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.

To understand this, it is important to understand that Russia is, in many ways, on the extreme edge of the European agricultural complex.  Eastern European agriculture is based on familiar European cereal cultivation, especially rye, wheat and oats.  Indeed, Russian peasants farmer and Russian Mennonite colonists have been something of agrarian geniuses in the field of grain—giving the world winter wheat (as David Moon has documented) and finding various ways to make grain a fodder base for livestock.  They had little choice.  Until the introduction of potatoes in the nineteenth century (a fraught process to put it mildly), very few crops would grow well in the severely continental climate of Russia.  It is not an exaggeration to say that Russians in particular relied on cereal production the way Mesoamericans relied on corn and East Asian civilizations relied on rice.   This reliance restricted Russian agriculture to a precarious wedge shaped by the influence of aridity and latitude (in this map the green zone, pink zone and red zone were the tradition areas of Slavic grain production with the bread basket being the long red belt in the south). 

Simply put, Eastern Europe and Siberia are wetter in the North and progressively drier as one goes south and southeast.  On the other hand, the growing season grows progressively shorter as one grows north.  Grain cultivation is pretty much restricted to the ten-inch line of precipitation and robust growing season (though barley does grow further north)—thus the Eurasian topography fit for Russian agriculture is a tapering wedge that extends more and more precariously across the continent.  It is hardly accidental that the area of Slavic-speaking population is pretty much coterminous with this zone as Russia conquered Eurasia with the peasant plow as much as the Tsar’s troops.

 Though this is a tapering and vulnerable triangle, it is immensely large and thus should provide a sound food base for any civilization.  Unfortunately there is another component in the alchemy of wheat farming—soil.  The heartland of Russian civilization is now given over much more to dairying and vegetable crops than grain—a reflection of its stony and thin soils.  The soil around Moscow and stretching northward towards Petersburg is, in fact, so infertile that Medieval Russian peasants practiced slash-and-burn agriculture—the highly extensive practice that meant Muscovy would never attain the population densities of France and Germany.  It is often forgotten that as late as the reign of Peter the Great the vast Russian Empire had only 14 million inhabitants—roughly comparable to Poland’s population and much smaller than France’s 23 million. 

Russia’s demographic as well as geographical growth lay southward.  Environmental scientists like to point out the importance of ecoclines—those areas where two ecological zones overlap and the various species interact and new forms of diversity arise.  This is certainly true in the Ukraine, south Russia and southern Siberia where the overlap of the forest zone with the great Eurasian steppe creates an excellent environment—rich black soils, wooded wind-brakes and forest fuel supplies and relatively well-watered fields—for wheat farming.  In fact, much of the history of the Eastern European plain has been structured by the contest between forest-belt farmers and steppe-based pastoralists for control of this rich area.  The Tsars of Russia began to win the war for this “forest-steppe” zone in the seventeenth century while the Russian Empire of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century decisively colonized this zone.  Much of the subsequent history of Russian agriculture, up to Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands program of the 1950s, has been the extension of grain-farming right up to its ten-inch precipitation line.   This expansion led to a population explosion that made the Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union, the most populous in Europe and gave it the manpower base to defeat both Napoleon and Hitler. It also, however, made the Russian state vulnerable to food insecurity caused by shifting weather patterns in this zone.   In other words, this expansion of wheat-growing agriculture into the ecologically vulnerable south is one of the crucial aspects of Russian history.

That is why the smoke of this summer’s fires enveloping Moscow obscures more than the view of the Kremlin—it obscures the view from the Kremlin.  While the fires have received the most emphasis, the country’s leadership is much more concerned about the fires’ inevitable dance partner—crop failures.  The Russian government has already announced a state of emergency and released state grain reserves as the searing winds blowing off the great Eurasian steppe have devastated Russia’s projected wheat-harvest.   The government, unlike Stalin’s government, has already put a moratorium on wheat exports—probably a prudent measure given the world-wide grain crisis of 2008.   

