The Cultural Turn and Soviet Environmental History
Alex Herbert shows how post-1991 Soviet historiography was shaped by a cultural turn, which marginalized materialist analysis, emphasized disaster, and carried a strong dose of liberal triumphalism.
In the late twentieth century, Western historiography underwent profound transformations as intellectual trends reshaped both methodology and epistemology. It seemed to many that liberal democracy represented the culmination of ideological evolution, effectively closing the grand narrative tension that had defined political history for centuries.[i] The “End of History” thesis suggested that the collapse of communism and the decline of fascism marked the end of large-scale ideological struggle, offering a teleological vision in which the liberal democratic model emerged as humanity’s endpoint, the grand, triumphal narrative of liberal history. While primarily a political argument, its implications reverberated through historical studies, intersecting with the concurrent cultural turn, which de-emphasized the materialist and structural approaches characteristic of the hitherto dominant social history and embraced cultural themes like narrative, meaning, agency, emotion, identity, linguistics, and human perception. The convergence of liberal triumphalism and the cultural turn expressed itself within Soviet historiography as a turn toward explaining why the Soviet Union collapsed with a new emphasis on failures of state ideology, nationalities policy, and, particularly in light of Chornobyl, environmental negligence. That meant that the relatively new field of Environmental History, with a uniquely declensionist narrative that seeks to historicize climate change, provided a ready-made interpretive framework for historians aiming to expose Soviet failures. By first outlining the broad ways in which the cultural turn impacted Western histories of the Soviet Union, I turn specifically to environmental history to demonstrate how the emplotment of environmental destruction has politically determined the stories we tell about the Soviet Union.
The cultural turn emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as historians increasingly drew on anthropology, literary theory, and poststructuralist frameworks to understand the construction of meaning in historical contexts. It denoted a form of historicism that focused less on material conditions and more on ideas, sensibilities, emotions, and cultural production as a reflection of larger ideas and patterns of lived experience.[ii] Scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), demonstrated how local customs, identity, and cultural perceptions shaped the actions and interpretations of historical actors. Similarly, Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) advocated for “thick description,” emphasizing that cultural practices must be interpreted within the webs of meaning in which they exist. Robert Darnton highlighted how information, rumor, and narrative shaped social perception and action. Finally, Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature (1980), traced how conceptualizations of nature were deeply intertwined with social hierarchies, proving the ideological power of environmental ideas.[iii] Within Soviet historiography, the cultural turn witnessed an explosion of new books dealing with a range of topics and time periods: Paul Werth and Michael Khodarkovsky on pre-Soviet religious policy as a means of understanding the confessional state, Mark Steinberg and Reginald Zelnik’s work on late imperial working class sensibilities, Lynne Viola and Stephen Kotkin on cultures of resistance and ideology under Stalin, Juliane Fürst on Cold War alternative youth culture, and many more. These historians collectively identified sensibilities, ideologies, emotions, and belief systems that they argued were integral to understanding life in the Soviet Union. I point these works out not only to showcase the variety that the cultural turn took but also to demonstrate their lasting power in the field of history, as I do not doubt that all scholars know these works well from their graduate reading lists.
While the cultural turn sought to overcome the explicitly political historicism, many scholars correctly understood that culture constituted a smaller part of a much larger social superstructure. Leading historians of the Soviet Union, like Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ronald Suny, and Lewis Siegelbaum, blended studies of everyday life and culture with a more focused analysis of class dynamics, social tensions, and the formation of new cultural expressions as part of the social superstructure.[iv] More importantly, they challenged the “totalitarian” narrative of the Cold War that narrowly focused on ideology and considered the Soviet Union to be a monolithic dictatorship that retained total control over public and private life. Until 1989, both culturalists and structuralists sought to explain and historicize Soviet life, to make sense of what was, at least from their Cold War perspective, very much an enigma.
