examines the relations of nature and humans under state socialism via the lens of industrial roles of Soviet forests. Discussing how professionals working in industry under the Soviet state envisaged the present and future of forests, and perceived them as both a natural resource and an industrial material, the paper explores Soviet policy in wood consumption. Looking at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood, this paper demonstrates how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project which saw the rise of new industry-ecology paradigms designed by specialists. It also discusses how the industry neglected socialist experience after the demise of the USSR and has been revived in post-Soviet countries in recent decades. Emphasizing the technological and environmental impacts of the Cold War, the presentation critically reconsiders two explanatory models which have become dominant in historiography over the last decades –ecocide and environmentalism. It extends beyond these polarized characterizations to show that under state socialism, concern over the environment arose due to industrial priorities of the modernizing state, giving birth to an industrially embedded ecology. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, I invite readers to re-evaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry. In so doing, I will contribute a fresh perspective on the activities of socialist experts and their view of nature, shedding light on Soviet state industrial and environmental policy and its continuing legacy in the present day.
Elena Kochetkova is a historian of the economy, environment, technology and state socialism. She is assistant professor at University of Bergen. She published articles on various aspects of the history of nature and natural resources, such as water and forest, technological projects and socialist modernity as well as the history of industrial heritage in modern Russia. She’s the author of the monograph “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology”.
Kornelia Sobczak (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw)
“The world doesn’t have to perish”, but it can. Environmental protection in practice and in discourse in Poland in the 1980s.
The devastation of the natural environment in the 1980s in Poland – a result of intensive industrialisation – was a rising concern of virtually all participants of the public sphere: the official press, scientists, local authorities, social activists. Pointing out the terrible state of the environment and the ecological negligence of the government was also an important part of the democratic opposition’s agenda and a lot of space in the samizdat press was devoted to these issues. At the end of People’s Republic of Poland, the largest social protests – which is rarely remembered today – were the environmental protests, many of them with predominant participation of women. But in the same period of the 1980s, a lot was also done to improve the quality of air or water, primarily at the local dimension: some factories were equipped with better filtration systems , new sewage treatment plants were established, etc. The research questions I pose in relation to the 1980s are:
– who was involved in the local environmentalist activities and why were they successful?
– why protecting the environment and identifying the causes of its devastation was such an important element of the discourse of the democratic opposition in the 1980s?
– how did it happen that ecological issues were so quickly „forgotten” after the political transformation, in favor of „inventing” the figure of a “crazy ecologist” chained to trees?
Kornelia Sobczak, PhD, member of Team for Research on Theories and Practices of Socialism and Communism, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, former academic teacher, researcher interested in cultural history, currently works as an editor in “Dialog” magazine.
Weronika Parfianowicz (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw)
Global crisis, local struggles. The reactions to the ecological challenges in socialist Poland
The presentation will be focused on the expert discourse on the environmental crisis in socialist Poland in 1970’ and 1980’. It was the period when important discussions concerning the global and local ecological problems took place among the Polish intellectuals and scientists. They were referring to the ongoing debates concerning “Limits to growth” and other influential Western publications, but were also searching for their own vocabulary to envision the ways of how socialist state could constructively answer to environmental challenges. The presentation will point out some of the crucial topics of this discussion, present some of its most influential participants and the ways of circulation of the knowledge concerning the ecological crisis.
Weronika Parfianowicz works at Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include Central European urban culture, contemporary Czech culture, housing policies, degrowth and ecosocialism. She’s author of the monograph “Europa Środkowa w tekstach i działaniach. Polskie i czeskie dyskusje” [Warszawa 2016] and co-editor of collective monograph “Awangarda/underground. Idee, historie, praktyki w kulturze polskiej i czeskiej” [Kraków 2018]
Organizers:
Weronika Parfianowicz, Kornelia Sobczak, Agata Zborowska, Magda Szcześniak [Team for Research on Theories and Practices of Socialism and Communism, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw]
The seminar is part of the research project “Traps of Industrialization, Temptations of Consumption, the Search for „Harmonious Progress” and Care for Earth’s Future. Environmental Challenges in socialist Poland” financed by University of Warsaw [IDUB].