Models Of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia

337 Pages·2000·25.26 MB·English

by  Douglas R. Weiner

MODELS OF NATURE
Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies
Jonathan Harris, Editor
MODELS
OF NATURE
Ecology, Conservation and
Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia
DOUGLAS R. WEINER
University of Pittsburgh Press
To My Parents
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261
Copyright © 1988 by Douglas Robert Weiner
Afterword © 2000 by the University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
ISBN 0-8229-5733-7
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments Xl
Introduction
Monuments of Nature 7
2 Conservation and Revolution 19
3 Conservation under the NEP 31
4 The Limits to Growth 40
5 The Goskomitet and the Zapovedniki 53
6 Models of Nature: The Zapovedniki and Community Ecology 64
7 The Conservation Congress of 1929 85
8 The Cultural Revolution Comes to Biology 121
9 Protective Coloration 134
10 Conservation and the Five-Year Plan 149
11 The Great Transformati on of Nature 164
12 Engineers of Nature 178
13 The First All-Union Conservation Congress 194
14 Conservation without Ecology: Nature Protection
in the Age of Lysenko 211
Conclusion 211
Afterword 239
ApPENDIX 1. Soviet Zapovedniki: Affiliation, Area, and
Administrative Status, 1925-1933 251
ApPENDIX 2. Zapovedniki of the USSR in 1933 256
Acronyms 261
Glossary 263
Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography 264
Notes 266
Selected Bibliography 301
Index 319
Map of Soviet Zapovedniki circa 1933, page 255
Photographs and Illustrations follow page 100

