Elena Kochetkova - "Forest and Industry in the Late Soviet Union"

Russia has more than one-fifth of the world’s forest areas, which contain more than 55% of the world’s conifers, and 11% of the world’s biomass. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, their forests are "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Historian Elena Kochetkova helps us better understand this important part of the Russian economy and the world's ecosystem. Elena discussed how the Soviet economy developed a unique approach toward forest resources after the Second World War. Looking at the materiality and dreamscape of Soviet industry through forests and wood, her talk demonstrated how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project, which saw the rise of new industry-ecology paradigms designed by specialists.

Elena Kochetkova is a historian of the economy, environment, technology, and state socialism at the University of Bergen in Norway. Elena’s new book "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology," published with MIT Press in 2024, examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests.

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Видео Elena Kochetkova - "Forest and Industry in the Late Soviet Union" канала foresthistory