Issue #13/68, July 1 - 15, 1999  

By John Dolan

A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev by Douglas Weiner University of Califorina Press 1999

When people of the twenty-second century look back at the Soviet Union, they won't care very much about the aspects we remember. The casualties will be less than dust, the economists' arguments as remote as medieval theology. Even Soviet iconography will merge with that of the other twentieth-century empires--German, Chinese and American--so that only art historians will recall whether Soviet armies marched under the hammer and sickle, yellow star, swastika or eagle.

But even when all its other works are forgotten, the Soviet Union will be remembered for one great, though unintended good deed: keeping Siberia uninhabited for the better part of a century. If hyperactive America, China, Japan, or Germany had occupied Siberia for the past seventy years, the taiga would be ripped through with roads, factories and suburbs.

Whereas the Soviet Union, like a dog in the manger, gripped the huge Siberian wilderness all the tighter for not really knowing what to do with it. Sure, the Soviets tried to pillage and wreck the taiga; they sent their slaves to dig the gold out of Kolyma, and attempted far more ambitious schemes, railways and dams and even huge river-diversion projects. But their utter fecklessness limited the impact they had on the northeastern Eurasian wilderness.

Even now, the taiga remains in the hands of a successor state with no capital and a declining population--in other words, a state whose ability to wreck the forest is severely limited. So by a strange sort of historical luck, the taiga may survive til a time when human beings will be grateful for every hectare of forest left on the planet...and on that day, our descendants will commemorate the Soviets as the greatest conservationists of our century.

I picked up a copy of A Little Corner of Freedom hoping to find out something about how the forests and plains had fared under the Soviets.

That's not an unreasonable expectation for a book with the subtitle, ""Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev," right? When you pick up a book with that title, you might think that the author was motivated, at least in part, by some fondness for nature, right? I certainly thought so. But I was wrong. Not once in this interminable volume (well over 500 pages) does the author reveal the least sympathy for, or interest in, wilderness areas. In fact, he seems unable to imagine that anyone, including Russians of the twentieth century who put their lives on the line to protect the forests, might have cared about Nature for its own sake.

I should have expected this sort of heartlessness. After all, this book was published by a traditional American academic publisher (University of California Press) and was written by an American academic, one Douglas Weiner. Those of you who were lucky enough to be spared the strange combination of tedium, false pride and groveling submission which is Ph.D. study at an American university may not see why this background should explain Weiner's weirdly heartless treatment of his subject. But I served a long time in one of those minimum-security institutions we called Grad School, and I know what sort of people it cherishes and promotes: above all, it nurtures people who long to fill their empty hearts with an easily-learned jargon which will keep the world at bay, behind a layer of dirty glass. People with a natural ability to believe absurdities and deny obvious facts....

In short: people like Douglas Weiner. Weiner's typical of the very worst products of the American liberal-arts academic system, in that he quite unselfconsciously takes his own half-mad, pedantic ideology as the human norm. He assumes--without any proof or even argument--that Russian environmental activists' apparent concern for Nature must have been a smokescreen for some political intention, one which an ideologue like Weiner can take seriously. Why did Russians put their lives and careers on the line to stop the pollution of Lake Baikal? An ordinary civilian might think it was because Baikal is one of the treasures of the world and Russians loved it enough to want to protect it. But Weiner never so much as considers that possibility. In analysing these weird people ("chudakii," he repeatedly calls them), he tries to find a sociological explanation for this odd behavior:

"[Environmental] Activists...were groups of individuals who used relatively open discourse to try to carve out independent social and professional identities as best they could within a system that prescribed official models of behavior, ethics and identity for all...[but] the activists' single-minded focus on the protection of 'pristine' nature by means of the protection and expansion of the network of zapovedniki effectively trapped them in a realm of concerned with sacred space. It trapped them in a delusionary division of Nature into "sick" and "healthy," freezing them in a framework of analysis that treated the abstraction "biocenosis" as if it were a real object of nature."

Read this passage a few times. If you ever have to deal with American academics, remember it. Do you see how it works? It allows a writer like Weiner to say that, in effect, the Russians who risked their careers and even their lives to try to halt the pollution of Lake Baikal were never really concerned with Lake Baikal at all, because the "healthy" status of the lake was "delusionary." An absurd, fascistic position; but one that Weiner's whole background has encouraged.

Let's see how the paragraph works. The key, in writing acceptable American academic prose, is to get from the banal to the ridiculous as quickly and deftly as possible. Weiner's an apt pupil; he begins with the redundant, fatuous definition of activist associations as "groups of individuals"--satisfying his audience's appetite for the banal as an appetizer--and then asserts that their "discourse" had as its intent "carv[ing] out independent social and professional identities...." -as ridiculous, and unprovable, a claim as even a Lacanian could want. What the Hell leads him to assume that there was some other motive lurking behind the environmentalists' stated goal of protecting the wilderness? How does Weiner come to reject the possibility that Soviet-era Nature advocates were simply interested in protecting the reserves they'd worked so hard to create? That they acted, as they claimed to be doing, because they loved the wilderness? Weiner lavishes pages of footnotes on proving banalities that any sane reader would be happy to stipulate. But he never, ever devotes so much as a word to the most fundamemental question of his entire work: "How do you know the Nature activists didn't just like Nature?"

The key technique in this effort is simple reductio: by pushing the distinction between safely preserved wilderness areas and cultivated or urban land into a "delusionary" binary opposition, Weiner can claim that no such distinction exists. If there is no such thing as truly "pristine" wilderness, then all distinction between wilderness and city is false.

Neat, huh? If taken seriously, this would mean that we cannot say that New

Jersey is more crowded and polluted than Montana.

The real reason, as Deleuze would say, is one of sensibility. You have to have lived among these swine to know how grotesque they really are, how horrible their taste, how crude their distinctions. They hate everything which lives outside their jargon. Baikal cannot be subsumed by Weiner's "field"; thus, for Weiner, Baikal must be crossed out, denied, made unreal. So, for him and his like, the difference between a polluted Baikal and a relatively clean one is "delusionary."

What was it Ronald Reagan said as Governor of California? Something like, "If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all." One can imagine Weiner furtively nodding, acknowledging a secret kinship. And in the meantime, after 500 very tedious pages, I know no more about the state of nature protection under the Soviets than I did when I started reading. Good one, Doug! You're a credit to your dissertation advisor! Hope you like that job at Arizona State!