Into Russian Nature

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century

Alan D. Roe

The first academic work on Russian national parks, based on interviews with veterans of the Russian national park movement and archival sources.
Has a wide geographical scope, from European Russia to Siberia and the Far East.
Places Russia into the global story of environmental protection in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Author has visited and served as a tour guide in numerous parks included in the study.

Into Russian Nature

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century

Alan D. Roe

Description

Since the early twentieth century, nations around the world have set aside protected areas for tourism, recreation, scenery, wildlife, and habitat conservation. In Russia, biologists and geographers had been intrigued with the idea of establishing national parks before the Revolution, but instead persuaded the government successfully to establish nature reserves (zapovedniki) for scientific research during the USSR's first decades. However, as the state pushed scientists to make zapovedniki more useful during the 1930s, some of the system's staunchest defenders started supporting tourism in them.

In Into Russian Nature, Alan D. Roe offers the first history of the Russian national park movement. In the decades after World War II, the USSR experienced a tourism boom and faced a chronic shortage of tourism facilities. During these years, Soviet scientists took active part in Western-dominated international environmental protection organizations and enthusiastically promoted parks for the USSR as a means to expand recreational opportunities and reconcile environmental protection and economic development goals. In turn, they hoped they would bring international respect to Soviet nature protection efforts and help instill in Russian/Soviet citizens a love for the country's nature and a desire to protect it. By the end of the millennium, Russia had established thirty-five parks to protect iconic landscapes in places such as Lake Baikal. Meanwhile, national park opponents presented them as an unaffordable luxury during a time of economic struggle, especially after the USSR's collapse. Despite unprecedented collaboration with international organizations, Russian national parks received little governmental support as they became mired in land-use conflicts with local populations.

Exploring parks from European Russia to Siberia and the Far East, Into Russian Nature narrates efforts, often frustrated by the state, to protect Russia's vast and unique physical landscape.

Into Russian Nature

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century

Alan D. Roe

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: For Science or Tourism? Protected Territories Before World War II
Chapter 2: Taking the "Best" from the West? The Beginnings of the Soviet National Park Movement
Chapter 3: Transformative Visions during the Brezhnev Era
Chapter 4: Disappointments and the Persistence of Grandiose Visions
Part II
Chapter 5: The "Shield" of the Sacred Sea: National Parks around Lake Baikal
Chapter 6: Paddling Upstream: Samara Bend National Park and the Transformation of Citizen "Environmentalism" from Soviet to Post-Soviet Society
Chapter 7: Protecting the Pechoran Alps? The Unmet Promise of Iugyd Va National Park in the Circumpolar Urals
Chapter 8: The Vision and the Reality in the Taiga of Karelia and the Arkhangelsk Oblast: Oleg Cherviakov and Vodlozero National Park
Part III
Chapter 9: The Crisis of National Parks in the 1990s
Conclusion: Russia's Forgotten Parks and the Crisis of Environmental Protection in the Russian Federation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Into Russian Nature

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century

Alan D. Roe

Author Information

Alan D. Roe is a lecturer in history at West Virginia University.

Into Russian Nature

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century

Alan D. Roe

Reviews and Awards

"Roe's work paints a picture of a country aware of its beauty but ambivalent over how to effectively preserve it. According to Roe, the historical reason for this is the state's unwillingness to fully acquiesce to a foreign model despite the persistent expert belief in its superiority. The result is not only a fractured national park infrastructure but also a cultural and social myopia concerning nature conservation among average Russian tourists and nature seekers." -- Alexander Herbert, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online

"Roe exploits primary sources from an extensive roster of archives to portray the experiences of Russian and Soviet naturalists as they laid grand plans to build a national park system along romanticized, nationalist lines—plans that never materialized....Providing a globalized interpretation, Roe here argues that despite disappointments, the movement generated by [Vasili Nikolaevich] Skalon...facilitated the growth of a yearning among Russians, based on a perceived fundamental desire among peoples in other industrialized nations, particularly those with eclectic landscapes, to visit and experience the wilderness. This realistic and enthusiastic account provides excellent context for understanding Russian history in general, and especially Russian attitudes toward nature in the modern world." -- Choice

"Alan Roe reconstructs in close detail the history of national parks in Soviet and post-Soviet history. This sweeping history features romantics, rebels, ideologues, economic pragmatists, champions and opponents of nature protection. Modulating among local, federal, and international registers, Roe's account reveals how positioning themselves as part of a global environmental movement could be both an asset and liability for Soviet/Russian environmentalists. Into Russian Nature haunts the reader with the ways in which the Soviet/Russian history of nature protection departs from and shares with that history in the West." -- Erika Monahan, Author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia

"This is a fascinating and sobering account of efforts to connect recreation and conservation in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. Roe offers important perspectives on Russians' engagement with what Americans would call 'backcountry,' relating how a Russian version of the 'wilderness debate' has played out and how Russia's vast and varied terrain continues to inspire deep love and fierce protection." -- Jane Costlow, Author of Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest

"Into Russian Nature tells the fascinating and previously unexamined story of Russia's national parks. With vibrant and lucid prose, it explores the history of Soviet environmentalism, tourism, and the culture of twentieth-century science and nature protection. Alan Roe has written the kind of book that we all wish we could produce: thoughtful and impressive analysis of a topic of global importance, built on unparalleled research and a dazzling array of sources." -- Nicholas Breyfogle, Editor of Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History

"Writing with contagious passion and remarkable thoroughness, Alan Roe tells the neglected history of national parks in Russia. While policy makers in the country treated national parks as an afterthought instead of a 'best idea,' Russian conservationists projected deep hopes onto these protected territories and experienced bitter disappointments over them. Into Russian Nature offers a vital contribution to the environmental history of Russia and understandings of national parks globally." -- Andy Bruno, Northern Illinois University