Introduction: Ecology Lessons: Community Solidarity, Indigenous Knowledge, Civic Society in Crisis

As Russia’s society has been wrenched by the war in Ukraine and civic-political divisions at home, one of its most critical problems, the environment, has been pushed aside. Yet ecological values and activism are more important than ever, as Russia’s citizens must contend with the exacerbation of natural resource destruction and climate crisis ramifications on an accelerated and unprecedented scale. The articles featured in this finale double issue of our journal were solicited well before the war began in February 2022, but most have been written and revised since, with each author feeling a sense of urgency and distress.

What began as a project to highlight the ecology activist successes in a few high-profile cases illustrating civic society mobilization in Russia has instead moved to analyzing disaster zones in various degrees of devastation. What can we learn from the experiences of valiant ecology activists and besieged civic society leaders? How can Indigenous knowledge gleaned and practiced over centuries help in managing ecological and societal stresses? How can Russia’s urban scientific and rural Indigenous communities communicate productively with each other, especially when some scientists are Indigenous? How could state legal and policy mechanisms mitigate environmental destruction rather than abet it? These are some of the questions asked in this issue. The authors come from diverse backgrounds, Russian and non-Russian, rural and urban, scientific and political, activist and scholarly. Each article qualifies as anthropology in the best, broadest sense of the word. The authors are ethnographic in their descriptions, sensitive to human rights at many levels, and strive to accurately portray the voices of their interlocutors.

Each case featured here resonates beyond the local, although their venues and contexts may not be well known or understood in the European or English-language-oriented world. Some have briefly appeared in the international news due to their shock value, whether massive fires that spread smoke from Far East Russia to Alaska in the summers of 2020–2022, devastating floods that increasingly force village removals, or attempts to demolish entire mountains in Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic, starting over a decade ago. Causes of the crises are often disputed, with human and natural origins intertwined in sometimes unexpected and inextricable ways.

We begin with Bashkortostan’s Kushtau Mountain, since the struggle to save it best fits my original goals of the issue, to broadcast ecology activist successes. It is no surprise that this is one of the earliest of the newsworthy stories featured here. Success stories have become less frequent in the past five years, and activists who can claim victories have achieved them at high cost with no guarantees of sustainability.

Karina I. Gorbacheva, who analyses the Kushtau Mountain case, is a Russian scholar with expertise in the social impacts of mass media and savvy environmental protest action beyond propaganda. She became an advocate for sustainable ecology while researching stories in her home republic of Bashkortostan, and she works for the Russia-wide EKA network, whose government-approved mission is to further environmental protection through volunteer actions, including planting trees and clearing garbage.¹ One of her main points is that the struggle for Kushtau has been far messier than was previously known. The activists’ victory came only after another of the four sacred limestone mountain tops (shihan) surrounding the capital Ufa was completely destroyed by the Bashkirsk soda company. Growing protests from 2018 to 2020 over Kushtau were accompanied by arrests of some activists and threats against others. Bashkortostan’s governor Radii Khabirov switched sides to eventually defend preserving the mountain. Each side in the conflict accused the other of harboring nationalist extremists, whether “skinheads” or “thugs for hire,” affiliated with gangs, some of whom temporarily become security personnel to protect a clear-cut logging operation against protesters.

Gorbacheva’s article beautifully links the importance of saving local environments with the value of stimulating civic society. She argues that precisely this dynamic can enhance state stability, and so is in the interest of state authorities as well as citizens. Misinformation leads to distrust of government authorities and mutual, reciprocal, and spiraling suspicion. While her nostalgia for environmental protections that she claims were more effective in the Soviet period may be misplaced, she has a worthy sense of balance between state policy requirements and citizen rights.²

Our next case centers on the devastating “black sky” pollution of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. The author, environmental sociologist Olga V. Ustyuzhantseva, draws conclusions similar to those of Karina Gorbacheva about the potential power of mobilized urban internet-savvy citizens with benevolent motives to bridge and transcend conflicts with officials at numerous levels. Fearing for the health of an entire urban population, especially the next generation of children, beginning in 2017 residents of Krasnoyarsk created conditions for the birth of a “citizen science” movement called “Za chistoe nebo” (For a clear sky), or “Nebo” (Sky). They also produced a transparent and credible “democratization of data,” publishing previously suppressed or distorted information. As our narrator and participant observer explains, in the process they managed to humanize relations with some authorities, who became more than faceless enemies to be stereotyped and condemned. While ethical leadership matters enormously in Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, and elsewhere, the role of many dedicated online participants in Krasnoyarsk, each taking on specific tasks, such as monitoring air quality with appropriate sophisticated equipment over several years, tipped the balance of effective lobbying power with authorities.

