How Russia’s Taiga Shaped Power Culture And War

If you care about Russian history, Soviet culture, environmental history, or how geography shapes war, 

Russia looks different when you stop treating nature like background scenery. We sit down with writer and Cornell professor Sophie Pinkham to talk about The Oak and the Larch and the idea that the Russian forest, the taiga, and the swamp belt are not just settings in history, but drivers of it, shaping how people imagine freedom, fear, exile, and power.

We trace how Siberia became both a place of punishment and a frontier promise, and why colonization in Asian Russia created its own mix of tragedy, blending, and myth. Sophie explains what the taiga really is, why the larch is such a potent symbol, and how old growth ecosystems like Białowieża Forest preserve “natural memory” because they escaped modern deforestation. Along the way we talk partisan refuge in World War II, how wetlands and forests still affect military strategy, and why attempts at “rational” forest management from Peter the Great through the Soviet era keep colliding with the sheer scale of the landscape.

Hit subscribe, share this with a friend who loves big ideas, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Find out more at https://www.bookclues.com/

W&W Norton https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324036685

More about Sophie Pinkham https://www.sophiepinkham.com/

Transcript

Welcome To Crossword

Michele McAloon 0:00

Hi, welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. You can find out more about this podcast and myself at bookclues.com. Have a great book. It's called The Oak in the Larch by a author named Sophie Pinkham, a great raunt through the Russian forest and what all the psychology that the Russian forest has presented to the Russian Empire, the Russian mentality. It's not an apology for Russia. By no means is it a nationalistic trope, but rather it's kind of wistful in understanding how horrible the invasion of Ukraine by Russia really is a shame because they could just be so much more than an invading force. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the podcast. If you again, if you want to find out more, be sure to look me up at bookclues.com. Happy to be listening. God bless. Okay, folks, we have a book that is as sweeping as the empire that it comes from. And it is called The Oak and the Larch, a Forest History of Russia and its Empires by Sophie Pinkham. We have Sophie Pinkham here. Hello, Sophie. How are you?

Sophie Pinkham 1:16

I'm very well. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Michele McAloon 1:21

I am so glad you're here. And I really want to congratulate this book. It is as big-hearted and as wide as any Tolstoy novel. And I think because you're talking about one, Russia and also the Russian force. I cannot wait to talk to you about this. Sophie is a writer specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet socialist and post-socialist culture, history and politics. She's a professor of practice in the comparative literature department at Cornell University. Her newest book, which is what we're going to talk about. She's also written about a lot of really cool stuff. I was just reading this, Sophie. You have a mysterious Siberian asteroid. You've written about that. Russia's most elusive novelist, Refugees Trapped in Europe's Oldest Forest, Revolutionaries, Oligarchs, Graphomaniacs, Tolstoy's Wife's Revenge, and Dancing Bears. You're probably one of my more colorful guests that I've had odd. So let me ask you, how did you get into Russia and post-Soviet and Soviet culture in the first place?

Sophie Pinkham 2:31

Yeah, thanks. It was kind of complicated. So I have no Russian background at all, not even nothing Eastern European. It's just sort of French and English, pretty much, is my family's background on both sides. But I grew up in New York City. And a lot of the people that I grew up with were immigrants, had immigrated from the Soviet Union as small children. And so there was a sort of post-Soviet ambiance where I grew up. And I had several close friends who were immigrants from the Soviet Union or whose parents had emigrated. So it was sort of lodged in my mind. And then I became very interested in Russian poetry and Russian literature as a teenager. I studied a little bit of Russian in college, but then my first encounter with Russia didn't come in the flesh until after I had graduated college when I went on this obviously no longer extant exchange program where I was placed actually not in Moscow or even St. Petersburg, but in Irkutsk, which is in Siberia, the old kind of, you know, Paris of Siberia, made famous by the Decembrist exiles in the 19th century. And I worked at the Red Cross in Siberia in the middle of winter for a couple months on this exchange program. And I became really fascinated, in particular, by public health in the former Soviet Union and by Siberia and all of the myths of Siberia, which I started studying after I came back. And that led to a job working in public health, actually, international public health, focusing on the former Soviet Union, where I met all kinds of fascinating people from Russia, from Ukraine, from Georgia, from Central Asia, and became completely obsessed with this part of the world, this history. I went back, then I got a Fulbright actually, and went to Ukraine and learned Russian. You know, it was quite a while ago, it was a different time. Learned Russian in Ukraine and had the good luck to be able to live in Ukraine for three years, which was where I became fluent in Russian and also learned some Ukrainian, of course. And yeah, and then I did a PhD in Slavic studies, and here we are now.

