ESSAY The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in

Slavic Review , no.  (Spring )

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. This is an Open Access

article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence

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doi: ./slr..

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REVIEW ESSAY

The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet

Science. By Pey-Yi Chu. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, . viii,

 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Figures. Maps. ., hard

bound.

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History. Ed. David

Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova. Cambridge, Eng.:

White Horse Press, . xxii,  pp. Glossary. Index. Photographs.

Figures. Tables. Maps. ., hard bound.

The Carpathians, the Hutsuls, and Ukraine: An Environmental History.

By Anthony J. Amato. Lanham: Lexington Books, . xiv,  pp.

Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Tables. Maps. .,

hard bound.

Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National

Parks in the Twentieth Century. By Alan D. Roe. New York: Oxford

University Press, . xiv,  pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Photographs. Maps. ., hard bound.

The eld of environmental history began to emerge in the s, but that

process took longer when it came to the environmental history of the former

Soviet Union. As late as the s, apart from the pioneering work of Douglas

Weiner (and a few studies of Soviet environmental degradation), environmental

histories of the region remained in short supply. But anyone paying attention

knows the eld has changed for the better during the rst two decades of

the twenty-rst century. Numerous specialists are now approaching the topic

from a variety of dierent angles. The four books under consideration here,

all published in  or , demonstrate that post-Soviet environmental

history has achieved a reach and level of sophistication comparable to that of

other regions. From the Carpathians to Kamchatka, as these studies indicate,

environmental history is robust and ourishing, even if, as some of them

reveal, environmental protections in the area lag behind.

Though all four books here clearly represent contributions to environ-

mental history, each diers substantially from the others. The dierence

is perhaps most obvious in Pey-Yi Chu’s engaging monograph The Life of

Permafrost. As much a study in the history of science as a work of environ-

mental history, this book provides a sustained examination of a problem that

has long bedeviled earth scientists: the attempt to generate an agreed-upon

denition of, and approach to studying, permafrost. Many would nd it puz-

zling that a simple denition would remain elusive, but Chu’s analysis reveals

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that scientists have returned to the same denitional conundrum time and

again without reaching any resolution.

The Life of Permafrost explores the practical diculties generations of

Russian and Soviet scientists have faced in attempting to make sense of the

phenomenon. The basic issue these geographers, soil scientists, and others

struggled with was, on the face of it, fairly straightforward: is permafrost ice

in the earth or is it instead frozen earth? Answers to that question are remi-

niscent of Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” It depends on the way

you look at it. Those answers, Chu shows us, usually depended on the pur-

pose for which permafrost was being studied. Since there were many practi-

cal engineering reasons for understanding permafrost as a substance (frozen

earth)—such as railroad building, architectural diculties, and extraction

of mineral wealth—this denition tended to hold sway. It was a concept that

served the purposes of those in power, and one of the strengths of this book

is its demonstration that scientic study is easily driven by political and eco-

nomic considerations. At the same time, it is rather refreshing that Chu does

not overemphasize the political inuence of the one-party state (and rather

remarkably, no one involved in the political disputes over permafrost in the

s seems to have wound up in the gulag or worse). Instead, the book con-

centrates on the interpersonal and institutional politics that determined sci-

entic priorities.

One of the problems with treating permafrost as a substance had to do with

its relative permanency, an issue that Chu brings to the fore using the original

Russian term for permafrost: вечная мерзлота (vechnaia merzlota; eternal

frozenness). Interestingly, Mikhail Sumgin, the gure most responsible for

the use of this term, dened permafrost as ground that remained frozen for at

least two full years, hardly an eternity. Other scientists, most notably Sumgin’s

rival, Sergei Parkhomenko, took exception to such a contradiction by argu-

ing that permafrost should be understood as a function of environmental sys-

tems. Chu’s approach to the history of science rejects the common conviction

that science is factual, objective, and linearly progressive, accepting scientic

research as embedded within politics, culture, and even personality. Readers

of this book will not come away with the sense that arguments over permafrost

will ultimately be resolved by a better theory or better instruments. Chu’s ana-

lytical framework replaces the metaphor of science as progress with an alter-

nate metaphor of science as dialectical conict, showing that our conception

of permafrost has developed in a long succession of theses and counter-theses,

unlikely to resolve in the triumph of any permanent synthesis.