Ustyuzhantseva’s analysis of the Krasnoyarsk antipollution case is particularly noteworthy for her long-term ethnographic monitoring of the online community that gradually developed in Krasnoyarsk, under the stewardship of Igor Shpekht, a scientist with a young family who initially was determined that his efforts be “nonpolitical.” The author’s rapport with and admiration for Shpekht enhances her description. He exposed why parallel sets of air quality data (citizen and official) could be discrepant, and raised the funds for responsible monitoring from their balconies by citizens all over a city that has been plagued with poor-quality brown coal production, intense car pollution in an air-trapping valley, multiple industrial factories, and much else. While flash mobs and other street protests had been part of the local environmental protest movement, the approach of Nebo is shown here to be relatively more effective in combatting what Ustyuzhantseva bluntly terms the extended “Leviathan” of the federal environmental oversight infrastructure and its local masters of rigged data.³

Ustyuzhantseva presents the evolution of the Krasnoyarsk “greens” movement as an atypical environmental activism study featuring nonoppositional online civic mobilization efforts in Russia. She stresses the significance of long-term citizen–government interfaces without situating this in the broader literature that has become a hallmark of Western definitions that distinguish “civic society” from “civil society,” with its more narrowly defined focus on “from below” demonstration-oriented protest movements. Her theorizing about the “constructedness and contingency of environmental activism” fits better than she acknowledges into the cutting-edge scholarship that valorizes Russia’s mobilized yet cautiously strategic ecology activists.⁴

The next three cases are all by Indigenous scholars and/or activists who understand the escalating ramifications of environmental destruction, climate change, and its human costs from the ground up. Their insights, data, and passion come through on a personal level informed by experiences living in villages and inheriting or specifically studying Indigenous knowledge from elders of their communities. Their wisdom is hard-won and merits serious attention.

The preeminent yet fragile success story of the “Battle for Bikin” centers on establishing a natural preserve, officially a “park,” to protect the vast taiga and river basin around the Bikin River in Russia’s Far East, and simultaneously to protect Indigenous lifestyles and the famed Siberian tiger. Bikin is sometimes termed Russia’s Amazon for its importance in providing a natural lung and carbon sink for the Northern hemisphere. This case is narrated with appropriate drama and flair by one of the founders of the park, Indigenous activist and president of the Batani Foundation, Udegé leader Pavel Sulyandziga. He fled Russia for his life. He graciously agreed to narrate his people’s history as it is intertwined with Bikin, illustrating the theme of “ecology lessons” from painful experience. Sulyandziga has been under enormous pressure from Russian authorities since at least 2013, when his popular candidacy for the presidency of the main Indigenous peoples’ association of Russia, RAIPON, was derailed by authorities determined to install their own “yes-man” member of President Putin’s United Russia party.⁵

After the RAIPON debacle, Sulyandziga, already a key player at many levels of Indigenous leadership, became the main negotiator in Moscow and in his homeland as he endeavored to create the conditions that would make the Bikin park acceptable for his Indigenous community. In the process, those conditions have become a hallmark of reasonable Indigenous demands when Indigenous territories are turned legally into state-level protected areas. The dangers of lack of consultation are well known for such national parks (very much including the United States), as is indicated by the famous mantra of global Indigenous leaders: “nothing about us without us.”⁶

The relevant conditions negotiated in the Bikin case are worth repeating here, as they contribute an important international precedent. Traditional economic activities, especially hunting, trapping, and fishing, are ensured on park lands. Free access to the territory at all times is not only for village residents within those lands, but also their kin “no longer living in these villages.” Hunters and fishers have priority rights to their yields, for private and commercial use. The park is to be co-managed, with ample job opportunities for Indigenous residents at all levels. Park lands may be expanded but not contracted. Ethnological expertise must be included in all environmental and social impact assessments related to park territories.

Among Sulyandziga’s lessons is the importance of Indigenous solidarity, learned at personal sacrifice, since authorities played “divide and rule” games with him before he left Russia. One of the salient questions left unanalyzed is why authorities agreed to nearly all his community’s conditions. The author implies that the excellent international publicity the Putin administration received for saving the charismatic Siberian tiger may have been a more important factor than the local Indigenous community. He warns that the legally established Bikin park could still be undermined by increasingly desperate development interests in logging, gold mining, and other resource extraction.