Michele McAloon 4:41

Wow. Okay. Quite the journey. So you your book is entitled The Oak and the Larch, and I want to talk about that. But first thing I need for you to define everybody knows what an oak tree is, but what's a larch?

Sophie Pinkham 4:54

Well, a larch is a conifer, but it is a deciduous conifer. So it's relatively unusual. I mean, it's it's you know unique among conifers. We think of conifers as evergreen, so that never lose their greenery, never lose their needles, but the larch is not like that. So the larch has a very intense beauty, especially when the needles have just come out because they become this incredibly vibrant, almost electric green color. I was observing it when I was doing some field research in the forest in northern Mongolia. And it gives this sense of unbelievable sort of renewal and the forcefulness of life, which is especially striking because larches are one of the trees that's found in Siberia, in the boreal forest, also in northern Russia, right? So these quite, quite harsh environments of the taiga. And that's connected to the symbolism of the larch and the title.

Michele McAloon 5:56

So you've got an oak tree and what and you've got a larch. And what you're talking really about is really the northern forests of Europe, really, of former Soviet Union, of you talk a little bit about the Caucasus, which is a little further south about that, but you also use a term there that I think we need to define. What's the taiga?

Sophie Pinkham 6:17

The taiga is the Russian word, although it actually comes from a Turkic word. So it's one of the many words that entered Russian from the east. The taiga is the Russian name for the boreal forest. So that's the northern forest. And it would be familiar also to people who have been hiking in Canada, for example. It's not so different from the forest that you meet in the northern parts of North America either. But the taiga in the Russian imagination has loomed incredibly large, right? I mean, we don't have a huge mythology in North America about the boreal forest, right? We don't even talk about it that much. But the taiga is a huge part of Russian culture and also Russian history.

Siberia As Frontier And Colony

Michele McAloon 7:02

And you kind of make a comparison in your book between you're actually talking about the peoples of Siberia and the people and the indigenous people of North America. We really have no comparison, do we, of I think, and we're a big country. We come from a huge landmass, but Russia is a bigger landmass. It's a ginormous landmass, right? And I do think it works on our mentality as Americans. It also works on the mentality of Russians, too.

Indigenous Life And Forest Myth

Sophie Pinkham 7:33

Yes, absolutely. You know, I think that we're used to thinking about Russia and the United States as rivals or competitors. But I would say that in any enduring rivalry, there is often under the surface a certain similarity, right? To be well-matched, rivals need to have similarities. And when you look at American history and Russian history, you start to realize that there are actually a lot of analogous features. Obviously, Russia, especially European Russia. So Russia has to probably be thought of as European Russia, which is west of the Ural Mountains, and then Asian Russia, Siberia, which is east of the Ural Mountains. And of course, the Russians went to Siberia much, much later and colonized Siberia, in fact. I don't think we usually think of Siberia as a place that was colonized, right? We think of it as integral to Russia. And Siberia is such a central part of sort of our myths, our stereotypes, our received ideas about Russia, right? Siberia as this incredibly forbidding, scary, cold place of exile of the gulags, which it was. But on the other hand, Siberia, at certain points in Russian history, was also the new world. It offered a promise of freedom. It was a place where there was no serfdom, where there were no huge estates, where there was much less kind of government control. It was a place away from feudalism. It was also a place of immense natural resources, although those natural resources were extremely hard to extract oftentimes because of the very, very harsh climate, and also because of the rivers that sort of didn't run in the convenient directions. But in that sense, there are a lot of parallels between Russia and the United States with its Wild West, its frontier, the kind of sense of mixed promise, riches, anarchism, danger, a hostile landscape in many cases. And obviously, there was also the issue of the indigenous peoples who were already in these supposedly unconquered land. Russia also then and now had many, many different indigenous peoples who were living in Siberia and in the far north. And they became very, very important in Russian history, both as trading partners and then as sort of colonial subjects. And a lot of them met the same tragic and violent fates as North America's indigenous peoples. But in other ways, other parts of the kind of model of colonialism that we see in Russian history were quite different. For example, that it was almost overwhelmingly men who were sent to Siberia and they didn't go with their families, as happened in the North American model. And so that led to much more kind of intermingling, many, many mixed marriages, and a kind of blending of Russian and indigenous Siberian cultures and practices that I would argue, and you know, I say this not being at all an expert on the history of indigenous peoples and colonialism in the United States, but based on my analysis of the Russian case, I would say that there was a much more intense blending of, for example, Russian religious practices, Russian cultural practices with local ones in Siberia, which leads to this very, for me, very intriguing, very exciting current of, for example, more, we could say, animistic approaches to nature that you see even in Soviet writers in like the 1960s, 1970s from Siberia.

