News

Our fourth and final annual meeting of the DFG-funded research network Russian Ecospheres will take place in the context of “Climate Change Adaptation” from the 27^th of February till 1^st of March 2025 at GWZO in Leipzig.

Together with scholars from various disciplines, including historiography, geography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and the natural sciences, historical lessons will be learnt from policies of adaptation from the 18^th to 21^st century.

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Program and Accession

The conference program on February 27^th and 28^th is open to the public. Scholars and guests are asked to present small- and large-scale case studies on adaptation, its discursive implications and technological practicability in Eastern Europe and the former territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

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Preliminary Content

As meeting the 1.5-degree benchmark for limiting the effects of climate change becomes increasingly implausible, the technological and social discussion is moving towards adaptation. Adaptation features prominently in the most recent synthesis report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and formed a key theme at the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28). There are, however, also gaps and barriers in adaptation policies, mostly caused by insufficient funding and inadequate technology in addition to the complex character of the climate change process. Philipp Staab (2022) argues that this gradual shift from mitigation to adaptation illustrates a greater shift from (self-)development to (self-)preservation in society, opposing the modernist agenda of democratization, emancipation and individualization. This recent reappraisal of adaptation as policy and concept prompts the question: how and what can contemporary discussion learn from historical experience? As sociologists like Talcott Parsons have argued, adaptation is a structural means of human behavior and social order. This also holds true for the adaptation to changing environmental conditions, both in short- and long-term perspective.

The regions and countries of the former Soviet and Russian empires promise to be particularly rewarding case studies in this respect, considering the area’s marked climatic zonal shifts and the prevalence of extreme weather and climate events. Furthermore, the area encompasses a range of competing adaptation approaches and traditions including, for example, the large-scale technocratic focus of Soviet and Russian managerialism, the more nuanced, local level adaptations at the national, regional and local levels, and the enduring, lived adaptations of indigenous peoples. Its history also embodies the ambiguity and dialectics of adaptation, namely the human adaptation to environmental conditions and the adaptation of environmental conditions to human needs.

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3rd Annual Meeting: Scales of Ecology (5th – 7th of July 2024, GZWO Leipzig)

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Day 1

Climate change in particular leads to the “derangement of scales” (Timothy Clark) and promotes concepts that go beyond anthropocentric scales such as big history or deep time. Changes in scale affect modes, concepts and contents of representation. They are mediated through narratives and require new ways of reading and analyzing cultural artefacts.

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First Section: Arranging Complexity

After the introduction, Erik Martin opened the conference with a talk titled “Three (Non-)Scalables: Life, Sensation, Environment”. This contribution challenged our meeting’s theoretical premise with a philosophical approach to life, something he calls a “non-scalable”. Departing from Aristotle’ classic definition of life, stating that a clear distinction between the animate and the inanimate cannot be drawn, the presentation turned to two prominent philosophical figures of Soviet science: Vladimir Vernadsky and Aleksandr Oparin, both reflecting on the relationship between living and non-living matter.

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Second Section: Scaling Energy

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A special role in the intellectual history of these ideas played the Kazakh Zapovednik of Borovoe, where both Vernadsky and Shmal’gauzen were evacuated during WWII. Writing his two major works here, Shmal’gauzen develops his biocybernetics theory of transformation of information in biogeocenosis. The Russian-language bias of environmental thought in theories of evolution, Levit concluded, instead of a “selfish gene” favored a “selfish biosphere”.

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The next paper was given by Philipp Kohl: “The First Russian Big History? Petr Lavrov’s Pre-Human History of Thought”. His case study was dedicated to a philosophical project, populist intellectual pursued between about 1870 and his death in 1900: the “history of thought”, an account of the evolution of thought starting with cosmological, geological, and biological processes. Lavrov never finished the cumbersome project, producing volume after volume. Looking at the critical and satirical reception of his 1874 Essay on the History of Thought, Kohl pointed to a discussion on scale and proportion he then compared to the contemporary discourse of “Big History”, a field of study established by David Christian and often uncritically embraced in contemporary Russia. A concluding comparison of Christian’s and Lavrov’s works’ structures as well as similar attempts of pre-human universal histories illustrated the promises and limits of large-scale narratives of history.