Resource extraction has been a huge issue in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), where local authorities like to brag that they have the entire Mendeleev table on territory approximately the size of India. Poorly managed development, while extracting such resources as diamonds, gold, rare earth minerals and fossil fuels, has disproportionately affected local Indigenous communities throughout the territory, especially in the northern regions (uluses) of the republic. The Arctic and sub-Arctic have been forced to endure the resulting effects of climate change, in some places at rates over three times that of other parts of the globe.⁷ The Indigenous Sakha research team of Vera Solovyeva, Liliya Vinokurova, and Viktoriya Filippova argues that Indigenous communities in the republic “are the first to bear the brunt of climate change, given their traditional land management.” Given this “line of fire” position, they have also become the primary communities attempting to adapt to climate change by utilizing traditionally based knowledge gleaned from their elders.

This talented Sakha team of co-authors united for their article “Fire and Water,” which I commissioned for this journal’s “Ecology Lessons” based on their previous field-based research on the fires and floods of recent years in the Sakha Republic. While one of the earliest and most famous floods was in Lensk in 2001, in the past five years both flooding and fires have become more frequent and destructive. Correlated with these disasters has been increased need for relocation of villages, reconstruction of houses on stilts, and activation of the kin and social networks needed to make community solidarity a reality. Most important, Vera Solovyeva has argued in her doctoral thesis, briefly recounted here, that traditional ways of preventing forest fires have included the “controlled burns,” sometimes called “cultural burns” or “agro-burns” that were cautiously carried out by groups of villagers in early spring, when the ground was wet enough to warrant the burning of underbrush without it getting out of control. This also helped avoid the phenomenon of “zombie fires” that could smolder underground, even in winter.⁸ The trouble is that controlled burns have become illegal in Russia, and thus Indigenous knowledge has clashed with overgeneralized science that frames all fires as dangerous. Community leaders must choose to go underground with some of their practices or to forego them, while also enduring outsiders’ absurd generalizations about Indigenous religious-spiritual practices being superstitious or “antiscientific.” At the level of federal relations, the republic has suffered an unfair undervaluation of their lands, while also contending with the need for citizen volunteers on a massive scale to join front line fire and flood rescue work.

The most common trope when people are asked to think about Siberia is its extreme below-freezing temperatures. Cold studies have emerged out of storage precisely as people are worrying about climate change in the form of rising temperatures. The value of cold has been underestimated and poorly understood, argue Indigenous Sakha scholars Aleksander A. Suleymanov and Liliya I. Vinokurova. They are pioneers in the study of cryoanthropology, also called the anthropology of cold. To remove the stigma of cold, they point to numerous ways Indigenous Sakha cattle and horse breeders historically kept their isolated farmstead households alive by using ice and snow in creative ways. Underground cold storage utilizing permafrost, ice roads enabling elegant winter travel across rivers and fields, ice windows enabling sunlight to filter into human and cattle housing, ice for potable water, as well as snow that helps reveal animal tracks to hunters – all are just a few of the traditional ways Sakha families, and other Indigenous peoples of the North, used the benefits of cold. The authors cleverly correlate some of these legacies with modern practises and demonstrate current significance of adaptation in a cold climate. Among the more controversial of their claims are the health benefits of cold, but this too is being confirmed by contemporary science.⁹

The next case brings us farther east to the island of Sakhalin, where Indigenous groups, especially Nivkhi fishers, have been developing creative and unusual forms of fishing entrepreneurships, contrary to stereotypes about Indigenous people and communities as impoverished and working only at subsistence levels. They have been pushing against the tide of Russia’s laws restricting Indigenous people to practicing traditional subsistence activities very narrowly defined. Natalya I. Novikova’s article on the Nivkhi and their aspirations and values is informed by international norms that sometimes run counter to Russia’s laws and politics.

Novikova is a well-known anthropologist of Indigenous peoples, a pioneer in comparative legal anthropology, and an advisor to Moscow officials as well as Native communities. Her article here is based on fieldwork with the Nivkhi, beginning in the early 2000s through 2019. Built on trust, her rapport with Nivkhi fishers, who maintain values of moderation and gift-giving, has enabled her to refute their reputations as incorrigible poachers or incompetent alcoholics. She instead argues for a change of the laws that prevent Indigenous peoples from gaining access to a fair share of their natural resources in sustainable ways, whether for subsistence or commerce, whether on Sakhalin or elsewhere.

