Conceptualizing and utilizing the natural environment: critical reflections from imperial and soviet Russia

Scholarship concerning Russia's environmental history has developed strongly in recent years providing new insight into Russian society's engagement with the wider environment. Whilst acknowledging the environmentally destructive trends characteristic of the Soviet period, this scholarship has also provided evidence of relatively complex systems for the management and utilization of natural resources. In considering Russia's evolving relationship with its natural resource base during the last 300 years, it is suggested that two broad themes are discernible: first, an enduring effort to explore and document the country's vast resource base and, second, a parallel effort to understand the functioning of natural systems at the earth's surface with implications for the way in which natural resources are managed and, in certain instances, transformed.