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Third Section: Global Perspectives

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The third section started with Clemens Günther’s paper “Soviet Eco-Cosmopolitanism? Oceans in late Soviet Travel Literature”. Based on numerous Russian travelogues on the world oceans in the long 1970s, he traced the emergence of oceanic narratives in late Soviet culture, which acknowledged the growing endangerment of the maritime world through fish die-off, fishery, nuclear radiation, overtourism and more. Unlike the inbound late Stalinist culture, those travelogues rehabilitated globalist frames and gradually established a cosmopolitan frame. They conceded the complicity of the modernizing Soviet empire in causing those risks and called for transnational cooperation to overcome and mitigate ecological degradation. In terms of actors and objectives, this agenda was cosmopolitan and comparable to prominent maritime icons such as Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Soviet writers, however, only reluctantly addressed the normative questions behind this environmental agenda and did not develop a new, specific Soviet idea of cosmopolitanism beyond imitating Western models and international organizations.

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Day 2

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He argued for a nuanced view on the Soviet ecology, acknowledging both environmental destruction (accentuated in early post-Soviet scholarship on socialist ecocide) and the growing awareness of ecological risks in science and society embodied by key figures such as Victor Kovda who followed the tradition of Vernadsky and his integrated view on the biosphere. The Soviet Union was a leading power in generating data on climate change and in ecological monitoring. Although tools for working with the gathered data were underdeveloped, they represent a valuable resource for contemporary, big-data-inspired ecological science.

Fourth Section: Recentering Central Asia

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She started with the most recent event in this biography, its 2023 renaming after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine into Vanch-Yakh Glacier. Since it is the largest glacier outside the polar region, its sheer size makes it a problem of scale. In her talk, Bakhmetyeva focused on the mapping history, looking at several major expeditions since the 1920s conducted in collaboration of German and Soviet scientists. She thus conceptualized scaling as a tool of modernization and power. With an ecofeminist focus on the interrelationship of bodies and the environment, she pointed to the multifaceted corporeal practices that researchers were using to literally scale the natural object with their (male) bodies.

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In the next talk, “Hydropoetics and Aitmatov”, Susi Frank offered an ecocritical reading of Chingiz Aitmatov’s novella The White Steamship (1970), a project she had been developing in the context of her conference on “Hydropoetics” (organized in 2023 together with Jana Rogoff in collaboration with our network). Set at Issyk-Kul, a salt lake without outflow in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the text uses bodies of water – the lake and the rivers flowing into it – as instances of a locus amoenus, as spaces of passage and the return to nature. In her talk, Frank not only gave a detailed analysis of the text but also contextualized it with Aitmatov’s position in the literary field and the political landscape of the late Soviet Union, his role in the formation of a Kyrgyz national literature, and, most importantly, his ecological commitment during perestroika, particularly his invitation of international environmental organizations to lake Issyk-Kul in 1986.

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In her case study on the fair at Karkara Valley, about a hundred kilometers east of the above-mentioned lake Issyk-Kul, she presented a chapter in the global history of pastoralist economy around 1900 that has been shaped by its imperial actors so far. With what she called a multiscalar view, Keating suggested going beyond the familiar scales of the regional and the global, offering a new account of the multiethnic phenomenon of the fair drawing on both local and international scientific sources. Thus, she argued, scalar frictions between the ecology of pastoralism and ecology of imperial capitalism could be seen more clearly.

Fifth Section: Scaling Transformation

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The narrative, often read as a satirical account of Soviet industrialization ambitions, includes the prototype of a perfect sausage, both nutritious and sustainable. It not only serves as a metaphor of collectivity, but also as one of transformation, literally expressed in the semantics of ‘pererabotka’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, depicting eating as the dissolution of boundaries between the body and the world, Fratto showed the interrelationship between environmental figures of thought and metabolic models in the early Soviet period.

