ABSTRACT
Between 1959 and 1989, the Czechoslovak communist government carried out a radical transformation of the Southern Moravian floodplain. A system of three shallow reservoirs replaced some of the last stretches of natural floodplain forests in Central Europe together with the village of Mušov, and altered the hydrological regime and ecological balance of the entire lower Thaya valley. Through the prism of this project, generally known as Nové Mlýny, this essay looks into the gradual development of the environmental debate within state-socialist planning. While so far the story of the project has been articulated mostly in terms of the Cold War dichotomy as an example of the communist war on nature, or Ecocide, we argue that the project has been driven by the specific socialist “technocratic environmentalism,” as exemplified in the ideas of “landscape planning.”
