On the face of it, Soviet politics and environmentalism don’t seem like a good mix – just think Chernobyl. Nonetheless, your focus on global warming brings us away from questions of radioactive pollution or the destruction of landscapes like the Aral Sea, and towards the ostensibly invisible specter of ‘global warming’. As you imply, the framing of global warming as a key, global scale environmental phenomenon – a manmade, anthropogenic acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions – seems to be a relatively recent formulation, largely rooted in the West and post-WWII scientific developments like oceanography or climatic modelling.

Alarm bells sounded by the World Meteorological Organisation in 1985, the 1987 Montreal Protocol (which the USSR was signatory to), and warnings by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988 remind us of global warming’s ascendance in the mid-1980s not just with scientific and technical communities, but also intergovernmental agendas and the popular imagination. This chronology is one that affords little room, or even time, for the Soviet Union (which after all ceased to exist in 1991) and its understanding of climate change.

However, this characterization of Soviet environmental policy as purely, inherently, self-destructive ‘ecocide’ belies the diversity of environmental and ecological thought throughout the post-WWII era. Soviet environmental research, politics and even activism never existed in a vacuum, and continuities in post-WWII research provided an epistemic and scientific foundation for the Soviet state to engage with environmental crises. Despite climatology in the 1950s being both relatively unprestigious and concentrated in Europe and the US, Soviet climatological and metereological thinking offered a means to think of climate on a planetary scale, akin to the ‘global’ in global warming’. The research of geophysicist Mikhail Budyko is an exemplar of the gradual, interdisciplinary affinity between climate studies. His engagement with physical geography led to writing about heat balance in the post-WWII period, and it was in the 1960s and 70s that Budyko would influence research on global climate changes with an influential monograph.

Its forecast of future rises in global temperature stemming from human activity echoes the later urgency of climate change discourse issued at platforms like the IPCC, and other Soviet colleagues like physicist (and later Nobel Peace Prize Laurate) Andrej Sakharov’s alarm that rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions from coal use were heating the atmosphere and would “sooner or later… reach a dangerous level” (Corry). Soviet scientists like Budyko played a formative role in the World Metereological Organisation and early on at the IPCC, engaging closely with scholarship from their Western colleagues to analyse the anthropogenic effects on climate. However, this climatological ‘epistemic community’ of Soviet researchers would be sidelined in the process of formulating ‘global warming’ as we know it today, owing to their use of “paleoclimatogical analogs” for climate prediction over the computer-based models that ultimately formed the basis of the first IPCC report in 1990 (Oldfield).

(cont'd)