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Andy Bruno, who could not come to Leipzig, gave an online presentation titled “Balancing the Scales: Ecology and Economy in Soviet Socialism”. He started with a hypothesis: in environmental thought of the early Soviet period, there is a remarkable shift from conquest to balance. To underscore this, Bruno looked at holistic theoretical impulses to achieve a balance between economy and ecology. This balance, he argued, was rather dynamic and anthropocentric than ecocentric. Bruno demonstrated this tendency, looking at several texts by Nikolay Bukharin, one of the most influential proponents of post-revolutionary Historical Materialism.

Comparing several early-1920s theoretical works, Bruno pointed out a shift from a Promethean view of nature to an idea of balance (ravnovesie). In the Theory of Historical Materialism (1925), a chapter titled “The Balance Between Society and Nature” uses deforestation at the Volga as an example of an event with the potential to influence global changes in climate and thus establishes an ecological link between a regional event and its planetary scale. This tendency towards balance, Bruno concluded, can be shown after 1945 in more manifest forms.

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Excursion to Bergbau-Technik-Park

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Day 3

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Section 6: New Views on 18th Century

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The last day of our annual conference started with a look at “New Views on the 18th Century”, a section with two presentations from environmental history and literary history. Julia Herzberg dedicated her talk to the search for the Cold Pole. Like previous talks, which approached the issue of Scale as one of measuring phenomena with different scales, Herzberg looked at the interplay between the exploration of space and the problem of establishing a reliable method of temperature measurement, which only became possible during the 19th century. In her talk, she not only showed how local indigenous knowledge can be used to provide information on global weather developments, but also pointed out how the imaginary of the cold pole became part of explorers’ autobiographical narratives, where it is troped a “coffin of ice” or a “living grave”. Although in 20th century, it became clear that there could be no single cold pole, interest in the idea remained high.

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In her following talk “Problems of Perception: Lomonosov and Learning How to See ‘priznaki’ of Precious Metal Ores”, Colleen McQuillen offered a reading of Mikhail Lomonosov’s mineralogical writings based on his studies at Freiberg in 1739 – not too far from our conference venue in Leipzig. His First Principles of Metallurgy or of Ore Mining published in 1763 go far beyond a technical description of minerals. They offer detailed accounts on how to recognize ores, negotiating sensual perception between the visual and the olfactory. In her analysis, McQuillen shed light on Lomonosov’s narrative strategies to produce knowledge about the invisible – the ores hidden in the Earth. At a time where neither microscopes nor chemical methods of analysis are available, miners look for ‘priznaki’ (material qualities in color, touch and smell). In their practices, not only theological narratives of hope and reward were common, but also bodily metaphors of ‘mother Earth’ hiding treasures in her womb (the ‘bowels of the Earth’). The problem of scale becomes palpable between the relationality of embodied experience and the imperial dimension of resource extraction.

Section 7: Escalating Soviet Utopia

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Although the history of artificial irrigation dates back to the 19th century, those ideas gained new ground in Stalinism and were formative for the late Stalinist “Great Plan for the Transformation on Nature”. The high hopes – protection against floods, yield increase and saving water supply –, however, never fully materialized and led to erosion, overfertilization and other environmental damages. Schönfelder introduced the various players responsible for the rise and fall of the region’s agronomic complex, including Soviet scientists, party politicians, local actors and international experts. His case study, thus, in exemplary fashion, addressed the various scales in which environmental policies can be studied and how their interplay shapes environmental conditions on the spot, both in long- and short-term perspective.

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In her concluding talk “Cross-Scale Imaginations of Future Ecologies”, Tatjana Petzer turned our attention to the present. Looking at utopian designs for green cities, she asked whether these ideas were in favor of nature taking over or humans being in control. This structural ambivalence of ecological landscape design, Petzer argued, can be found in various media.

A few of them are Nikita Argunov’s 2019 film Coma, whose protagonist becomes the architect of a virtual future reality while being in a coma; Pleistocene Park, an experimental ecological project recreating a past ecosystem in northeastern Siberia; or the project “Green Reconstruction of Ukraine”, an attempt to ecologically transform municipalities damaged during Russia’s full-scale invasion since 2022. In this latter case, she pointed to conflicting visions of a green future, a debate she contextualized with the contradictory views on Ukraine between architects and urban planners from the West and local actors on the one hand and between utopian concepts of avantgarde architecture and dystopian contemporary visions on the other.

