Day 1

In the introduction of the three day annual conference, Philipp Kohl and Clemens Günther outlined how scale functions as a prominent transdisciplinary concept in contemporary geography, ecology, physics and world literature. Scale aligns to a newly emerging epistemological frame, informed by constructivism, relativism and praxeology and offers a conceptual tool to relocate familiar ideas in new temporal and spatial dimensions.

Climate change in particular leads to the “derangement of scales” (Timothy Clark) and promotes concepts that go beyond anthropocentric scales such as big history or deep time. Changes in scale affect modes, concepts and contents of representation. They are mediated through narratives and require new ways of reading and analyzing cultural artefacts.

First Section: Arranging Complexity

fter the introduction, Erik Martin opened the conference with a talk titled “Three (Non-)Scalables: Life, Sensation, Environment”. This contribution challenged our meeting’s theoretical premise with a philosophical approach to life, something he calls a “non-scalable”. Departing from Aristotle’ classic definition of life, stating that a clear distinction between the animate and the inanimate cannot be drawn, the presentation turned to two prominent philosophical figures of Soviet science: Vladimir Vernadsky and Aleksandr Oparin, both reflecting on the relationship between living and non-living matter.

While Vernadsky returns to what Martin calls a “new scientific geocentrism” where life not merely adapts to the environment but transforms it, Oparin reflects upon the beginning of life as a process in which a boundary between a living entity and a non-living environment forms. Both scientists, Martin concluded, could be seen as “spherical thinkers”, drawing a connection to our first network meeting dedicated to the idea of spheres.

Second Section: Scaling Energy

The second section started with Georgy Levit’s presentation “Is there an Environmental Bias in Russian-language Evolutionary Theory?”. By the “bias” in the title, Levit meant a tendency to see life in its complexity and its environmental interrelatedness. Drawing on Darwinian and non-Darwinian authors from Russia and the Soviet Union (Lev Berg, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, Ivan Shmal’gauzen), Levit described how ideas of evolution were scaled up, arriving at an idea of biological evolution on all major levels, from the molecule to the biosphere.

A special role in the intellectual history of these ideas played the Kazakh Zapovednik of Borovoe, where both Vernadsky and Shmal’gauzen were evacuated during WWII. Writing his two major works here, Shmal’gauzen develops his biocybernetics theory of transformation of information in biogeocenosis. The Russian-language bias of environmental thought in theories of evolution, Levit concluded, instead of a “selfish gene” favored a “selfish biosphere”.

The next paper was given by Philipp Kohl: “The First Russian Big History? Petr Lavrov’s Pre-Human History of Thought”. His case study was dedicated to a philosophical project, populist intellectual pursued between about 1870 and his death in 1900: the “history of thought”, an account of the evolution of thought starting with cosmological, geological, and biological processes. Lavrov never finished the cumbersome project, producing volume after volume. Looking at the critical and satirical reception of his 1874 Essay on the History of Thought, Kohl pointed to a discussion on scale and proportion he then compared to the contemporary discourse of “Big History”, a field of study established by David Christian and often uncritically embraced in contemporary Russia. A concluding comparison of Christian’s and Lavrov’s works’ structures as well as similar attempts of pre-human universal histories illustrated the promises and limits of large-scale narratives of history.

Third Section: Global Perspectives

The third section started with Clemens Günther’s paper “Soviet Eco-Cosmopolitanism? Oceans in late Soviet Travel Literature”. Based on numerous Russian travelogues on the world oceans in the long 1970s, he traced the emergence of oceanic narratives in late Soviet culture, which acknowledged the growing endangerment of the maritime world through fish die-off, fishery, nuclear radiation, overtourism and more. Unlike the inbound late Stalinist culture, those travelogues rehabilitated globalist frames and gradually established a cosmopolitan frame. They conceded the complicity of the modernizing Soviet empire in causing those risks and called for transnational cooperation to overcome and mitigate ecological degradation. In terms of actors and objectives, this agenda was cosmopolitan and comparable to prominent maritime icons such as Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Soviet writers, however, only reluctantly addressed the normative questions behind this environmental agenda and did not develop a new, specific Soviet idea of cosmopolitanism beyond imitating Western models and international organizations.

Day 2

The section “Global perspectives” continued on Saturday morning with Jonathan Oldfield’s contribution, “The Soviet Union and Global Environmental Change”. Oldfield shortly summarized the results of his eponymous recent book and paid particular attention to questions of gathering and analyzing ecological data.

