ABSTRACT
Despite the significant range of research activities undertaken in the Soviet Union directed towards understanding climatic trends and associated processes, the contribution of Soviet scientists to the climate change debate is typically underplayed within English-language overviews, which tend to stress the slow, meandering accretion of relevant knowledge evident within the European and North American contexts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In view of this, the chapter provides an analysis of the underlying institutional and intellectual characteristics of climate change research evident in the Soviet Union during the period from the 1960s through to the early 1990s. It begins by reflecting on the evolution of the main institutions that were involved in climate change research within the country and the oversight role of the dominant hydrometeorological services. It moves on to analyse the broad scientific debates evident with respect to conceptualisations of both anthropogenic and natural climate change. The final part of the chapter draws attention to the Soviet engagement with the IPCC process and its associated emphasis on palaeo-analogues in order to predict future climate change. The chapter thus provides an initial insight into the scientific debates concerning climate change at play in the Soviet Union and the conditions under which they developed and took shape.