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Further activities of the network and possibilities to take part here:

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Network Members in cooperation with the GWZO call for papers until the 30 June 2024 for the upcoming event with the Title “Adapting to climate change and climate extremes in historical perspective“, taking place in Leipzig at sight from the 27th of February untill the 1st of March 2025.

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Preliminary Content:

As meeting the 1.5-degree benchmark for limiting the effects of climate change becomes increasingly implausible, the technological and social discussion is moving towards adaptation. Adaptation features prominently in the most recent synthesis report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and formed a key theme at the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28).

There are, however, also gaps and barriers in adaptation policies, mostly caused by insufficient funding and inadequate technology in addition to the complex character of the climate change process. Philipp Staab (2022) argues that this gradual shift from mitigation to adaptation illustrates a greater shift from (self-)development to (self-)preservation in society, opposing the modernist agenda of democratization, emancipation and individualization. This recent reappraisal of adaptation as policy and concept prompts the question: How and what can contemporary discussion learn from historical experience? As sociologists like Talcott Parsons have argued, adaptation is a structural means of human behavior and social order. This also holds true for the adaptation to changing environmental conditions, both in short- and long-term perspective. 

The regions and countries of the former Soviet and Russian empires promise to be particularly rewarding case studies in this respect, considering the area’s marked climatic zonal shifts and the prevalence of extreme weather and climate events. Furthermore, the area encompasses a range of competing adaptation approaches and traditions including, for example, the large-scale technocratic focus of Soviet and Russian managerialism, the more nuanced, local level adaptations at the national, regional and local levels, and the enduring, lived adaptations of indigenous peoples.  Its history also embodies the ambiguity and dialectics of adaptation, namely the human adaptation to environmental conditions and the adaptation of environmental conditions to human needs. 

This conference calls for the historical lessons we can learn from these policies of adaptation from the 18^th to 21^st century. It invites scholars from various disciplines, including historiography, geography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and the natural sciences, to present small- and large-scale case studies on adaptation, its discursive implications and technological practicability in Eastern Europe and the former territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

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Contributions:

Contributions may address, among others, the following issues:

• the cultural imaginary of climate change adaptation; tropes and narratives of adaptation; generic conventions (science-fiction, utopia/dystopia etc.), 
• the cultural imaginary of climate change adaptation; tropes and narratives of adaptation; generic conventions (science-fiction, utopia/dystopia etc.), 
• the cultural imaginary of climate change adaptation; tropes and narratives of adaptation; generic conventions (science-fiction, utopia/dystopia etc.), 
• (socialist) policies of climate change adaptation (climate engineering, nature protection etc.),
• technological, political, moral and social constraints of adaptation,
• strategies of activating adaptive capacities,
• adaptation strategies in specific sectors (agriculture, urban planning), ecoregions or environments,
• national and transnational approaches to climate challenge and adaptation,
• local and indigenous strategies of adapting to changing climates; protection against and preparedness for extreme climate conditions; tools of adaptation,
• personal, collective, institutional and infrastructural resources that allow individuals, groups or systems to respond and adapt to climate change,
• limits and risks of adaptation; historical fallacies and their reasons.

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Hand in of CfP:

Please submit your abstract (up to 300 words), a short CV (1-2 sides of A4) and your contact details to Julia Herzberg (julia.herzberg@leibniz-gwzo.de) and/or Clemens Günther (clemens.guenther@fu-berlin.de) by 30th of June 2024.
We might be able to cover costs for travel and accommodation if needed.

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General Meeting Details:

Venue: 

Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO)

Reichsstraße 4 – 6

D-04109 Leipzig

Organizers:

Julia Herzberg, Mika Perkiömäki, Jonathan Oldfield, Clemens Günther, Andrei Vinogradov

Date:

27.02.2025 – 01.03.2025

Literature:

Block, Rachel; Ebinger, Jane; Fay, Marianne (eds.). 2010. Adapting to Climate Change in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Washington.

