ABSTRACT
The Russian backwoods look at us . . . A multitude of faces, troubled, joyful and suffering.1
(Praise under Brezhnev for A. Malyshkin’s Liudi iz zakholust’ia,
1937-38)
In examining the traditions Putinesque television wishes to employ, we have
moved from the supposedly geopolitical, imperially bounded concerns of
‘‘Soviet’’ tales to a form of storytelling that – when it’s not angry – aims instead
for a limitless, truly global and heartfelt notion of social membership. Today’s
President speaks – as did his predecessors – of unmanageable integration;
his narratives require a heritage that cannot be enacted (nor, indeed, was it
ever). Political stories and their proposed networks are desirously more organic than feasible. Following that assumption, it is necessary to scruti-
nize the way in which Soviet culture deals with a classic query of Russian
literature, of Aksakov and Chekhov, say, when pondering one’s relation to
the unutterable membership of people within nature: ‘‘Could we human
beings not learn to live in better harmony with nature, making measured
use of her bounty to fill our needs, but without destroying either her beauty
or her capacity for self-renewal?’’2 Attitudes to nature (to the romanticism
of boundlessness) reveal the spirit of urbanization, of Moscow itself. Under Lenin’s governance, forests, waters, and minerals were swiftly
claimed as state property, while huge tracks of uninhabited land were set
aside, continuing the Romanovs’ regal tradition of zapovedniki, i.e. provinces
to be free of both development and tourism. These were to be places of
ecological study, where man could learn how to live in harmony with
nature, rather than falling to the unsophisticated excesses of capitalist
rapaciousness. Lenin himself held, in any case, that ‘‘replacing the forces of
nature with human labor would be impossible.’’ Here the Bolsheviks were furthering a possible, well-established Czarist body of ecological thought,
working towards the harmonious interaction of man’s reason and the
environment from the theories of the biologist Vladimir Vernadskii (b. 1863)
on the evolution of the planet’s biosphere as an open, spectacularly complex
system of relations. Maksim Gor’kii, writing in a pre-Revolutionary context, was among
those who spoke up in favor of levelheaded scientific enquiry and con-
servation before the foundation of the Free Association for the Propagation
of Positive Knowledge, headed by ecology activist V.I. Taliev. The zapo-
vedniki, held the Association, were the ideal place of such inquiry and
should be protected. One of the most valuable national reserves at this time
was Askania-Nova in Ukraine; founded modestly in the nineteenth century
as a zoo and botanical garden, it still operates today as research center for over fifty species of wildlife: Przewalski horses, zebra, bison, zebu, elks,
steppe deer, antelope, and many others. Here the head administrator, Vla-
dimir Stanchinskii, had some surprising, simultaneous theories about man’s
position in the natural world, allowing a pastoral harmony to inform the
goal of harmonious, populated ecosystems.
