Northern Riches? Natural Resources and Colonization in the European North of Russia, 1890–1930
12. März 2025 | 16:00 MEZ | online
ESEH online seminar in environmental history with Vasily Borovoy (University College Dublin) as presenter and Katja Bruisch (Trinity College Dublin) as dicussant organized by Anna Mazanik.

Abstract: How can an underdeveloped and overlooked outskirt of a vast empire be effectively ruled? First, it should be imagined; second, it should be marketed to the empire and the wider world. This paper examines the discursive construction of the European North of Russia as a region abundant in natural resources—such as timber, fish, and subsoil minerals—but scarce in labor, capital, and infrastructure. The study explores how the educated public and state officials, in both late imperial and early Soviet contexts, collectively invented the European North of Russia, its “natural riches,” and the various groups inhabiting it. By framing the region’s past and present as “backward,” they created an image that left no alternative but a transition to a “modern” and prosperous future, in which the natural resources of the North would be integrated into imperial and global markets. The paper emphasizes the unexpected and lasting challenges and failures of governance based on the marketisation of regional natural resources in the gap between image and knowledge and between policy design and implementation.
Vasily Borovoy is a historian working in the field of environmental, economic, and global history of the late imperial and Soviet Russia. He has recently defended his Ph.D. dissertation at the University College Dublin. His research project examines the ways in which the north-western region of Russia was governed through its natural resources and emerged as a resource frontier during the transformative period between the 1890s and 1920s.
Katja Bruisch is the Ussher Assistant Professor in modern environmental history at the Trinity College Dublin. A historian of modern Russia, she is interested in the interplay between social, political and environmental change, particularly in the Russian countryside. She is the author of Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war: Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Cologne, 2014) and is currently working on another book project on the history of peat extraction and wetland drainage.
Zoom link for online participation:
https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/j/68579429641?pwd=wJCMYM2wx2ZL42jchLTWWmEj9OmVRw.1
Meeting ID: 685 7942 9641
Passcode: 204401
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Maria Tschassowskaja (11. März 2025). Northern Riches? Natural Resources and Colonization in the European North of Russia, 1890–1930. Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa. Abgerufen am 11. Februar 2026 von https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/10158

