A01=Douglas R. Weiner
activism
Author_Douglas R. Weiner
baikal
Category=JPFC
Category=JPH
Category=JPQB
Category=JPVH
Category=RNK
conservation
counterculture
ecology
environmental history
environmental studies
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
foreign contacts
gorbachev
habitat protection
history
khrushchev
land development
land use
mid level soviet official
modern russia
nature
nature activism
nature protection
nonfiction
politics
preservation
resource exploitation
russia
russian history
scientific societies
soviet russia
soviet scientists
stalin
student movements
student protest
ussr
voop
Product details
- ISBN 9780520232136
- Weight: 907g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage. Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all.
Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.
Douglas R. Weiner is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (1988; paperback edition, 2000)