Novikova’s well-meaning and well-presented arguments unfortunately are dashed by a more recent federal-level law that redefines some Indigenous people out of existence. This is being done by an official “registry list” of all who may qualify as Indigenous, ironically taking effect February 2022, as the Ukraine war began. This recent master list is the horrifying theme of Olga A. Murashko’s article, our final piece in this issue, and indeed in the journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia. Murashko is Russia’s preeminent anthropologist of Indigenous human rights, and her text is legally responsible and cautious. While it may at first glance seem technical, her legal analysis has amazing implications. The required registration is not genocide by violence, but rather by bureaucratic fiat, something that Pavel Sulyandziga briefly mentions in his history of Bikin River and Amur River peoples. I use the phrase bureaucratic genocide fully cognizant that it is incendiary, and I must emphasize that it is not used by Olga Murashko.¹⁰ At the very least, the registry will likely have long-term effects that can result in far fewer people being counted as Indigenous, further Indigenous impoverishment, and demeaning cultural homogenization, including loss of precious Indigenous knowledge. As Olga Murashko points out, the registry also creates risks of dividing Indigenous peoples into rural and urban, village and “asphalt” Natives, as well as separating Indigenous communities from urban leaders. Angry and confused Indigenous reactions to the law are recorded here.

It is obvious that we lose Indigenous peoples as stewards of specific sustainable lands when their lands are engulfed in nonconsensual development. At a deeper reciprocal level we, as citizens of the planet, are also losing in moral, humanitarian, and survival terms when we shrink the numbers of Indigenous people and communities. This happens directly when villagers are forced to relocate due to climate change and indirectly due to bureaucratic redefinitions and political machinations. Without Indigenous communities as keepers of the precious lands and natural resources that are left, we lose our last chance for their knowledge of symbiosis with living beings on the lands and waters of their territories. Ice roads across the Lena River are unstable and dangerous earlier each spring, with devastating human costs. Warming of permafrost produces swamps, flooding, and black ice that exacerbates methane release and spiraling temperature rise. The cycles of life are off-balance in those remaining places on earth, including northern Eurasia, where Indigenous people have kept the cycles alive not only for their own benefit but, as scientists now confirm, for the benefit of all. And Indigenous non-Russian citizens are among the very people in Russia today being mobilized for the Ukraine war in disproportionate numbers.

Returning to this introduction’s lead theme, Krasnoyarsk’s “Clear Sky” hero Igor Shpekht correlated the environment and the Ukraine war directly in a 2022 message to his followers, excerpted here:

We have done huge work, for which I will be grateful to all of you until the end of my days, so that the environmental disaster of air pollution in our city would get resolved. It has begun to be resolved, and much has changed since 2017. It seemed we were in a watershed moment and would soon be able not to dream, but to know the precise year when the air in the winter would be clean and the sky over [our] heads would be blue in our beloved Krasnoyarsk. Now, unfortunately, our dream will not come true. … With the start of the horror … taking place in Ukraine and the [tit for tat] economic sanctions—we can forget about the environmental modernization of enterprises, the building of a gas mainline, the transition to subsidized electricity for heating private homes, and the technical development of production facilities. This has become simply impossible without accessible technologies and with a collapsed economy … .[T]here are other things to worry about now besides the environment. One day has wiped out the future of our city, of an entire country …

Igor Shpekht exhorts his followers to not lose hope and suggests that the environmental and economic collapse is temporary, for an “indeterminate period.” However, it is clear to all environmentalists, Russians and non-Russians, domestic and foreign activists alike, that there is no time to lose. President Putin’s war has set the planet back in ways both clear and unpredictable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Garbage, particularly its long-haul transfer from Moscow to poorer regions, has become a sensitive issue, as the famous 2018–2020 Shies case in Arkhangel’sk indicates. The Shies plan, thwarted in part by public protests, is described in note 6 of Olga Ustyuzhantseva’s article featured here. See also https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/06/protests-shiyes-how-garbage-dump-galvanized-russias-civil-society-a66289 [accessed 10/15/2022].

For online sampling of the broad cross-region network of EKA activities, see https://www.asi.org.ru/ngoprofile/eka/events/ [accessed 10/15/2020]. Since 2012 the EKA has affirmed that it “in the future it does not support and will not support any political parties, political associations or specific political leaders … . The EKA is not involved in political activities, such as election campaigns, debates, rallies, pickets, meetings, conferences, etc.” (EKA Zelenoe Dvizhenie Rossii [Зеленое Движение России] 2012).