Yet, the events that occurred between 1986-1991 were monumental, not just in the political sense but also because the collapse accelerated another historiographical transition that reshaped a core question for inquiry: instead of asking what the Soviet Union is, i.e. how do we explain the USSR and the cultural/ social complexities that constituted it, the question became: how did we get to collapse? The new narrative checkpoint to be explained shifted from 1917 or Stalinism and its aftermath to Gorbachev, to transition, and eventually to the collapse, supported by new archival access. For many, but not all, that seemed like a story that only a cultural analysis of ideas, particularly nationalism, environmentalism, and stagnation, could explain.
The consequences of the tripartite emergence of the cultural turn with declensionist environmental history and the triumph of liberalism after 1991 allowed certain narrative devices from the Cold War to persist into the present. To think through this, I want to conjure one of the foremost poststructural thinkers, Hayden White, and his theory of metahistory, which can help us understand the implications of the broader focus on cultural historicism and how it reinforces tragic narratives of the Soviet Union. I want to do this not only because I believe White’s analysis to be sound, but because I want to expose the circular logic through which cultural history operates, to the point of self-implication.
White contended that historians do not merely report facts but organize them into narratives structured by emplotments—romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire being the main four.[v] These narrative forms reflect underlying ideological, ethical, and moral frameworks and shape the meaning assigned to historical events. For instance, romantic emplotments depict history as a progression of heroic struggle culminating in triumph—one might think of Ivan in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part 1. Tragic emplotments emphasize the inevitability of decline, moral decay, and missed opportunities—the Soviet Tragedy described by Martin Malia in 1995. Yet, White’s insights suggest that all historical writing is inherently interpretive, and that the historian’s role is as much creative as analytical, selecting and arranging sources and facts to craft meaning. My question, then, is what White’s insights mean for our field today, both as a field of study and as a tool of political commentary.
The entire edifice of cultural historicism within our field after 1990 can be read through White’s lens as a tragic emplotment of the history of competing Cold War ideologies: liberal democracy is cast as the ultimate triumphal narrative that defeated the backward and defunct communist ideology by default of its triumph. Even the so-called revisionists of the ‘70s and ‘80s mobilized the language of tragedy to structure their narratives in the 1990s, especially when taking Stalinism as a negative point of departure.[vi] As White showed, history is simultaneously interpretive, contingent, and literary, shaped by the ideological and narrative choices of its practitioners. The cultural turn’s reliance on national identity blended with liberal triumphalism after 1990 within the context of collapse. Perhaps this is a convoluted way of saying history is written by the victors. Still, it is more than that: our region’s gravity toward cultural historicism has remained uniquely strong; scholars, often from that part of the world, dismiss material analysis as outdated, dogmatic, and ideological, while simultaneously applying their own ideological commitments to the field through cultural historicism. Indeed, the anti-communist nationalism of the region is based on a sense of “victimhood” that reinforces the colonial, and thus imperial, narratives being pushed. While cultural studies certainly has itsplace, one is grasping for straws by arguing that, for instance, national identity is based on abstract symbols like cuisine or articles of clothing rather than material forces (investment capital, resource sovereignty, trade, and private property) that made those items possible and promoted them as national symbols to begin with.[vii] It seems as though some in our field can’t help but be boxed by the ideological triumph of liberal cultural historicism and limited by the tragic narrative form that frames almost all of our stories. It becomes particularly problematic when the “empire” paradigm appears as a lazy intellectual framework to make sense of something like the Soviet-era exchange of natural resources, which was inherently political and a result of union-wide comparative advantage.[viii] The theme of resources is an important one, so to narrow my point, permit me to use environmental history as a case study.