At the same time, however, Chu detects a degree of evolutionary prog-

ress here, leaning heavily on another metaphor that seems inherently con-

tradictory to that of the unresolved dialectic: the analogy of a buttery’s

development from egg to larva to pupa to adult. In conjunction with these

two conicting, if arguably co-existing, metaphors, Chu adds yet a third in

the chapter titles—Mapping, Building, Dening, Adapting, Translating—to

describe the dominant interests and functions taking place as the concept

of permafrost develops. The three separate analogies used here strike this

reader as reaching for one metaphor too far. For instance, if the coining of the

English term “permafrost” as an attempted translation of вечная мерзлота

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marks the arrival of the “adult” stage of the buttery, then what are we to

make of the fact that the unresolved dialectical problem is now “renewed”? I

found it dicult to keep hold of so many apparently contradictory approaches

to the history of the concept, but in the end it does seem that the study of per-

mafrost may still be in its infancy, and the argument of this book generally

supports the unresolved dialectic analogy more than it does the analogy of

a progression to maturity. While Chu downplays any contribution this book

may make to the science of permafrost, one cannot help but read it as a his-

torian’s intervention in the scientic discourse that seeks to raise awareness

of the confusions inherent in a debated scientic model. Toward the end of

The Life of Permafrost the author rejects the notion that permafrost should be

understood as permanent and calls for the creation of new terminology. Time

will tell if the historian’s view injected into the scientic debates will aect

any rethinking of the science itself.

Remaining in the regions of permafrost but much more attentive to the

surface of the earth, the beautifully illustrated collection of essays titled Place

and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History rests on the intriguing

premise of physically connecting an international group of scholars with the

specic places they research. Over the course of three years these scholars—

hailing from Russia, the US, the UK, and Canada—gathered together at loca-

tions near the White Sea, Lake Baikal, and the Urals. The editors of the book

conceived of this project as a “methodological intervention” () in the study of

environmental history based on the assumption that to write such histories

“historians need to embed themselves in the places they study” (). While this

approach may seem ahistorical to a degree—one cannot, for instance, visit

ancient Rome—with respect to environmental history it is a valuable and sen-

sible undertaking since far more than archival documents inform the topic;

environmental historians must also “read” the landscapes and locations

they study in order to fully understand their subject. That point is especially

salient with respect to the type of essays presented here, which mostly have

to do with what might be called the “place-making” that results from human

involvement in nature. The experience “on the ground” that informs most of

these essays renders the volume more vibrant than most essay collections,

and it is very well complemented by a wealth of color photos.

The nal product to emerge from these visits turns out to be something of

a platypus. It unites in a single entity various parts and pieces one does not

usually nd together on the same animal, but like the Australian mammal

it still manages to function eectively. For one thing, it focuses primarily on

two Russian regions quite remote from one another: the northwest near the

White Sea and the Siberian area around Lake Baikal; it also includes material

on the Urals, St. Petersburg, and the Russian Far East. For another, it unites

both formal, well-documented academic essays with some shorter pieces of

travel writing. Finally, the aims and interests of the dierent environmental

histories found here are quite diverse. For these reasons, it is dicult to pin

down a single theme linking them together, and readers will likely take dier-

ent lessons from dierent texts.

I would argue that the title word “Nature” holds a decidedly secondary

position to “Place.” Some of these texts, in fact, make a point of complicating

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the notion of “nature” in the rst place, arguing that concepts like “pris-

tine nature” or “wilderness” are misleading because of the deep impact

human inhabitancy has had on shaping what we reexively understand as

“untouched” environments. “Place” is the dominant organizing concept here.

All of these essays share a concern for how natural spaces become meaning-

ful places in the eyes of those who have lived in or interacted with them.