He argued for a nuanced view on the Soviet ecology, acknowledging both environmental destruction (accentuated in early post-Soviet scholarship on socialist ecocide) and the growing awareness of ecological risks in science and society embodied by key figures such as Victor Kovda who followed the tradition of Vernadsky and his integrated view on the biosphere. The Soviet Union was a leading power in generating data on climate change and in ecological monitoring. Although tools for working with the gathered data were underdeveloped, they represent a valuable resource for contemporary, big-data-inspired ecological science.

Fourth Section: Recentering Central Asia

The fourth section, dedicated to the recentering of Central Asia, opened with our guest Tanya Bakhmetyeva, Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. Her paper titled “The Scales of Ice: Historical Maps of the Fedchenko Glacier and Modern Climate Science” was part of her ongoing work on a collective monograph undertaking an eco-biography of the largest glacier in Tajikistan.

She started with the most recent event in this biography, its 2023 renaming after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine into Vanch-Yakh Glacier. Since it is the largest glacier outside the polar region, its sheer size makes it a problem of scale. In her talk, Bakhmetyeva focused on the mapping history, looking at several major expeditions since the 1920s conducted in collaboration of German and Soviet scientists. She thus conceptualized scaling as a tool of modernization and power. With an ecofeminist focus on the interrelationship of bodies and the environment, she pointed to the multifaceted corporeal practices that researchers were using to literally scale the natural object with their (male) bodies.

In the next talk, “Hydropoetics and Aitmatov”, Susi Frank offered an ecocritical reading of Chingiz Aitmatov’s novella The White Steamship (1970), a project she had been developing in the context of her conference on “Hydropoetics” (organized in 2023 together with Jana Rogoff in collaboration with our network). Set at Issyk-Kul, a salt lake without outflow in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the text uses bodies of water – the lake and the rivers flowing into it – as instances of a locus amoenus, as spaces of passage and the return to nature. In her talk, Frank not only gave a detailed analysis of the text but also contextualized it with Aitmatov’s position in the literary field and the political landscape of the late Soviet Union, his role in the formation of a Kyrgyz national literature, and, most importantly, his ecological commitment during perestroika, particularly his invitation of international environmental organizations to lake Issyk-Kul in 1986.

The section was concluded by our guest Jennifer Keating, Associate Professor at the School of History at University College Dublin. Her talk “Multiscalar Environmental Histories of the Russian Empire: A View from the Karkara Valley” was based on her research project on pastoralist exchange networks between southern Central Asia, the Russian Empire and other countries.

In her case study on the fair at Karkara Valley, about a hundred kilometers east of the above-mentioned lake Issyk-Kul, she presented a chapter in the global history of pastoralist economy around 1900 that has been shaped by its imperial actors so far. With what she called a multiscalar view, Keating suggested going beyond the familiar scales of the regional and the global, offering a new account of the multiethnic phenomenon of the fair drawing on both local and international scientific sources. Thus, she argued, scalar frictions between the ecology of pastoralism and ecology of imperial capitalism could be seen more clearly.

Fifth Section: Scaling Transformation

The last panel on Saturday, “Scaling Transformation”, started with Elena Fratto’s paper “Scales of Food Transformation: Individual and Collective Digestion in Yuri Olesha’s Envy”, in which she offered a new reading of the author’s 1927 classic. Her talk began with a historical overview of the early Soviet reorganization of the food system, including theories concerned with dietary trends and their impact on human bodies and the environment.After that, Fratto gave a detailed analysis of the rich culinary and corporeal imagery of Olesha’s novel.

The narrative, often read as a satirical account of Soviet industrialization ambitions, includes the prototype of a perfect sausage, both nutritious and sustainable. It not only serves as a metaphor of collectivity, but also as one of transformation, literally expressed in the semantics of ‘pererabotka’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, depicting eating as the dissolution of boundaries between the body and the world, Fratto showed the interrelationship between environmental figures of thought and metabolic models in the early Soviet period.

Andy Bruno, who could not come to Leipzig, gave an online presentation titled “Balancing the Scales: Ecology and Economy in Soviet Socialism”. He started with a hypothesis: in environmental thought of the early Soviet period, there is a remarkable shift from conquest to balance. To underscore this, Bruno looked at holistic theoretical impulses to achieve a balance between economy and ecology. This balance, he argued, was rather dynamic and anthropocentric than ecocentric. Bruno demonstrated this tendency, looking at several texts by Nikolay Bukharin, one of the most influential proponents of post-revolutionary Historical Materialism.

Comparing several early-1920s theoretical works, Bruno pointed out a shift from a Promethean view of nature to an idea of balance (ravnovesie). In the Theory of Historical Materialism (1925), a chapter titled “The Balance Between Society and Nature” uses deforestation at the Volga as an example of an event with the potential to influence global changes in climate and thus establishes an ecological link between a regional event and its planetary scale. This tendency towards balance, Bruno concluded, can be shown after 1945 in more manifest forms.

