Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2022
We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.
This research was funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant titled “Deconstructing steppe imaginaries in Russian and Soviet artistic and scientific literature from 1890 to 1960” and financial support from the same agency for the conference “The Soviet Steppe—Culture, Environment, Economics and Politics.” We are grateful to the SNSF for making this research project and the conference possible. We also warmly thank all the conference participants for sharing their expertise on the history of the Soviet steppe and engaging in fruitful and stimulating discussions over two days in Fribourg. Their contributions inspired and shaped our thinking over this thematic cluster. Lastly, in addition to the authors whose work appears in the cluster, we would like to thank the reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped improving the quality of the individual papers and the cluster overall.
1. Ely, Christopher, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002)Google Scholar.
2. Hurka, Herbert, Friesen, Nikolai, Bernhardt, Karl-Georg, Neuffer, Barbara, Smirnov, Sergej, Shmakov, Alexander, and Blattner, Frank, “The Eurasian Steppe Belt: Status Quo, Origin and Evolutionary History,” Turczaninowia 22, no. 3 (September 2019): 5–71Google Scholar.
3. Isenberg, Andrew C., “Seas of Grass: Grasslands in World Environmental History,” in Isenberg, Andrew C., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. Frachetti, Michael D., Smith, C. Evan, Traub, Cynthia M., and Williams, Tim, “Nomadic Ecology Shaped the Highland Geography of Asia’s Silk Road,” Nature 543, no. 7647 (March 2017): 193–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christian, David, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History,” Journal of World History 11, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5. Isenberg, “Seas of Grass,” 141.
6. Breyfogle, Nicholas, Schrader, Abby, and Sunderland, Willard, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also: Kunichika, Michael, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston, 2015)Google Scholar.
7. Gibson, David D., Grasses and Grassland Ecology (Oxford, 2009), 1Google Scholar.
8. Isenberg, “Seas of Grass”; See also Elie, Marc and Ferret, Carole, ”Verte, la Steppe? Agriculture et environnement en Asie centrale,” Études rurales 200, no. 2 (2017): 65Google Scholar.
9. See for example: Kepe, Thembela, “Grasslands Ablaze: Vegetation Burning by Rural People in Pondoland, South Africa,” South African Geographic Journal 87, no. 1 (March 2005): 10–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kathleen A. Farley, “Grasslands to Tree Plantations: Forest Transition in the Andes of Ecuador,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 4 (December 2007): 755–71; Emily T. Yeh, “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures into Grasslands,’” Nomadic Peoples 9, no. 1/2 (2005): 9–30; Lesley Instone, “Encountering Native Grasslands: Matters of Concern in an Urban Park,” Australian Humanities Review 49 (November 2010): 91–118.
10. Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).
11. Sharon E. Nicholson, Dryland Climatology (Cambridge, Eng., 2009).
12. Alan Mikhail, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford, 2013); Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2007); Loretta Kim and Niccoló Pianciola, “Introduction: Watering the Land-Based Empires,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62, no. 4 (May 2019): 525–59.
13. A.A. Chibilev, Lik stepi: Ekologo-geograficheskie ocherki o stepnoi zone SSSR (Leningrad, 1990).
14. Mikhail Stroganov, “Landshaftnye obrazy i identichnost΄ ‘voobrazhaemykh soobshchestv,’” in N. Kokovina and Mikhail Stroganov, eds., Step΄ shirokaia: Prostranstvennye obrazy russkoi kul΄tury. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii (Kursk, 2009).
15. Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004).
16. David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford, 2013).
17. Isenberg, “Seas of Grass.”
18. David Moon, “The Grasslands of North America and Russia,” in John Robert McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, eds., A Companion to Global Environmental History (Chichester, UK, 2012).
19. Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale (1905–1936) (Rome, 2009). See also his: Niccolò Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928–1934,” Cahiers du monde russe 45, no. 1/2 (January–June 2004): 137–91; Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: Collectivisation et changement social (1928—1945) (Paris, 2006). See also the Russian translation: Isabelle Ohayon, Sedentarizatsiia kazakhov v SSSR pri Staline: Kollektivizatsiia i sotsial΄nye izmeneniia (1928–1945 gg.) (Almaty, 2009); Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca, 2018); Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden: Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan (Hamburg, 2014). See also the English translation: Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Pittsburgh, 2018).
20. Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh, 2001); Irene Anastasiadou and Aristotle Tympas, “Iron Silk Roads: Comparing Interwar and Post-War Transnational Asian Railway Projects,” in Martin Schiefelbusch and Hans-Liudger Dienel, eds., Linking Networks: The Formation of Common Standards and Visions for Infrastructure Development (London, 2014), 169–86; Julia Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991 (Göttingen, Germany, 2017); Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge, Eng., 2019).
21. Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams, 371–461.
22. There was, for example, a drastic decline of saiga antelopes known for their large migration routes. As an overview: Marinus J. A. Werger and Marja A. van Staalduinen, Eurasian Steppes: Ecological Problems and Livelihoods in a Changing World (Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2012).
23. Paul Josephson, Nicolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian, Aleh Cherp, Dmitry Efremenko, and Vladislav Larin, An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2013), 131, 283.
24. Artem Kouida, “Land Melioration in Belarusian Polesia as Modernization Factor in the Soviet Periphery,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 68, no. 3 (August 2019): 401–17.
25. Compare also: McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London, 2016), 3–61.
26. Filipp Prokudin, “Planeta Tselina” SSSR pokoril kosmos, no poterpel porozhenie na zemle,” Ria Novosti online, July 7, 2019, at https://ria.ru/20190707/1556136197.html (accessed February 11, 2022).
27. Robert A. Kopack, “Rocket Wastelands in Kazakhstan: Scientific Authoritarianism and the Baikonur Cosmodrome,” Environmental Governance in Authoritarian and Populist Regimes, special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 2 (March 2019): 556–67.