Chavez-Rodriguez, Libertad; Klepp, Silja (eds.). 2018. A critical approach to climate change adaptation: discourses, policies and practices. Boca Raton.

IPCC, 2023: Sections. In: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 35–115, doi: 10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647 

McQuillen, Colleen. 2018. Human adaptation in late-Soviet environmental science fiction. In McQuillen, Colleen. & Vaingurt, Julia, eds. The human reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia, 99–113. Boston.

Staab, Philipp. 2022. Anpassung. Leitmotiv der nächsten Gesellschaft. Berlin.

Tennberg, Monica. 2012. Governing the Uncertain: Adaptation and Climate in Russia and Finland. Heidelberg/London/New York.

After two inspiring meetings on spheres and forms, our third convention at GWZO Leipzig from the 5th till 7th of July 2024, will be dedicated to the problem of scale.

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Like music and maps, studies of relations between culture and nature need scales which are socially produced and imply normative models (Ram 2016). Popularized first and foremost in human geography, problems of ‘scale’ and practices of ‘scaling’ have been widely discussed in such various fields as biology, ecology, architecture, engineering, and mathematics. More recently, they have gained new relevance in Anthropocene studies. Timothy Clark called the Anthropocene a symptom of a “crisis of scale” (Clark 2012, 150), a crisis that demands new conceptualizations and representations of the environment. In response, literary and cultural studies developed scale-centered approaches that allow to account for the entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological, and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal levels (e.g., Dürbeck/Hüpkes 2022).

In ecocriticism, questions of scale have been discussed with respect to the broadening of canons, the use of digital tools, and the ability of existing narrative forms to engage with large scales of space and time, influenced by Gayatri Spivak’s and Wai-Chee Dimock’s musings on “planetarity” as distinguished from “globalization” (Heise 2019). In historiography, the differentiation of scales informs theoretical debates about time (évènement – moyenne durée – longue durée) and space (microhistory vs. macrohistory). It has been debated in various contexts, not only in environmental history (Walkind 2014), but also in the field of ‘Big History’. Thus, David Christian has suggested to examine history from the microhistorical scale of individual lives to the macrohistorical scale of cosmic history (Christian 2005). In literary and cultural studies, questions of scale figure prominently in current debates on world literature (Tanoukhi 2008) and inform works experimenting with non-anthropocentric forms of mediating voice and agency of entities such as animals or plants.

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For the network meeting, we would like to go beyond questions of size:

Are scales in Russia and the Soviet Union, a space of “large-scale projects and large-scale bureaucracies” (Josephson 2013), only ever vast or small?

An approach to scale as an epistemological device of interdisciplinary humanities should allow to include competing scale concepts which mutually supplement each other. Instead of just looking at the size of scales in time and space, we plead for an ecological multidimensionality of scale. In his classic article The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology (Levin 1992), ecologist Simon A. Levin identifies the problem of relating phenomena across scales as the central problem in biology and science in general. His suggestion of “cross-scale studies” has been taken up in multiple contexts (Chave 2013). We would like to make this and other approaches productive for literary and historiographical studies.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in global perspective,
• Circulation, transformation, and adaptation of ecological knowledge across states and regions,
• Russian ecocriticism and world literature,
• Planetarity and ecology; mediating sense of place and sense of planet,
• Theories of scale,
• Ecological, geological, evolutionary theories of scale,
• Historical predecessors of scale ideas (e.g. scala naturae, micro- and macrocosm),
• Approaches and alternatives to concepts of scale in literary and cultural theory,
• Narrating scales,
• Narrating non-human scales of time and space,
• Scales as devices of ideology, e.g. in infrastructure and geopolitics,
• Examining scales,
• Cross-scale phenomena between the disciplines,
• Dysfunctional scales: Blurry and fuzzy states between nature and culture; Problems of (dis)proportion across disciplines and epistemologies,
• and Scales out of joint: Balance and escalation.

In addition to contributions from within our network, we invite promising PhD students or graduates to present their work at a panel for junior researchers.

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For questions please contact network coordinators Clemens Günther or Philipp Kohl and visit our website to stay up-to-date.