Historically, Russia’s leaders are right to be concerned.  If grain is the staff of Russian civilization, the Russian state often stumbles when this staff is weak. Food insecurity has played a major role in fomenting Russia’s various “times of trouble” and the ghost of Boris Godunov, a cultural archetype of ruler as Macbeth thanks to Pushkin’s play and Mussorgsky’s opera must haunt Vladimir Putin and Medvedev.  The story as penned by Pushkin (who got it from the Romanov apologist Karamzin) made it clear that when heaven wants to unleash chaos on a wicked ruler, it blights the grain.  While the alleged murder of the young Tsarevich Dmitri bulks larger in these works, the starving peasants and social rebels moving in the background of the plot are far more important in the real history.  Russia faced the most horrific famine of its history in 1601-1603 as the rich grain lands it had wrested from nomadic Tatars were first stunted by a summer of unseasonably cold rains and early frosts, then hurt by a ferocious winter in 1601/02; one-third of the Russian population starved (these torrential rains remind one more of Pakistan’s present crisis than Moscow’s—the most recent explanations blame the eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru  rather than changing weather patterns).  First the serfs appealed to their lords for alms and the government opened its granaries.  But soon, lords were releasing their serfs and slaves to fend for themselves while the militarized nobility of Muscovy murmured about usurpation.  Since many of these slaves where slave warriors, the mobs of starving people soon morphed into great revolts—the Khlopko and the Bulavin Revolts—that pushed the famine crisis  into social war.  This social war morphed into a civil war with the appearance of a suddenly “resurrected” Tsareavich Dmitri and Russia’s devastating “Time of Troubles” was upon it.  The callous corruption of the boyars in undermining the court’s charity by throwing their own dependents on the street can be seen, to a lesser extent, in Moscow’s fire crisis with charges that villages have burned firefighters were concentrated to protect the villas dachas of the elite.  The Russian state and much of its society collapsed under the hammer blows of social revolution, civil war and foreign invasion which only abated when the weak Romanov dynasty slowly and precariously rebuilt the society.  The army that conquered Moscow for the Romanovs was fed on the again fertile breadbasket of the recently conquered lower Volga when the drought and rains abated.  The regime’s great enemy, Poland, was defeated by this same grain as the mighty Swedish army was fed from it in both Gustavus Vasa’s wars on Catholic Poland and the Thirty Year’s War.

So, the rise of the Romanov Empire is linked to the security of its food supply—its decline was marked by the same dynamic.  Despite all the attempts to nurture revolution by that Empire’s educated elites, the regime only began to falter with the great  famine of 1891 (which would seem small potatoes indeed in the wake of the next century’s famines).  As land-hungry peasants were restricted to their overstressed villages by internal passport regulations and state obligations, social revolt again percolated up from the rural hinterland.  As one peasant rioter told police during the wave of peasant unrest that would rock the monarchy leading up to the 1905 Revolution, “It is not the little books [meaning revolutionary propaganda] which are terrible … It is that there is nothing to eat for man and beast.”  That the Romanov regime fell incapable of solving its intractable food shortages during the war—also triggered by climatic conditions—is hardly surprising.