The subfield of environmental history emerged in the 1980s and shares some of the concerns of the broader historiographical and political turn I’ve traced so far. Its primary concern is studying the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, treating ecosystems, climate, and geography as historical actors. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972) illustrates this approach, presenting European colonization as a tragic ecological and demographic event.[ix] The arrival of Old-World diseases devastated Indigenous populations, while new plants and animals transformed both European and American ecologies. Crosby’s work demonstrates how ecological processes can be narrated with multiple emplotments: tragedy in the story of indigenous depopulation, romance in European expansion narratives, and satire in accounts of ecological mismanagement. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983) similarly integrates empirical ecological data with cultural interpretation, focusing on how European settlement reshaped New England’s forests, wetlands, and wildlife while reflecting changing social and economic practices.[x] Donald Worster, in Nature’s Economy (1985), emphasizes that ideas about ecology and society co-evolve, producing cultural narratives that shape human interaction with the environment.[xi] However, because of the field’s heavy emphasis on ecology and dialectical relations between humans and nature, it seemed impossible for early practitioners to fully break free of materialism.
Yet by 1990, American historian Richard White proposed such a break from the excessive materialism in environmental history. In an article criticizing Worsteter’s materialist framework, White contended that environmental history has failed to “recognize the role of value judgments and beliefs.” He went on to argue that “environmental historians do face grave difficulties in trying to incorporate natural history, social relations, technology, and culture into unified explanations of social change.”[xii] White wanted environmental historians to take the cultural turn: to plunge into the ideas, aesthetics, and non-material relations humans have with the environment in order to dive deeper into motivations, stewardship, and causality. Since then, environmental historians have balanced material and cultural analysis probably better than most other sub-fields.
Yet, practitioners of Soviet environmental history are often tilted toward the cultural analysis because of the narrative emplotments that cultivated their intellectual upbringing and guided their research questions. Histories of Soviet environmental management—ranging from industrialization projects to large-scale water and energy schemes—frequently rely on tragedy as their primary narrative frame. Recently, scholars such as Paul Josephson, and Kate Brown have highlighted the ecological and human costs of Soviet projects within the framework of an ideologically negligent state, from the diversion of rivers and draining of wetlands to the catastrophic consequences of industrial pollution and nuclear contamination.[xiii] In works such as Brown’s Manual for Survival (2013) and Weiner’s Models of Nature (1999), the dominant narrative emphasizes environmental degradation, human suffering, and state mismanagement as a product of Soviet ideology, positioning the overall Soviet ecological experiment as a cautionary tale. This tragic emplotment aligns closely with Hayden White’s observation that historians organize facts into emplotments that convey moral or ideological meaning, and in the case of the Soviet Union, the pervasive focus on tragedy constructs a vision of the “empire” as hubristic, coercive, and ultimately destructive to both nature and society. What is important is that all of these studies offer the possibility of a fruitful material and structural analysis, but revert to ideological conclusions.
The emphasis on tragedy in Soviet environmental histories carries significant political and historiographical repercussions. By framing the Soviet environmental project almost exclusively through catastrophe and failure, historians risk reinforcing Cold-War-era ideological narratives that depict the USSR as inherently irrational, authoritarian, and incapable of sustainable management. In other words, absolutely irredeemable, which seems to contradict popular nostalgia in post-Soviet countries. This narrative framing can obscure more complex realities, such as instances of ecological planning that succeeded, local adaptation strategies, or the broader structural pressures imposed by industrialization imperatives in the context of global modernization and competition. For example, if I followed a tragic narrative for my own research project on the Leningrad dam, I might adopt the framework of anti-dam dissidents who considered the project ecologically irresponsible. Yet, such an approach ignores the fact that scientists and engineers spent decades testing models and incorporating new science to understand the hydraulic dynamics and the ecological effects of certain structural components, and it also ignores the simple fact that one way or another St. Petersburg had to be dammed or it would cease to exist. My version frames it as a romantic tale of Soviet science and technological development, and places the tragic narrative on late Soviet civil society’s opposition to the project.
