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Like chickens, historians ought to be free-range. This, paraphrased, is the methodological intervention of Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History, a 2021 collected volume edited by David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova. The collection summons readers to the field: “to write robust history, historians need to embed themselves in the places and environments they study” (1). We are to flee the library’s artificial light, lace up our hiking boots, and go break bread with locals.

Place and Nature is the capstone of such an undertaking. Between 2013 and 2016, an international team gathered for workshops on—and fieldtrips in—Russian nature. As the editors put it, participants “gained a sense of how these places look, sound, taste, feel, and smell” (1). The project was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and several Russian, British, and US universities.

Two decades ago, observers could lament that Russia was among “the world regions that remain almost unexplored by environmental historians, native or foreign.”[1] This is no longer the case. Place and Nature joins a growing shelf of collaborations on the Eurasian environment, including a 2018 volume that shares Breyfogle as an editor.[2]

Yet Place and Nature is distinct for three reasons. First, it concentrates on Russia’s far north and far east. Second, it is lightly interdisciplinary. While most contributors are card-carrying environmental historians, some hail from other subfields and disciplines (including the natural sciences). Third, the volume boasts as an intermezzo a collection of personal essays, which share the authors’ travel notes and photographs.

The introduction plots the project’s theoretical guideposts. One is Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between “space” and “place.” The other is Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde’s distinction between “nature” and “environment.” The editors (with Julia Lajus) invoke both dyads to conceptualize humanity’s transformation of natural space into something hybrid—neither natural, nor artificial. This process, called “environing” in Sörlin and Warde’s parlance, is mediated by culture, technology, and natural agency. The introduction then highlights the book’s main themes of water, mobility, and conservation. The result is a useful primer on Russian environmental history.

Part I spirits readers to the northwest, whose inhospitable beauty inspired visionaries of all kinds.

Lajus and Alexei Kraikovski profile the communities that “environed” the Solovetskie Islands since 1438. Each generation—a kaleidoscope of monks, pilgrims, prisoners, scientists, and backpackers—introduced its own expectations of nature to the archipelago. These coalesced into “two strongly contrasting parts,” in which the daily hardships of life on the White Sea unsettled narratives about the islands’ deep spiritual and ecological heritage (38).

Andy Bruno experiments with historical scales in his “biography” of Imandra, one of Europe’s largest lakes. Bruno frames Imandra’s modern degradation within the larger story of the Anthropocene, a concept whose epochal omnipresence can flatten local particularities. Bruno asks, “Must we sacrifice the concrete for the general” (72)? Local waterways, he shows, can facilitate but need not replicate global trajectories.

Alan Roe introduces Vodlozero National Park and its charismatic founder, Oleg Cherviakov. Surfing the fluid years of perestroika, Cherviakov managed to procure the dying state’s consent to open a park. However, his utopian vision, in which foreign ecotourists would fund Karelia’s ecological and spiritual restoration, floundered for lack of money, infrastructure, and local buy-in. Vodlozero was an extreme case of a common dilemma: “the high expectations set by park founders led to great disappointment when the state did not provide the resources for parks to become fully functional…” (94).

Robert Dale brings Part I to its southern terminus: St. Petersburg. Dale compares the city’s 1824 and 1924 floods to historicize water management across the imperial and Soviet divide. Though Peter I’s soggy capital suffered 124 big floods in the intervening century, the 1824 and 1924 disasters were similar in scope and hydrography. Leningraders’ historical memories of 1824 (transmitted via works such as Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”) were tools for coping with calamity. In contrast to disaster histories that focus on social disintegration, Dale underscores “resilience” and adaptation (120).

Part II is an album of photographic essays. These “postcards” give a backstage glimpse into the travels and conversations behind the volume (22). Beyond inducing envy (the photographs are lovely), the essays manifest the rewards of embodied research, as extolled in the introduction. Breyfogle ferries to the Solovetskie Islands, which have seen so many sides of humanity—from prehistoric art to the murderous gulag. Catherine Evtuhov spelunks in the Urals, whose city-factories launched Russia into the industrial age by decapitating mountains. Bryce Stewart, a marine biologist, traverses Lake Baikal, home to diverse yet vulnerable wildlife. Moon hikes bear territory under the smoke of forest fires.