Because of this focus on place-making and the human relationship to nature,

the volume manages mostly to avoid the common approach to environmen-

tal histories of the Soviet Union that emphasize uninterrupted damage to the

natural environment. While such histories have validity, they oen seem to

overshadow the wealth of environmental diversity found in the former Soviet

Union, and this volume does its part to celebrate the positive side of Russian

nature. It highlights environments that are historically rich and still beauti-

ful, even if under threat.

Specic essays should be noted for their unique contributions. Andy Bruno

focuses on the region around Lake Imandra in the far northwest of Russia,

concluding that under pressures that are at once local, national and global the

lake succumbed to “Anthropocene conditions” () in which human impacts

have reshaped the earth’s environment. This “glocal” approach seems espe-

cially promising. An outlier here is Robert Dale’s discussion of St. Petersburg

oods, a study as much in urban as environmental history. Dale’s article dem-

onstrates how the city of St. Petersburg had grown more resistant to ooding

in the early twentieth century by comparing results of the two major ooding

events that took place in  and . Another essay by Alexandra Bekasova

and Ekaterina Kalemeneva uses turn-of-the-century travel guides to eastern

Siberia to show how changes in mobility led to changes in mental maps and

perceptions of Siberian Russia as a whole. The authors reveal the ways in

which travel guides can help to shape a region by creating expectations and

encouraging the use of particular pathways through it. Nicholas Breyfogle is

particularly innovative in his discussion of the Barguzin zapovednik (nature

preserve) on Lake Baikal. He situates human activity within a historical/

environmental set of determinants that breaks down, to a degree, the idea

of “human versus nature” and replaces them with “human within nature,”

where human inhabitancy is understood as a constituent part of the natural

world. This is the lesson we might take from the collection as a whole: human

beings are not necessarily the adversary of nature. Think of us instead as the

place-making animal. Now what kind of places ought we to make?

Even more deeply concerned with the interconnectedness of humanity and

environment is Anthony Amato’s The Carpathians, the Hutsuls and Ukraine. I

nd this book to be at once the most impressive and the most frustrating of

those under review here. To call this study exhaustive would be an understate-

ment. By far the most in-depth examination of a single region, its more than

four hundred pages explore the people and environment of a relatively small

area in what is today the southwestern Ukrainian sector of the Carpathian

Mountains. Intentionally limiting his focus to the material life of this region,

Amato displays an encyclopedic mastery of the topic, and he does so without

privileging either the Hutsul people who live there or the mountainous envi-

ronment that is shaped by them and in turn shapes their way of life.

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This study seems to serve as a kind of model for how to write environmen-

tal history. If so, then its central argument is that human lives and the natural

environments must not be conceived of in isolation from one another. Human

beings, going back to a time before written records, have molded their envi-

ronment in myriad ways, and continue to do so, while those environments

have informed much more about the lives of the people living within them

than we typically recognize. Amato gets at this point by cycling through a

series of dierent lenses with which to observe the Hutsuls and their world.

He examines them from the perspective of outsider mapping of their terrain,

with an eye to the impact of various kinds of farming and herding, from the

standpoint of both global and local shis in ora, fauna, and climate, under

the impact of the  abolition of serfdom, and in response to regional

and economic developments as control of the region shied hands from the

Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Poland, to the Soviet Union, and today Ukraine.

Many other foci, too numerous to name, come together to shape this study

into the environmental “deep time” thick description that it is. Readers will

come away impressed with Amato’s vast erudition, both with respect to the

place and to the varied socio-economic and natural processes that created it.

Practicing environmental historians will undoubtedly nd many useful ideas

here for how to approach their own topics.

To the degree that the Carpathians in European history are known, they

occupy an interesting position in the European imagination. Many have likely

felt curious about this part of Europe that seems somehow simultaneously

nearby and exotic. This image of the Carpathians is never very far in the back-

ground of the book, as Amato oers repeated winking nods toward the idea

of the Carpathians as Europe’s eastern, exotic other. He makes several refer-

ences to Count Dracula, for example, in an eort to suggest how far apart are

the external image of the region and the reality of actually living and dying in

this place. Hutsul community and mountain terrain come together here almost

as a single, undivided ecosystem. To characterize people and landscape as

a single phenomenon, Amato makes use of some unusual vocabulary, such

as referring to local areas as “taskscapes,” places shaped by and for various

forms of labor, or referring to his approach as “bioregional.” The processes

Amato describes are closer to haphazard than systematic. This landscape, as

he is fond of pointing out, resolves itself into “patches,” like those of a quilt,

each responding to dierent inuences exerted by people and environment.

