Sixth Kontinent

Aug 16

Russia’s Burning While the Kremlin Fiddles

The massive wildfires and killer heat wave in Russia has captured the imagination of Western audiences as a harbinger of doom.  The wildfires which have choked Moscow in a suffocating cloud are paired with the horrific flood in Pakistan in a sort of “nature run amuck” narrative, a cautionary tale about global climate change.  As chunks of glaciers bigger than Manhattan float off to sea and landslides inundate China, the conventional wisdom is the planetary climate has now entered a “weirding” phase.  The problem with this narrative is not that it is wrong (Moscow broke the 100 degree F mark for the first time in 130 years of measurements and regularly reached record highs this summer); by any stretch of the imagination the Russian heat wave of 2010 is much worse than the killer heat wave centered on France in 2003:

Still, this narrative misses some important aspects of the crisis—especially its historical resonances.  In the first place, the term “natural disaster” elides over the human agency in this or any other such event.  We should take seriously Mike Davies’ observation that “natural disasters” are frequently driven by human calculation.  The Victorians tended to look at the apocalyptic famines wracking their empires as markers of backwardness by stagnant societies indifferent to human suffering, not “holocausts” delivered by Europeans in the name of profit.  Davies argues that the places most wracked by the introduction of market capitalism and imperialism—what we would now call the global “South”—evolved in ecologically vulnerable zones and relied on institutions that evolved from long experience to cope with such vulnerability.  When these “traditional” institutions ran afoul of what was taken as “progress” the human toll was staggering.  While not Ireland during the Black ’47 or India of 1877, Russia is precisely one of those civilizations built in an ecologically vulnerable zone—one in which drought and heat may portend much greater crises.  To put it simply, while the fires are spectacular, it is the withering wheat fields that should be attracting greater attention.

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Aug 10

Hello: Not Another History Blog

Hello: Not Another History Blog

Alas, another blog.  Like we need another one.  Still, I thought it might be worthwhile for me, if not the casual reader, to have the discipline of organizing my incoherent thoughts in a way that makes them accessible to others.   This is what I tell my students to do—to write their papers for the public, not me—and I might as well try it myself.  I find too much of my writing is in “academic” and not really accessible.  So, (as the Victorians would have said) dear reader, I’m really writing this little blog for myself and not to impress/inform/sway anybody.  My guess is that I’ll be mostly the guy getting impressed, informed and swayed.

As is clear from the above, I’m an academic—in particular an associate professor of Russian and Soviet history at Emory University.  My training was at the University of Chicago and my specialty is Soviet social history of the 1930s, especially in Kazakhstan.  I wrote a book about a railroad construction and am working on one on nomads under communism.  I teach not just Russian history (pretty much from the Neolithic to now) but also European general history and Central Asian history.   I’ll put up a CV and syllabi at some point once I learn how to run a blog.  I have very firm opinions on many different things and my guess is that those opinions will hardly be congenial to most readers.  So be it.  That said, I work very hard in my academic life to separate opinion from empirically-based analysis and do hope I make the distinctions in this blog.

So what will I write about?  Dunno.  Mostly, I think, I hope to get into the deeper background of news of the day or material I am working up for classes or research.  There is generally always an interesting angle on even the most prosaic subjects if you look at them a new perspective.  Unfortunately, much of the stuff that strikes me as having a deeper meaning is outside my field so I generally do not/can not do the research to investigate them.  This blog will be an attempt to force me to engage on a deeper level with the things I (not you dear reader, all apologies for my selfishness) consider interesting.  Finally, I can not but feel that this enterprise is self-indulgent and narcissistic.   Like most historians I know enough history to know I don’t know enough history (and probably never will given the immense corpus of history and its sources), so I feel silly even sharing my shallow thoughts with others.  But if the exercise, no matter how futile (like going to the gym!) burns off a little intellectual fat, it will be worth it.