That the editors situate these essays in the volume’s heart reaffirms their commitment to “place-based learning,” a modality popular with environmental history educators. However, the personal essays remain separate from the historical chapters, which are less explicit about the lessons learned from “being there” (24). Given the introduction’s methodological claims, I craved further discussion on how fieldwork ought to inform history writing. Anthropology, for instance, has developed conventions for incorporating reflexivity into the scholarly product. Would Place and Nature have environmental historians rethink their relationship with the first-person pronoun?

Part III returns to a more traditional format, this time in Siberia and the Far East. Reflecting the historiography writ large, the lion’s share concerns Lake Baikal, the planet’s deepest pool of freshwater.

Bekasova and Ekaterina Kalemeneva study the guidebooks that shepherded passengers along the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Europe to the Pacific. With their timetables and descriptions, guidebooks contributed to new “landscapes of transportation,” which constituted both “a physical phenomenon and a kind of rhetorical resource” (203-204). The publishers, a motley cohort of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, helped to define East Eurasia for the Russian public.

Arkady and Tatiana Kalikhman chart Baikal’s long human history. Particularly fascinating is their firsthand account of the campaign to preserve the lake. The Kalikmans’ thirty years as scientists and activists in Baikal in many ways resemble Cherviakov’s struggles in Vodlozero. The authors recount Soviet-era institutional battles, the aftershocks of communism’s collapse, and the uneasy convergence of Western and Russian conservation cultures.

Breyfogle reconstructs the origins of the Barguzin Zapovednik, imperial Russia’s “first and only state-sponsored nature reserve” and a landmark in global conservation practice (268). Breyfogle argues that Baikal’s topography and fauna, particularly the fur-bearing sable, influenced the reserve’s design. It was the interaction between sables, smallpox, Russian settlers, indigenous Evenks, Petersburg bureaucrats, and scientists that gave Barguzin its contours.

Elena Kochetkova details the notorious fight over Baikal’s industrialization, which pitted Siberian-based scientists against pulp producers and their supporters. The scuffle was intricate: both sides marshalled science to justify their vision for Baikal, which hinged on the efficacy of water treatment technologies and the lake’s capacity to self-purify. Yet the “tensions between local and central levels of decision-making and authority” ultimately favored the latter, even as Baikal’s “zones of contamination” spread in the 1960s (309).

Mark Sokolsky spotlights the leading role of “gentlemanly” hunters in the conservation of Primor’e—Russia’s southeastern edge. By stewarding game animals, hunting clubs lay the institutional groundwork for “more comprehensive forms of nature protection” and “many Soviet-era successes,” such as the Amur tiger’s rebound (314, 330). However, as in other colonial contexts, regulation privileged elite recreation over the interests of peasant, indigenous, and migrant hunters.

As a multinational and interdisciplinary project, what Place and Nature sacrifices in cohesion, it gains in thematic breadth. Beyond those listed in the introduction, the volume’s red threads include the opportunities—and challenges—created for environmentalists by molten moments such as war and political rupture. The editors rightly highlight mobility, yet just as potent in the volume is the theme of immobility. Russia’s hard-to-reach interiors, better known as places of exile, fostered preservationism as well as unchecked exploitation. The Kalikhmans, for instance, rest their hopes for the future of Baikal’s purity on the region’s inaccessibility (264). Moon asks, “Why don’t more environmental histories of Russia and the Soviet Union start in remote regions…” (198)? Such questions will interest historians of other far-off places, which, as Bruno demonstrates, are nearer than we think.

Place and Nature is above all a testament to the benefits of international scholarly collaboration. Its example is particularly poignant now, when great forces threaten to cut those ties.

[1] J.R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 30, quoted in Andy Bruno, “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika 8, no. 3 (2007): 638.

[2] Nicholas B. Breyfogle, ed. Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).