This narrative emphasis also shapes public understanding and policy debates about the Soviet Union. Tragedy-driven environmental histories contribute to a perception of Soviet governance as inherently destructive, reinforcing Western ideological frameworks that consider liberal democracy as somehow environmentally rational and morally superior and socialism as incapable of addressing environmental problems. The repetition of catastrophic narratives in both academic and popular accounts strengthens the teleological framing of Soviet history as a cautionary tale, paralleling the broader argument about the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal democracy. In other words, the emplotment of Soviet environmental history as tragedy does not merely describe ecological outcomes; it produces interpretive consequences, determining how scholars, policymakers, and the public understand Soviet social, political, and technological systems, providing a commentary on socialism itself. And insofar as Russia today is considered the default successor of the USSR, tragic emplotments permeate how we understand, report on, and interpret Russia today.
Moreover, the prevalence of tragedy in Soviet environmental histories demonstrates the interplay between narrative and evidence in historical writing, where interpreted evidence fits an a priori narrative structure. While ecological and demographic data provide the factual basis for analysis, the selection, emphasis, and arrangement of those facts are made to fit a pre-determined story of imperialism. For instance, Stephen Brain’s “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature” (2010) acknowledges the campaign to re-plant large swaths of Soviet territory, but falls short of considering it truly conservationist, viewing it instead as utilitarian and contradictory to five-year-plan goals.[xiv] Even Bathsheba Demuth’s innovative Floating Coast, while advancing a decidedly materialist argument, romanticizes the material transformation of the land as a destructive force, by naughty human beings. It leaves one questioning how civilizations would survive, how political entities could compete, and what role external structural pressures played in the transformation of land.[xv] Thus, it seems as though tragic emplotments are so embedded in our scholarly and personal imagination—perhaps a product of graduate education, emotional experiences, or personal politics—that scholars cannot help but foreground human suffering and environmental collapse, often marginalizing countervailing evidence, such as instances of regional ecological recovery, successful technical interventions, or adaptive management strategies employed by local actors. One finds it particularly revealing that Frank Uekoetter’s book The Green and the Brown gave more credit to Nazi conservation efforts as genuine expressions of state paternalism and a concern for the national environment than any Soviet history has yet done.[xvi] Finally, “Hero projects,” or large-scale geoengineering, the topic of much ink spilled in our field, are a matter of perspective: for us today, confronting climate change, maybe there will be long-term consequences of large-scale construction projects, but at the time of construction, people considered bringing power, faster transportation, and flood control as monumental achievements. So while some may see Dnipro as a vague symbol of “Russian” imperialism, the simple fact is that it brought formerly remote communities into the wider connected space of Soviet modernity.[xvii] When more positive narratives do emerge about Soviet civil society, such as in the case of the environmental movement that emerged to protect Lake Baikal in the 1960s, their positivity is allowed to exist only as a case of opposition to the state.[xviii] The narrative remains a condemnation of Soviet socialism in the face of a tragic defeat of civil society.
The tragic framing in Soviet environmental history invites reflection on broader methodological and political implications. It challenges historians to consider the ethical dimensions of narrative emplotment: how the choice of tragedy shapes moral lessons, ideological interpretations, and political consequences. For example, emphasizing tragedy can cultivate empathy and highlight human and ecological vulnerability, but it can also oversimplify complex social-ecological systems and political imperatives. Conversely, integrating multiple emplotments—recognizing tragedy alongside comedy or instances of adaptive resilience—can produce a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet ecological experience, illustrating the contingent interplay between state planning, technological innovation, and environmental response. This approach not only enriches the historiography of the Soviet Union but also provides a model for analyzing environmental history in other contexts.
