Into Russian nature: tourism, environmental protection, and national parks in the twentieth century

Abstract

Some reviewers of Alan Roe’s Into Russian Nature, and I am no exception, use the term ‘fascinating’ to characterise his monograph. It is a truly breathtaking story about Soviet nature and protected areas, and Soviet environmentalists and their quixotic struggle with bureaucratic and ideological windmills. It is a story about Soviet scientists, their plans and dreams related to national parks and nature conservation. It is also about the birth of the green movement in the USSR and its connections with the West, and about the phenomenon of Soviet tourism, as well as about disappointments and crushed hopes. The book is based on a vast range of primary sources: Roe uses data from the Russian state, local and private archives, newspaper publications, interviews with participants and photos and maps. The book consists of three parts, the first covering the history of the struggle for national parks, the second presenting stories of four Russian national parks, and the third part being dedicated to the situation in the country in the early 1990s and including the author’s reflections on the crisis of the entire system of protected areas. Roe begins the narrative with the idea of protected areas that originated in the Russian Empire. In the first four chapters, Roe does not lay out the history of Soviet protected areas from year to year, but rather briefly outlines key events and milestones. His statement that the ‘Russian national park story ... does not fit neatly into traditional political chronologies’ (p. 7) is applicable for the last 30 years; however, the Soviet period in the history of protected areas shows otherwise. The history of Soviet nature reserves (zapovedniki) is closely connected with the political history of the country. The industrialisa-tion of the 1930s led to a shift from nature conservation to its active use. The Stalin purges of the 1930s affected the staff of protected areas and the repres-sions of the early 1950s, along with the ‘doctors’ plot’ and the ‘Mingrelian affair’, resulted in a massive reduction in the number of nature reserves. Some of these areas were restored during the Khrushchev thaw, when the USSR joined the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1956, but by 1961 there were already new reductions in the system of protected areas and a general ‘tightening of the screws’ followed. The connection between the development of tourism and Soviet and later Russian nature reserves and national parks is the cornerstone of Roe’s monograph. He traces throughout the book two opposing ideas among Soviet environmentalists. Some advocated the protection of nature from hordes of tourists with their ‘destructive rituals’ (p. 55), loud songs, drums, guitars,