Michele McAloon 11:14

Yeah, there really is. There's almost a mystical element. And maybe it's because the history is so embedded. It really started with the Mongolian horde and then the fur trade. And but there is, there's a mystical, almost, you're right, animistic element in the forests of Russia. We don't have anything, I think, associated with that, at least in our popular mentality. Is the forest the friend or the foe? Were you a gorilla that could escape into the forest? Or are you going to get diamonds and oil out of the forest? And one of the best parts of your book, it's also a great cultural compendium because you bring out a lot of things and you open the book with the Conti people and the Sons of Toro. And folks, go download that video. It is something on YouTube, the Sons of Toro.

Sophie Pinkham 12:03

Yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed that. I enjoyed that so much and went down such a fun, a fun rabbit hole about Leonard Mary, who the maker of that film, who later became the president of Estonia.

Michele McAloon 12:16

Yeah, that's just it's just bizarre. It's almost a national geographic type of of a of these Conti peop Conti, am I saying that right? Of these indigenous people, Siberia, and they've got they've captured a bear, and I mean, it's just it's it's actually it's really charming. It's adorable actually to watch it. But throughout the book, you really do show how the the media and the culture has has intertwined with the force, and there's some great YouTube stuff out there that you mentioned that is really good.

Sophie Pinkham 12:50

I'm so glad you enjoyed it. It's yeah, it's it was a fun book to work on because it's such a huge topic. I mean, I wrote, you know, uh at least half again as much text as ended up in the book because there were so many kind of curious stories and interesting tales, and I wanted it to be a narrative with a strong through line, so I couldn't have too many, too many digressions, but it was a lot of fun learning about all of these different characters who touch on this story.

Michele McAloon 13:18

This is something I had never heard of. Biolavija force.

Sophie Pinkham 13:21

Am I saying that right? It's a it's a difficult Polish word. So it's the L that sounds like W, the infamous Polish L. So it's Białovieja. But Okay.

Michele McAloon 13:31

Wow. Biało Vieja, yeah. In you wrote it's in the center of it, it's uh been undisturbed for 11,000 years, or it's still an old growth force. Tell us a little bit about this and how this is played into history and into again into the imagination of the Russian mind.

Sophie Pinkham 13:48

Well, so Białoveja is a place that you can visit, actually, unlike a lot of the places in this book, which are very hard to visit for American citizens and and European citizens at this point. But Belovieja is on, let's see, the eastern border of Poland and the western border of Belarus. And it was preserved and now is this incredibly valuable, incredibly important sort of ecological monument and repository of natural memory, right? Because an ecosystem has its own memory that it that can be preserved over thousands and thousands of years, although it's extremely rare for that to happen at this point in history. So it's this amazing repository of memory, in part because it escaped the deforestation that happened over the course of the modernization of Europe, because it was a royal hunting ground. So it was this hunting preserve that was protected from being cut down because various royalty from the many different sort of states and kingdoms and empires that controlled that land over the centuries, they like to hunt there. And one of its sort of signature animal, the king of Yahoo Vesha, is the Viccent bison, which has been brought back. And if you go there, I'll send you, I'll send you a photo. I have I have a beautiful photo. If you go there, you can see all these Vicent humpbacked bison sort of wandering around in the fields. And there are a lot of them. Occasionally a cow will get confused and try to go and live with them. It has to be rest viscent. So there are a lot of viscent bison there now. And you know, they're these very imposing, big, you know, shaggy, beautiful, remarkable animals. So they were one of the sort of key prey for these very performative and theatrical royal hunts. And that was what preserved the forest. So this was originally, Biaovija was originally part of a much, much, much bigger belt of swampy forest. Biaoviza is quite swampy, and a lot of that region is swampy. So this belt of swampy forest extended all the way up in the Baltic states and then all the way across into central Russia, across northern Ukraine, across a lot, so a lot of Belarus, especially southern Belarus. And loosely speaking, some of this region was called Palesia, which is a word that just comes from the word for forest in Slavic languages. So along, along the forest, the forest belt. And this whole kind of swampy region had a really fascinating and important role in Russian history. So when swamps and forests unite, they have kind of special powers to defend against modernity, even you could say, certainly to defend against the imposition of surveillance, intense imperial power. And so, of course, uh over the last few centuries, a very large part of the world's swamps were drained, right? Because swamps were always seen as unproductive, useless, right? Maybe you would want to have a hunting enclosure in part of this forest, but you couldn't grow food there. It's hard to traverse, et cetera. You can't do farming there. So most swamps were drained. They were considered unhealthy. But this swamp was not drained all the way. A lot of the forest remained in more or less its current form, even up to the present. This forest was really important in the Second World War, and when these swampy forests were one of the most important refuges for the partisans and became centers of Soviet partisan resistance. They were also extremely important refuges for Jews who were escaping, escaping the genocide committed by the Nazis. And then later on, so in 2022, the swamps of Pelisia even helped slow down the Russian invasion of Kiev and were part of the reason that the Russians weren't able to seize Kiev kind of almost overnight as they had hoped to. It was because the Soviets had drained some of the swamps, but didn't manage to drain it all. And so the tanks that were coming the coming in through Belarus actually got bogged down.

