NOTIONS OF SIBERIA’S INDUSTRIAL FORESTS AMONG SPECIALISTS IN THE SOVIET UNION, LATE 1940s–1991

This article examines the notions of Siberia’s industrial forests among Soviet specialists in the context of colonization of Eastern regions of the USSR from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. It pays a particular attention to how specialists perceived forests of Eastern virgin lands and what were their expectations about industrial forest exploitation and wood harvesting. The analysis is based upon professional publications about the tension between so called “old” (mainly North-West and the Urals) and “new” (the Siberian region) forests. The author raises the question of the meaning that Soviet specialists placed on the newly colonized forests within the industrial development. The article demonstrates that foresters replicated the state rhetoric about “virgin” lands seeing the new technologies of colonization as a possibility for solving the problem of resource supply in the industry which became visible in the period under study. The development of forest resources and timber industry construction with the help of the latest technologies have been among the most important tasks set by specialists since the late 1940s. Many specialists hoped to start a new page in forest exploitation via the rational and complex, as they called it, approach to wood harvesting and processing. This was to minimize the risks and losses associated with forest exploitation in old industrial areas. However, the lack of funding and infrastructural impediments including difficult access to new forest reserves complicated the colonization drive and was perceived by specialists as a transfer of old problems (problems typical for the ‘old’ forests) to ‘new’ regions. In the course of colonization during the period between the late 1940s and 1980s professional enthusiasm of earlier decades changed to disappointment about the practice of forest colonization in the Soviet Eastern lands.