Book Review: Travellers in the Great Steppe: From the Papal Envoys to the Russian Revolution by Nick Fielding

Abstract

matter, as the authors of Mussolini’s Nature, for all their determination to be virtuously antifascist, repeatedly admit. Nuances surface. Thus, the reclamations, if doubtlessly couched in the vocabulary of war, bore much continuity with what had been started under liberalism. Perhaps worse, for all the talk about thereby hardening a united race ready for victory, expensive government intervention brought greater benefit to canny large landowners and industrialists than to more ordinary people. In the Pontine marshes and elsewhere, there was always ‘a gap between the regime’s rhetoric and [its] practice’ (58), a reality that combined ‘low tech. modernisation ... and violence’ (62). Hydro-electrical developments were scarcely a fascist invention and the spread of ‘remote dams’ ‘spoke the language of the big banking and industrial groups, not that of the rural [mountain] folk so celebrated by the regime’ (79). In regard to the design of national parks, policy changed in the 1930s as the regime, allegedly, ‘grew more totalitarian’ (93). Mining and drilling were part of the colonialist venture (with its rape of nature and local people’s identities). AGIP, for example, sought oil off Massawa. But no one found it where, later it might seem to have been obvious, in Libya. Qualification follows qualification in the portrayal of totalitarianism, Italian style. Words and facts fit uneasily together. ‘Nature as an enemy and fascists’ wars on nature’, we hear in the conclusion, ‘were as much narrative devices as they were the practices of environmental governance’ (182). With such a warning, Armiero, Biasillo and von Hardening have purposefully initiated what may be later studies of the complex relationship between the Italians of Mussolini’s regime and the environment.