As meticulous and immersive as this study is, it still le me dissatised

in certain respects. The back cover includes a statement claiming that the

book is “accessible” and “will appeal to a wide audience.” With that point I

would respectfully disagree. It will be of great interest to environmental his-

torians and those with a specic interest in the Hutsuls and the Carpathians,

but it certainly does not read like a book seeking a wide audience. While it is

engagingly written at the sentence level, a certain opaqueness of argument

pervades the text. In the eort to demonstrate the complexity of the environ-

ment, the trees predominate to the point that it is hard to get a sense of the for-

est, or the larger meaning of what is being accomplished here and why. There

are many similar small mountain communities in the Carpathians. Why,

the reader wants to know, did the author choose to examine this particular

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region and people? At the level of the chapters themselves, Amato provides

only meager introduction to the various topics, little explanation of their rela-

tive importance, and almost no internal organization. Each chapter’s theme

slowly emerges as a series of loosely connected motifs rather than a chain

of well-constructed arguments. As a result of this lack of organization and

explanation, the text feels disquietingly cryptic at times. Because of its den-

sity, the copyediting of the book must have been dicult, and indeed while

the writing lacks any appreciable grammatical aws, every chapter contains

several typographical errors that were not caught.

The book’s title suggests another question. Since it focuses primarily on

the period between  and  when this region was not a part of Ukraine,

why is “Ukraine” given such prominence? The answer to that question is sug-

gested by the book’s short nal chapter, which describes the process whereby

modern Ukraine has sought to incorporate this region as part of Ukrainian

national identity (see, for example, Ruslana on Eurovision). In retrospect we

can look back and see that this facile attempt to co-opt for external purposes

a region’s autonomous past and identity may well be something the author

hopes to thwart. Although this point is never made directly, the title’s oth-

erwise odd incorporation of “Ukraine,” seems to suggest as much. But the

reader can only guess because the aim and purpose of the book is never clari-

ed. In my view, the absence of a more direct exposition of aims, in addition

to the lack of attention to audience, weakens what is nevertheless a fascinat-

ing study from which I learned a tremendous amount about both the Hutsul

region and the great value of an exhaustively thorough environmental history.

By contrast to Amato’s emphasis on methodology, Alan Roe’s Into Russian

Nature feels like a return to more familiar ground with its emphasis on envi-

ronmental protection. This book oers an engaging and surprisingly optimis-

tic exploration of a mostly disheartening topic. If each of the aforementioned

studies seeks to break new ground methodologically, that is not necessary

for Roe, whose research examines a fresh topic that has been surprisingly

neglected: the formation of a Soviet and post-Soviet Russian national park

system. Roe breaks new ground in terms of subject matter, and in a certain way

Into Russian Nature can be read as an extension of Weiner’s aforementioned

work on the zapovednik system. The zapovedniki were originally intended as

areas set apart from human intervention and public use. For a variety of rea-

sons, they came under re, and the idea of national parks that would be open

to the public along the lines of western models eventually found favor. But the

parks did not come into being until the s and s. Weiner has described

how the zapovedniki had to struggle to survive because of their poor t with

the ideology and economic interests of the state, and Roe tells a similar story

about the national parks, which faced their own set of diculties and, sadly,

never fullled the promise held by their original planners. But where the

zapovedniki had Stalinism as one of their major hurdles, the national parks

confronted a dierent set of problems that included low turnout, public resis-

tance, and underfunding.