Michele McAloon 18:13

You bring up a great point there. One thing that you really do show is kind of there there's this war against the forest, too. There's of how many resources can they get out of it in the Soviet plan to basically, wow, they believed that they could actually re-engineer their forest, didn't they? And you have a great piece and really interesting about how the Germans and the Russians looked at forest management very, very differently.

Sophie Pinkham 18:42

Which I thought was Yeah, it's sort of a funny, yeah, it's sort of a funny interaction that goes on over the centuries. So Peter the Great, who was the emperor of Russia, who famously sort of tried to westernize, tried to modernize, he spent a lot of time in Western Europe, in the Netherlands, he was in England. He was he was on this kind of study tour of Western Europe, learning about various practices. And he was very interested in sort of making Russia a rational place according to these Western European principles. And one aspect in which he wanted to rationalize Russia was by rationalizing its forests and rationalizing its forest management. And at that time, the Germans, you know, then as at other times in history, the Germans were seen as kind of the pinnacle of rationality, right, in this realm. And they were in the forefront of sort of rational scientific approaches to forestry. And so Peter the Great, and then later, later rulers of Russia, tried to import these German ideas of forestry to the Russian context. But these efforts never went very well, partly just because Russia is so much bigger, the areas of Germany that existed then. It was simply too much forest in Russia to manage rationally. There weren't enough people to supervise it, right? There were inevitably going to be these huge stretches of even unmapped terrain, right? It took them centuries just to map all of the forests of Russia. There was really no hope of adopting these German forestry management.

Literature Born From Forest Landscapes

Michele McAloon 20:19

It's so funny you brought that because I'm in Germany right now, and the there's a forest right next to where I live. You know what? And those trees behave. They are all in a line. I just hadn't noticed it for the first time. Where I've stood in the forest on the Georgia as Azeri border. I mean, and it's it's probably, if you want to go through a border, it's probably one of the most beautiful borders in the world where, you know, these just towering, towering trees. Everybody does their own thing there. It's it's not a German forest, so it's a Chechen forest. Or Caucasian forest, shall I say? I thought that was a really great point. But it's also served as a seat of literature. And you really show how Pushkin and and Lermontov and Tolstoy, they were so influenced by their and their imagination was so captured by the forest story, by of the strength and the mysticism of the forest. And you really show their stories in contrast to the story. Have you ever been to Yasnaya Polandana? Yasna Polyana? Yes, I have been. And I think it stayed in the Tolstoy family till really recently, didn't it?

Sophie Pinkham 21:33

I know. He we associate him so much as a 19th century writer that I think it's kind of hard to remember that he all I mean, he almost made it to the Russian Revolution, which is interesting.

Michele McAloon 21:42

Wow, that would have been interesting, wouldn't it?

Sophie Pinkham 21:44

Yeah, I mean, he was alive for the revolution of 1905.

Russia’s Far East Hidden Geography

Michele McAloon 21:47

Yeah, a little war and peace, right? So, oh my goodness. Wow. I mean, you've got these wonderful stories of people going up to Siberia, up to and what they had to do to survive in Siberia. Yeah, the guy who goes and joins the Cossacks of the Amur. And there's rivers I had never even heard of in your book, too, that I had to look up. What is that area that's by the ocean, the polis? Oh, yeah, Pymoria. That's it. That's it. Yeah. Not like Europe. Yeah. And you know what? I mean, I don't think we understand the the bifurcation between Europe and European Russia and Eastern Russia. It's just, it's almost like it's two different worlds, isn't it?

Sophie Pinkham 22:30

Absolutely. And even within Eastern Russia, within Siberia and the Far East, there are these dramatically different worlds, right? It's sort of funny how our minds, not everyone's minds, I'm sure there are people who listen to this podcast who are, you know, map lovers and study geography all day long. But I think in the modern world, we're pretty detached from geography, and we tend to think of culture as sort of floating outside of geography. We don't think often about Russia's extreme proximity to Japan and Korea and China. You know, we don't think about all of the plant species that are common to both Korea and Russia, or both Japan and Russia, right? I think most people think of Japan as a world away from Russia, even though I think you could stand on in the right part of Japan. I think you could stand there and look at Russia, right? And so the the Far East is an incredible, incredible region with its own very specific, very specific ecosystem, its own plants, its own animals, like the Amur Tiger, right?

