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Environmentalism survived—and even thrived—in Stalin’s Soviet Union, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world, although for only one component of the Soviet environment: the immense forests of the Russian heartland.¹

Throughout the early Soviet period, the agencies in charge of timber extraction repeatedly pressed for greater latitude, advancing visions of highly engineered, regularized woodlands while employing aggressive, revolutionary rhetoric. Yet with one quickly reversed exception, the Politburo consistently rejected the drive toward hyperindustrialism in the forest.

After briefly capitulating to the industrialists’ unrelenting attacks on conservationism in 1929, Stalin’s government reversed course, and in the 1930s and 1940s set aside ever larger tracts of Russia’s most valuable forests as preserves, off-limits to industrial exploitation. Forest protection ultimately rose to such prominence during the last six years of Stalin’s rule that the Politburo took control of the Soviet forest away from the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and elevated the nation’s forest conservation bureau to the dominant position in implementing policy.

The results of this struggle for supremacy in the forest, which pitted the party leadership against those very bureaucratic interests assigned to carry out the party’s industrial ambitions, show that environmental protection could find a place in a rapidly industrializing [government] as aggressive as Stalin’s—provided that the reasons given for protection were sufficiently pragmatic, and the supporting faction sufficiently powerful.

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