The history of these parks began with a buoyant sense of possibility and

progress. As Soviet ideological extremism waned in the sixties and seventies,

the idea that the public would be able both to contribute to the protection of

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nature and to benet from it by visiting scenic places grew popular with the

public and Soviet ocials, to the point that many formerly closed zapoved-

niki were now opened up for public use. This change in attitude encouraged

the formation of national parks that aimed to attract expansive tourism and

public recreation and thereby become economically self-sustaining. The proj-

ect seemed increasingly feasible since the Soviet public was simultaneously

developing a great interest in domestic tourism, which Roe illustrates by point-

ing to the creation of dozens of tourist clubs and the production of television

programs on domestic nature travel. At this stage the promise of a national

park system seemed to betoken a brighter Soviet future. The early optimism

wavered, however, when the parks came into being, and it certainly did not

outlast the collapse of the Soviet Union. While ultimately more than y

national parks in Russia, and many more in other parts of the former Soviet

Union, have been established, in case aer case Roe demonstrates that they

were unable to withstand the pressures that assailed them. Those pressures

emerged at a variety of dierent levels. Perhaps most problematic was the

state’s refusal to establish a single agency responsible for park development,

so that responsibility for that development had to be shared among groups

with conicting interests. Those charged with organizing parks included

local ocials, tourist bureaus, hunting and shing authorities, and nature

protection organizations. As a result of the state’s attempt to please all parties,

everyone remained dissatised.

Lurking in the background of this book is a question about nature pro-

tection and land use that has been raised with respect to national parks in

other parts of the world. To designate an area as o-limits for human use and

habitation for the greater environmental good can also be, and has been, a

way to shut down use of the land by people, Native Americans for example,

who had long lived on it. Who has a right to the land, and what rights does the

natural environment itself possess? To what degree is humanity to see itself as

separate from and inimical to the natural world? The US national park system,

established long ago, has largely managed to erase the memory of alternate

claims to the land. In more recent times in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the

problem of local rights, the interests of industry, and the demand for greater

environmental protection have grown all the more dicult to reconcile. Many

people in the area of the parks already using the land for various purposes

considered nature preservation as the removal of their own rights. Moreover,

the parks were coming into being just as Soviet Russia was drawing to a close.

Under circumstances of economic collapse and capitalism unleashed, envi-

ronmental protection shrank to a much lesser consideration.

Roe describes how some parks were so poorly protected that they actually

suered from greater damage once they had been opened. As one concerned

citizen wrote aer several national parks had been declared, these were only

“parks on paper.” Under the rather anarchic conditions of the s, locals

continued to use park space as dumping grounds and industries continued to

extract what they needed from the land. Roe does, however, oer a counterex-

ample. The parks of the Kamchatka Peninsula were able in the s to gain

enough support from abroad to ourish. Unfortunately, these parks stand as

the exception that proves the rule of mismanagement and continued damage

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to natural areas that ocially have been deemed national treasures. Although

Roe ends his examination of the parks in the s, the story of these parks

did not of course end there. The book’s conclusion adds some information

about the intervening years, though it is not a particularly hopeful story. Even

aer the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia remains the largest country in

the world, containing huge amounts of terrain designated for protection and

much more that ought to be managed wisely. Whether these lands will receive

the stewardship they deserve remains an open question at the end of Into

Russian Nature. One hopes Roe will continue his careful examination of the

fate of these parks as they evolve—in whatever direction—during the twenty-

rst century.

What have we learned from juxtaposing these four excellent but dissimi-

lar studies? I can remember reading Weiner’s Models of Nature as a young

graduate student and assuming that it had “covered the territory” of Soviet

environmental history. As important as that book was, the past two decades

have demonstrated the absolute naiveté of my assumption. These four studies

from the s provide further proof of just how much more there is to do. One

can imagine, for instance, environmental histories at the same level of intri-

cacy Amato lavishes on the Hutsul Carpathians stretching across potentially

hundreds of local areas from eastern Europe to Siberia. Indeed, participants

in the Place and Nature conferences already seem to have embarked on a num-

ber of such projects. None of these studies can be thought of as a nal word

or culmination. Collected together they suggest rather that we stand at the

beginning of a welcome and ongoing expansion in the environmental history

of this vast region.

Wilkes Honors College

Florida Atlantic University

C E

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