In fact, the scholarship that is doing this kind of analysis often gets little attention. There are scholars who are actively engaged in bucking the tragic narrative frame of Soviet environmental history. For instance, those who look at environmental activism in the late USSR have found a redemptive quality in activists’ diversity of ideology, protests, and advocacy rooted in international cooperation and inspiration that offered a glimmer of hope in the moment of transition.[xix] However, even in this topic, the possibility of political alternatives as a redemptive narrative is only made possible by the moment in which it takes place, between 1988 and 1991. Scholars such as Julia Lajus have taken a step further by diving into the Soviet scientists in the 1970s and 80s who took the emerging consensus on the Limits to Growth seriously and sought ways that the socialist state might manage its resources better.[xx]
The point that I want to stress is that we have all implicitly accepted the implications of White’s theory of emplotment through our willingness to treat history as a field within the humanities rather than a social science, and through our use of frameworks like “empire” and “nation”: such narrative choices, even when unintentional, are not neutral, but encode contemporary moral judgment and ideological interpretation, influencing historiography, collective memory, and thus political positions today. It is through these political implications that the tragedy narrative in our field has become hegemonic, to the extent that the moral judgment of the USSR, which has grafted itself on to Russia thanks to the cultural re-telling of Soviet history that sees it as a continuation of Russia’s empire, impacts hiring decisions, graduate admissions, and research funding. By leaning on the tragic narrative, they have pronounced a moral judgment not just on the Soviet Union, but on socialism and material analysis itself.
Alexander Herbert is a professor of Global Environmental History and Modern Europe at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of two books on Soviet culture, and numerous articles on topics ranging from late Soviet environmentalism to early Soviet disasters.
[i] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992) made this overly confident argument in light of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and China’s transition to a limited market economy.
[ii] I should make a distinction here between materialist history, that concerns questions of political economy and structural analysis, versus what has been termed the “new materialism” which examines how physical things play an active role in shaping all aspects of society. In this subfield, material objects are just as vital to the development of history and culture as written works or ideas. It is thus cultural historicism finding meaning, symbolism, and emotions within objects. One pioneering case is Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1015–45.
[iii] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973); Robert Darton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper and Row, 1980).
[iv] These scholars have a number of works that take a social-historical perspective. Just two examples include Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge, 1979).
[v] Haden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 9.
[vi] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
[vii] Esma Kunchulia, “Georgian Cuisine—’Inventing Tradition,’” Spekali 16 (January 2010).
[viii] The “new material histories” are unrelated to traditional Marxist materialism in the sense that they approach material as a reflection of cultural relations, not an economic exchange. The clearest example is Mollie Arbuthnot, Christina Bonin, and Gabriella Ferrari, Soviet Materialities: Socialist Things, Environments, and Affects (Manchester University Press, 2026). At a recent conference I heard a paper that proposed a manuscript that studied the transference of construction materials from the Baltic States to Russia as a sign of a “colonial” relationship. This type of thinking ignores the material outcomes of a economic and political union and erroneously considers all exchange relations as colonial.
[ix] Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972).
[x] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
[xi] Donald Worcester, Nature’s Economy: A history of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
[xii] Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” The Historian 66, no. 3 (Fall 2004).
[xiii] Paul Josephson, Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to Putin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20224). Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019).
[xiv] Stephen Brain, “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” Environmental History 15, no. 4 (2010): 670–700.
[xv] Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: And Environmental History of the Bering Straight (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019)
[xvi] Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[xvii] Roman A. Cybriwsky, Along Ukraine’s River: A Social and Environmental History of Dnipro (Central European University Press, 2018).
[xviii] Nicholas Breyfogle, “At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism,” The Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2019): 147-180.
[xix] Alexander Herbert, “Protesting Destruction in Chapaevsk: Green Politics in a Late Soviet City,” Europe Asia Studies 76, no. 7 (2024). Also Laurent Coumel and Marc Elie, “A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 30, no. 2 (2013).
[xx] Julia Lajus, “Soviet Official Critiques of Resource Scarcity Predictions by Limits to Growth Report: The Case of Evgenii Fedorov’s Ecological Crisis Rhetoric,” European Review of History 27, no. 3 (2020): 321-341.
 | A guest post by
|