Nature’s Agency in Times of Transformation: Political Ecologies in Soviet Modernity and After

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

This group project investigates how nonhuman agents – animals, plants, other lifeforms, and their environments – have shaped cultural and political imaginaries and practices in times of radical historical disruptions across the territories of what is now Russia and Ukraine. It examines three key moments: the 1917 Revolution; Soviet modernization, marked by industrialization, space exploration, and post-Chernobyl ecological silence; and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. The hypothesis of the project is that Soviet history and its utopian modernization cannot be fully understood without recognizing how relations between humans and the more-than-human were transformed through industrialization, collectivization, catastrophe, and war. The project shows that early Soviet utopias of nonhuman collaboration persisted alongside discourses of domination, exploitation, and ecological devastation. By investigating figurations of the nonhuman across diverse ecologies, discourses, and artforms, the project shows how revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet cultural practices shaped dynamics of care and resistance to violence. Comprising four interconnected sub-studies by three scholars and an artist, this interdisciplinary project draws on literary theory, ecocriticism, human–animal and critical animal studies, the history of science and technology, as well as political and cultural theory. It explores how revolutionary and Soviet avant-garde articulated nonhuman agency, recognising animals, plants, and other lifeforms as utopian co-creators, victims of violence, or witnesses of catastrophe. This perspective informs contemporary artistic practices that respond to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. By foregrounding multispecies entanglements and shared vulnerability, the project proposes a new framework for understanding the cultural history of the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, situating the current war within a longer trajectory of political ecologies.