For earlier perspectives on the “greens” movement and its attempts to be apolitical, see A.V. Yablokov and A. V. Zimenko, eds., Zelenoe dvizhenie Rossii i ėkologicheskie vyzovy: materialy konferentsii, Dubrovskii, Moskovskaia oblastʹ, 21–22 marta 2009 (Moscow: Lesnaia strana, 2009); and Julian Ageyman and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger, eds., Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union (Boston: MIT Press, 2009).

2. On the serious ramifications of Soviet environmental legacies, see especially Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992). See also Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom. Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachëv. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

3. The term “leviathan,” used by Thomas Hobbes (1651) as a metaphor for power-hungry governance, has come to be used in Russian popular discourse for the dangers of recentralization, state consolidation, and corruption, centered on political or church authorities, and their collusion. Its most famous use in Russia was in the 2014 film “Leviathan” by Andrey Zvyagintsev.

4. Compare Joshua P. Newell and Laura A. Henry, “The State of Environmental Protection in the Russian Federation: A Review of the Post-Soviet Era,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2016 (online 2017) 57 (6): 771–801. See also Alfred B. Evans, “Civil Society and Protest,” in Putin’s Russia, ed. Stephen Wegren, 94–107 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); Alfred B. Evans, Laura A. Henry, and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2006); Laura Henry, Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Laura Henry, “Russia’s Environment and Environmental Movement,” in Understanding Contemporary Russia, ed. Michael L. Bressler, 275–301 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2018); and Elizabeth Plantan, “Not all NGOs Are Treated Equally: Selectivity in Civil Society Management in China and Russia,” Comparative Politics 2022, 54 (3): 501–24. Scholars of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies [ASEEES] interest group “Environmental Studies & Sustainability” have a relevant website: https://www.aseees.org/about/committees/committee-environmental-sustainability [accessed 9/20/2022].

5. The winner was former reindeer breeder turned Duma deputy Grigory Ledkov, who continues as president. See the website of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North https://raipon.info/ [accessed 10/15/2022]. See also the site of the Batani [bogatyr-hero in the Udegé language] Foundation https://batani.org/ [accessed 10/15/2022]. For background, see Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Indigeneity, Land and Activism in Siberia,” Land, Indigenous Peoples and Conflict, eds. A. Tidwell and B. Zellen, 9–27 (New York: Routledge, 2017).

6. See especially the key United Nations document “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” http://www.un.org/ru/documents/decl_conv/declarations/Indigenous_rughts.shtml; and the journal Cultural Survival, https://www.culturalsurvival.org. See also “Indigeneity and Sovereignty,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 2020 (2021 online 59 [1]); and Gleb Raygorodetsky, The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change (New York: Pegasus, 2017).

7. See “Arctic Issues and Identity,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 58 (4); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); and Thane Gustafson, Klimat: the Future of Russia in the Era of Climate Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

8. See Vera Solovyeva, Climate Change in Oymyakhon: Perceptions, Responses and How Local Knowledge May Inform Policy.” PhD Dissertation, George Mason University, 2021; and Vera Solovyeva, “Ecology Activism in the Sakha Republic: Russia’s ‘Large numbered’ Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” in Walking and Learning with Indigenous Peoples, eds. Pamela Cala and Elsa Stamapatalou, 119–39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

9. Sakha medical colleagues and others have confirmed their experience that fewer viruses and insect-born diseases thrive in their cold, long winters. Compare “How can our health benefit from colder temperatures?” https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320214 [accessed 10/15/2022]; and https://selecthealth.org/blog/2020/02/5-health-benefits-of-cold-weather [accessed 10/15/2022]. Among the Western scholars contributing to and playing on stereotypes about Siberia are Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

10. See Olga Murashko, “Who Are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia? The Russian Government’s Latest Concept of Defining Indigenous Identity” in Who Is Indigenous? Perspectives on Indigeneity, Identity, Dispossession, and Transition, E. Barrett Ristroph, ed. (Fairbanks: Ristroph Law, Planning and Research, 2022), pp. 34–48; Olga Murashko “Uchet kul’turnykh, ekologicheskikh i sotsialnykh posledstvi promyshlennogo razvittia v mestakh traditsionnoi khoziastvennykh deiatel’nosti korenykh malochesklennykh narodov Severa,’” V.A. Shtryrov, et al., eds., Sovremmennoe sostoianie i puty razvitiia khorennykh malochesklennykh narodov, 158–68 (Moscow: Sovet Federatsii, 2013). Compare Natalya Novikova, Okhotniki i Neftianiki (Moscow: Nauka, 2014); N. I. Novikova and D. Funk, eds., Sever i Severiane: Sovremennoe polozhenie Korennykh malochislennykh Narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka, 8–21 (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 2012).