Excursion to Bergbau-Technik-Park

On Saturday afternoon, our group headed to Bergbau-Technik-Park, an outdoor exhibition located at the former open-cast mine Espenhain south of Leipzig. Our guide Martin Baumert (German Historical Museum, Berlin, author of a 2023 monograph about post-mining areas in East Germany) not only demonstrated the lignite mining practices common in East Germany, but also gave a historical account of the environmental and social impact of GDR coal mining and the recreational use of former pits.

Day 3

Section 6: New Views on 18th Century

The last day of our annual conference started with a look at “New Views on the 18th Century”, a section with two presentations from environmental history and literary history. Julia Herzberg dedicated her talk to the search for the Cold Pole. Like previous talks, which approached the issue of Scale as one of measuring phenomena with different scales, Herzberg looked at the interplay between the exploration of space and the problem of establishing a reliable method of temperature measurement, which only became possible during the 19th century. In her talk, she not only showed how local indigenous knowledge can be used to provide information on global weather developments, but also pointed out how the imaginary of the cold pole became part of explorers’ autobiographical narratives, where it is troped a “coffin of ice” or a “living grave”. Although in 20th century, it became clear that there could be no single cold pole, interest in the idea remained high.

In her following talk “Problems of Perception: Lomonosov and Learning How to See ‘priznaki’ of Precious Metal Ores”, Colleen McQuillen offered a reading of Mikhail Lomonosov’s mineralogical writings based on his studies at Freiberg in 1739 – not too far from our conference venue in Leipzig. His First Principles of Metallurgy or of Ore Mining published in 1763 go far beyond a technical description of minerals. They offer detailed accounts on how to recognize ores, negotiating sensual perception between the visual and the olfactory. In her analysis, McQuillen shed light on Lomonosov’s narrative strategies to produce knowledge about the invisible – the ores hidden in the Earth. At a time where neither microscopes nor chemical methods of analysis are available, miners look for ‘priznaki’ (material qualities in color, touch and smell). In their practices, not only theological narratives of hope and reward were common, but also bodily metaphors of ‘mother Earth’ hiding treasures in her womb (the ‘bowels of the Earth’). The problem of scale becomes palpable between the relationality of embodied experience and the imperial dimension of resource extraction.

Section 7: Escalating Soviet Utopia

The last section of the annual conference began with Timm Schönfelder’s presentation “Scaling Soviet Environments. Nature Management, High Modernism, and Dreams of Total Control”. He built on his monograph on agriculture and melioration in the Kuban Region in southern Russia and summarized the stages and policies behind expanding agriculture. Although the history of artificial irrigation dates back to the 19th century, those ideas gained new ground in Stalinism and were formative for the late Stalinist “Great Plan for the Transformation on Nature”.

Although the history of artificial irrigation dates back to the 19th century, those ideas gained new ground in Stalinism and were formative for the late Stalinist “Great Plan for the Transformation on Nature”. The high hopes – protection against floods, yield increase and saving water supply –, however, never fully materialized and led to erosion, overfertilization and other environmental damages. Schönfelder introduced the various players responsible for the rise and fall of the region’s agronomic complex, including Soviet scientists, party politicians, local actors and international experts. His case study, thus, in exemplary fashion, addressed the various scales in which environmental policies can be studied and how their interplay shapes environmental conditions on the spot, both in long- and short-term perspective.

In her concluding talk “Cross-Scale Imaginations of Future Ecologies”, Tatjana Petzer turned our attention to the present. Looking at utopian designs for green cities, she asked whether these ideas were in favor of nature taking over or humans being in control. This structural ambivalence of ecological landscape design, Petzer argued, can be found in various media.

A few of them are Nikita Argunov’s 2019 film Coma, whose protagonist becomes the architect of a virtual future reality while being in a coma; Pleistocene Park, an experimental ecological project recreating a past ecosystem in northeastern Siberia; or the project “Green Reconstruction of Ukraine”, an attempt to ecologically transform municipalities damaged during Russia’s full-scale invasion since 2022. In this latter case, she pointed to conflicting visions of a green future, a debate she contextualized with the contradictory views on Ukraine between architects and urban planners from the West and local actors on the one hand and between utopian concepts of avantgarde architecture and dystopian contemporary visions on the other.

The annual conference ended with remarks and outlooks to planned cooperations between the members in upcoming workshops and conferences as well as the publications and handbooks, that will be introduced in autumn this year.

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