| In 1988, Douglas R. Weiner, America's leading historian of environmental politics in the Soviet Union, wrote that "through the early 1930s the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of conservation theory and practice" (Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation , and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. x]). Other western writers have echoed these sentiments. Even more glowing accounts of early Soviet conservation have been given by a generation of Soviet historians. The evidence overall, however, is fairly narrow. Western scholarship has tended to focus disproportionately on one unquestionable achievement: the creation, mostly during the early 1920s, of a unique network of Soviet nature preserves (zapovedniki); while Soviet writers have focused mostly on Lenin and the body of conservation-related decrees he signed into law beginning shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.;This dissertation is an attempt to bring another perspective---that of forestry---to bear on questions of early Soviet nature conservation; and here there are many reasons to be less sanguine about both theory and, especially, practice. Among the main points argued here are the following: first, early Soviet forest conservation and management, though original in some ways, do not represent the watershed that has often been suggested---rather, important pre-Revolution precedents can be found, as can important post-Revolutionary deficiencies; second, Lenin's contributions to forest conservation are in fact much less impressive than has been argued; and third---and most important---despite great plans for managing Russia's forests scientifically and along nationally planned lines, the Bolsheviks were effectively stymied by the hostility and resistance of Russia's peasant masses, for whom any efforts at forest management were unwanted intrusions into village life.;Two major Bolshevik forest laws provide the chief focus of this study: "The Basic Law on Forests," decreed in 1918; and "The Forest Code," issued in 1923. Considerable attention is also given to the late Imperial period. |