PREFACE
During the salad days of the ecology movement in the United States many wondered whether
other societies had experienced any greater success than our own in avoiding serious
environmental harm. Some speculated, reasonably enough, that the example of the Soviet
Union, with its centrally planned economy and proclaimed commitment to community
well-being, might be instructive. Recent studies have made clear, however, that guarding the
integrity of the natural environment had as Iowa priority in the USSR as it had in the West.
Understandably, but mistakenly, students of Soviet environmental policy tended to
believe that the disappointing record of recent years was simply a continuation of past
failings. Claims by Soviet authors that Lenin took an active role in conservation matters were
dismissed by American students as hagiographical dross. It is true that a few scholars in this
country have shown an awareness of early Russian conservation activity, but they have
located the golden age in the decade before the 1917 Revolution and viewed what followed as
an uninterruptedly grim Bolshevik wasteland.
Soviet authors, too, by their omissions, have helped to sustain the impression that there
was little to investigate in Russian conservation before Khrushchev. To a considerable extent,
that is a result of the continuing political difficulties facing Soviet historians who seek to treat
events of the late 1920s and 1930s. The paucity of literature on early Soviet conservation has
been compounded, unhappily, by the attenuation of this social movement from the mid-1930s
through the late 1950s. When I. I. Prezent and T. D. Lysenko cast their shadows over the
early Soviet conservation movement and the discipline of ecology, they brought ruin to those
enterprises, just as they did to genetics when they wielded unbridled power in that field.
While the Lysenko affair in genetics attained worldwide notoriety, the fate of Soviet
conservation and ecology languished in relative obscurity.
Although it is impossible to say for certain why that has been so, an unlucky combina
tion of factors seems to have been at work. First, conservation and ecology lacked their
Vavilov. No one in those fields enjoyed the degree of international prominence of the plant
geneticist (or shared the lurid circumstances of his martyrdom), and Prezent and Lysenko
could more easily draw the veil of historical amnesia over their less well-known ecologist
adversaries.
A second reason grows out of the divergent histories of the sciences themselves. When
the modem evolutionary synthesis-"Mendelism-Morganism," as it was derisively referred
to in the late \940s-was repudiated by Lysenko and his followers in favor of a vague
Lamarckism, educated people everywhere recoiled in shock. Through crude political in
terference, beliefs endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the international biological
community had been arbitrarily declared reactionary and in error. Worse still, in their stead,
hereditary and evolutionary mechanisms that had been rejected decades earlier were elevated
to positions of official approval. The ordeal of Soviet genetics became a vivid parable of
legitimate science quashed by politics and ideological dogmatism.
The situation in conservation and community ecology was substantially different. Here,
no worldwide consensus existed as to the fundamental tenets of environmental policy or
ecological theory. On the contrary, these fields were characterized by controversy and
diversity. The suppression of the leading Soviet approaches in conservation and ecology, in
this context, was not seen as a devastating blow to legitimate, empirical science-unlike the
suppression of genetics. Owing to the same lack of consensus in ecology, the alternative
ecological notions favored by Prezent and Lysenko never garnered the flamboyant aura of
illegitimacy that surrounded their ideas about heredity and speciation. Perhaps operating here
as well were deep-seated cultural assumptions shared by Soviets and Westerners alike. For a
long time our cultures have elevated to paramountcy in science those branches, such as
viii PREFACE
physics and chemistry, that have enabled us to predict and manipulate natural phenomena. In
biology, the fields that have most approximated this mechanistic ideal are molecular biology
and genetics. Ecology, by contrast, particularly until the 1960s, represented a largely
descriptive science with little predictive power, "merely" concerned with the messy "loosely
ordered systems" of life, to use R. H. Whittaker's apt description. It hardly seems strange
that our power-oriented scientific culture took quick note of an assault on genetics but
remained blissfully unaware of the subjugation of a gentle, descriptive science.
This book is an attempt to remove the historical veil. What I have found underneath is a
rich weave of bureaucratic intrigue, scientific politics, tragedy, and glory. In what will be a
surprise to many, through the early 1930s the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of
conservation theory and practice. Russians were first to propose setting aside protected
territories for the study of ecological communities, and the Soviet government was first to
implement that idea. Furthermore, Russians pioneered the suggestion that regional land use
could be planned and degraded landscapes rehabilitated on the basis of those ecological
studies. These ideas and strategies now guide not just Soviet policies concerning protected
territories but those of many nations. They have even been enshrined internationally in the
United Nations' Biosphere Reserves Program, in which our own country has participated.
Russian and early Soviet achievements in the field of community ecology proper-so
central to our story-are no less imposing. Suffice it to say that Russians pioneered
phytosociology, the individualistic theory of plant distribution, and the trophic-dynamics, or
ecological energetics, paradigm.
It is easy to imagine the excitement I felt as I rediscovered Soviet conservation and
ecology's dazzling past in a treasure trove of antique journals-some with octavos still uncut.
That is the researcher's paydirt. The challenges facing me as a historian, however, were just
beginning. W. S. Cooper, the American ecologist, once described ecological succession as a
braided stream. Human affairs are often much like ecological phenomena. The in
terconnected history of Soviet conservation and ecology was just such a dauntingly complex
braided stream. What I needed to do was to unravel the strands and examine them, while not
losing sight of the fact that they could be truly studied only in the broader context of the
stream, and not clinically, in isolation. These are the dilemmas confronting all those who
elect to study wholes. Wearing my historian's hat I set about assembling the information I
had collected into a coherent, imaginative, and, I hope, convincing reconstruction of the past:
a history of that stream-its sources, tributaries, destination, flow rate, hydrology, and
denizens.
Finally, I confronted my materials as a thinking and feeling human being. I make no
apologies for my sympathy for the early Soviet conservationists and their search for earthly
harmony. Nor do I seek to conceal my belief that the severely utilitarian view of nature held
by the Stalinists was and remains a confining view of the world. For. as John Rodman tells us
in his remarkable essay "Liberation of Nature?" (Inquiry 20, Spring 1977, no. I, pp.
83-131 ), the moment we remove ourselves from the continuum of life and time we dismem
ber ourselves. By looking into the past and discovering there some pieces of ourselves we
never knew, we can begin to regain the fullness of our humanity. I feel privileged that it was
possible for me to rescue this fragment of our human heritage.
TERMINOLOGY, TRANSLATION,
AND TRANSLITERATION
This book is principally a history of Russian and Soviet conservation. Conservation is a term
that has become so all-inclusive as to thwart all attempts to define it. Even in its early usage in
the United States, it connoted such diverse goals as game protection, preservation of scenery,
PREFACE ix
efficiency, and wise use-exemplified by Gifford Pinchot's famous explication, "the great
est good for the greatest number over the longest time." The meaning of the term has become
blurred further by its melding in the public mind with the whole notion of environmental
protection, especially with pollution control.
Its Russian equivalent, okhrana prirody (literally, protection of nature), which I have
translated here as conservation, suffers from the same lack of semantic precision. Although
okhrana prirody has also enlarged its meaning to encompass broader spheres-frequently
being used interchangeably with okhrana okruzhaiushchei sredy, or environmental pro
tection-its use as conservation in this book will be based on how Russians construed the
term prior to the mid-1930s: a concern about wildlife, landscape protection, and wise
husbandry of resources with only minor emphasis on the dangers of pollutants to human
health.
Many other terms that appear in this book may prove unfamiliar to readers who have not
devoted their scholarly lives to a study of Russian conservation and ecology. Although I have
included potential troublemakers in a glossary, following the appendices, it seems useful to
acquaint the reader with the most important of them at the outset.
Four Russian terms designating various types of protected territories appear frequently
in the text. They are zapovednik, okhotnichii zapovednik, zakaznik, and pamiatnik prirody.
Zapovednik presents problems in translation because Russian conservationists them
selves could not agree on what, precisely, it denoted (that is a crucial theme of our story).
While I have rendered it as (nature) reserve, for many, zapovednik had the additional
connotation of a protected territory maintained in a state of inviolability and devoted to
scientific research. In this connection, zapovedniki (the plural form) were regarded by some
theorists of conservation as eta[ony, or baseline areas embodying virgin natural communities
typical of the surrounding region.
Okhotnichii zapovednik, like zapovednik, was a term much in dispute. Introduced by a
tsarist economic ministry, and later by Soviet economic commissariats to denote their
utilitarian preserves, . okhotnich' i zapovedniki' were characterized neither by a regime of
inviolability nor by the pursuit of scientific research. Rather, they sought to alter the natural
conditions within their borders so as to provide optimal conditions for the propagation of
commercial game, both native and introduced. I have translated this term as game
management preserve.
Both types of zapovedniki could be either state (gosudarstvennyi) or local (mestnyi).
State zapovedniki were established by decree of the central government, and were usually
(until 1929) funded by the central RSFSR budget. By contrast, local zapovedniki were
created and funded by organs of local or provincial government. They were frequently under
the overall jurisdiction of some national ministry, however.
Zakaznik may be distinguished from both kinds of zapovedniki by its impermanence
(zakazniki were usually established for periods of five to ten years). Functionally, however,
they were almost identical with the okhotnich'i zapovedniki in their concern for the propaga
tion of particular species of protected wildlife (and not the protection of the entire natural
complex). The principle behind the zakaznik was the same that guided the farmer's practice
of letting his land lie fallow. It was hoped that the game animals, given a respite from hunting
and development pressures, would recover so that their exploitation could soon resume.
Unlike the zapovednik, the zakaznik was not the legal master of its own territory; while either
certain or all economic activities might be prohibited on its territory, the zakaznik continued
to belong to its former landholders and did not have its own administration or staff. Zakaznik
may be translated as (temporary) game preserve.
Pamiatnik prirody, the smallest of the protected territories, is literally monument of