Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2024 number 3

The aim of this article is to explore the experience of applying environmental rhetoric in the political and economic discourse of the 1920s when Soviet Russia was forced to resort to the concession of national raw material resources to foreign entrepreneurs. In particular, foreigners were granted the right to exploit northern forests, and fish and sea animals in the Arctic Ocean. The sources for the study were diverse historical materials, both published and various business correspondence of Soviet political and economic bodies, often classified as secret. The analysis of the totality of sources allows us to reconstruct one of the early pages of domestic environmental science using the example of the protection of the country’s natural resources, which was initially a response to various challenges of the era. Thus it was found that, before the 1917 Revolution, environmental protection issues influenced political decisions and public sentiment as a form of struggle against foreign economic competitors. In the 1920s, arguments for the protection of natural resources were widely used by the authorities in the northern provinces of European Russia, seeking to preserve traditional occupations for the local population. Later, in order to close down foreign concessions that proved unable to achieve the results expected of them, issues of inefficient and even predatory use of natural resources began to be raised by the central authorities. To substantiate these claims, experts in various fields of science and practice of natural resource use were involved, and this gave an impetus to the development of environmental science. In addition, the activities of concessionaires were subjected to constructive criticism by Soviet economists, which made it possible to identify ways in which the national raw materials economy began to develop independently.