The Empire’s successors, the Bolsheviks would be dogged by harvest problems, despite their commitment to violent social engineering to resolve the problem.  Lenin’s goals of building communism were undermined by famine of 1921, which forced him to beg for aid from the hated capitalists in the form of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Association and make peace with the market through the introduction of the New Economic Policy.  The 1921 famine, while mainly caused by the government’s ruthless grain procurements, nonetheless was triggered by poor rainfall in the southeastern grain zone and the regime’s refusal to accept that weather, not peasant hoarding, had led to the decline in the harvest.  While Stalin, faced with drought and harvest failure in 1932-1933 would blame the “kulaks and idlers” and far more brutally “stay the course”—his dreams of extracting enough grain from the peasantry to pay for industrialization (primitive socialist accumulation) collapsed (as is quite evident from the amount of grain exported).  Soviet industrialization would be built on the backs of the putative ruling class, the workers, and an impoverished and broken countryside would remain the Achilles’ Heel of the Soviet state for the rest of its existence (the destruction of peasants resisting collectivization and “nationalist deviationists” in places like the Ukraine being the only “benefit” of the famine from the regime’s point of view).  It is worthwhile remembering that the major acts of internal repression in his subsequent rule (the purges and the post-war expansion of the gulag )were both preceded by harvest difficulties in 1936[i] and the 1946 famine.  The great harvest crisis of the early 1960s caused mass social unrest and was resolved by a humiliating necessity of importing western grain and was one of the major causes of Khrushchev’s fall.  While Brezhnev was shrewd enough to avoid this fate during the next decade’s harvest difficulties, his young agricultural expert—Mikkhail Gorbachev, became convinced of the system’s need for reform while administering the harvest portfolio.  One of Putin’s great successes has been the revival of post-Soviet agriculture and the greater food security for a Russian population deeply traumatized by the hyper-inflation and market deformations of the American-advised “shock therapy.”  The failure of the 2010 wheat harvest is, then, no small potatoes.  It will certainly eat up a large portion of the country’s hard currency reserves and it is not obvious that the receipts from the energy sector will make up these losses.  Indeed, as Putin’s stunt in “co-piloting” a fire-dousing jet makes clear, he is acutely aware of the optics of an out of touch leadership on a fearful society at such a time.  (And to be sure, with the number of officials refusing to cut short their vacations—including the Minister of Forestry!—this perception is more than one of just “optics”).

As in 1601, so in 2010, food security worries bedevil the denizens of the Kremlin.  In fact, it seems the peasants are already growing restless.  In an exchange with a “blogger” forced upon him by Radio Ekho in Moscow, Putin consented to an unscripted dialogue with a Russian citizen—not an event he accepts with grace (just ask Mikhail Khodarkovsky’s whose critique of Russian economic policy in an “unscripted” television program led to his extended stay in prison).  It is interesting that a heavily sarcastic Putin (can one imagine a Western ruler so trained by legions of PR propagandists to be so unguarded?), feigning chagrin at the bloggers’ crudity, essentially granted the blogger’s points.  those commentators who describe this incident as a victory for new technology (the allegedly “democratic” medium of the internet) are missing Putin’s own mindset, which is decidedly historical.  He dismisses the blogger’s critique of his regime’s handling of the crisis in comparison to Communism by saying that since Russia hasn’t faced such wildfires in 140 years, the Communist regime never faced such a challenge.  But, of course, the Romanovs did.   Their failure to solve the Empire’s food insecurity in the latter years of the dynasty was a contributing factor in its collapse.  As it did with the Soviet Empire (well I remember the apocalyptic fear of mass famine in the Moscow of 1989-1999).  I doubt the historical precedent is lost on Putin.

Any regime’s response to climatic stresses is a crucial component on its longevity.  Which is why Moscow’s smoke has resonance far beyond Russia.  One of the more flippant things heard from the ignoramuses and industry hacks who deny the seriousness of global climate change is that global warming will be a boon for northern countries like Russia and Canada as their growing seasons will be extended and shipping would be open in the Arctic ocean (to be fair, a number of these ignoramuses are themselves influential Russians).  As if the rich soils of the south that built Russia into a world power would suddenly transport themselves to the thin, glacier-scraped terrain north of Moscow.  Or that this extended growing season would not come with increase aridity, instability in precipitation patterns (including disastrous rains) and the coming of early frosts or very hard winters.  In other words, for Russia, to make permanent the climate the produced the Time of Troubles.  Of course, the actual scientists of the Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change in 2007 predicted precisely the present unfolding scenario. 

Russia burns—how long, and at what cost, will the Kremlin and the world fiddle?

[i] Roberta T. Manning, “The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges,” Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, pp. 116-141.