Michele McAloon 23:32

Yeah, that which is like the Bingle tiger. Not it's like the Siberian tiger, right? That's the same thing. Uh-huh. The Amur tiger and the Siberian tiger the same thing. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. And I did a deep dive on that. I mean, I I geeked out on this book. I just said there were so many, so many interesting things about it that, oh, it's actually it's coming back in number. It's pretty incredible. Our world is pretty incredible. And that's what, you know, this story is, yeah.

Sophie Pinkham 23:59

And it's it's good to remember that. One of the things that I was really grateful to be able to do in publishing this book is just to sort of remind people about how much is is going on and has happened in Russia, in all of the places that at various times have fallen under Russian control. I mean, the amount of diversity and variety of people, of animals, of plants, of languages, of kind of ways of living is incredible. And I think, of course, it's so important that we understand what's happening with Putin. It's so important that we understand the history of Stalin and things like this. But if you look at sort of a shelf of books about Russian history, it's so focused on the same topics again and again, right? Sort of Putin, Stalin, Romanov's, Catherine the Great, Fun, right? For the miniseries or whatever it is. Yeah. But we, you know, we almost never hear about the Russian Far East. We hear so little about Siberia. And these places are just endlessly, endlessly fascinating.

Agafia Lykova And Taiga Survival

Michele McAloon 25:03

It really is. Even the languages of the former Soviet Union is just, I like you said, I don't think we really understand that the hugeness and the diversity of it. And as Americans, we should probably be able to understand it better than most. I still don't think we get it. So how many borders they share, how many different people they have in there. And it really truly is an empire. I mean, and Putin coming up and saying that's an empire, not really a new thing, how he's executing it, not really even a new thing, unfortunately. But yeah, it's just so interesting. Tell us, this is another one. Tell us about the character Agaifi Likova. That's amazing. Tell that story.

Sophie Pinkham 25:49

Agatha Likova, yeah. Excuse me. Yeah. So Agatha Likova is still alive and remains a sort of figure of fascination in Russia and internationally. And Agatha Likova is the youngest and only surviving member of the Likov family, who were a group of old believers. So old believers, a they come from the so-called Great Schism that happened in Russia ages and ages ago, before even Peter the Great, when there was a change in church liturgy about, and it was to us very small things, how Jesus was spelled, and then how many fingers he used when making the sign of the cross. But for various reasons, this was a cataclysmic moment in Russian Orthodoxy. And the old believers split off. And over time, they were, I mean, they were persecuted, some of them burned themselves alive, some of them were left to starve in open pits. It was a very violent episode in Russian history. And over time, some of them retreated into the wilderness. Some just retreated to the countryside and sort of lived in their self-sufficient enclaves, subject to various levels of persecution from the government, depending on who was in charge. But some retreated quite far into the wilderness. And the Likovs were a family who retreated all the way into the wilderness after the Russian Revolution. And they ended up not having any contact with outsiders for decades, virtually no contact with outsiders for decades from sort of the middle part of the 20th century. They were completely alone. They ran out of salt at a first at a certain point. The mice ate their carrot seeds, and then, you know, all of their skin was like deadly white because of beta-carotene deficiency. And they were discovered in 1978 by geologists, by Soviet geologists. They had identified some iron ore that was in this region of the Western Scion Mountains. So that's just north of Kazakhstan. It's right near the kind of X where Kazakhstan, China, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan meet. The geologists were very surprised to fly over this, they believed completely deserted, incredibly remote area and see a garden plot among the larches and other conifers. And they they were so amazed that they immediately went and investigated. And they found this family of a father and four children who had been living without speaking to another person for decades and decades in this incredibly harsh environment of the taiga of the boreal forest. And as, you know, their tools had broken or rusted away, as they ran out of salt, et cetera, they were living more and more like prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The books, my book starts with this prehistory in the taiga, and the Likovs, in a lot of ways, were reliving this prehistoric way of life in the taiga in the 1970s, which is so amazing. And they, of course, became these figures of absolute fascination in Russia, partly because they were people who had managed to almost completely sit out the major events of this the 20th century in Russia. And who seemed, you know, things weren't going super well for them. They had severe vitamin deficiencies. They were uh constantly on the brink of starvation. The mother of the family had in fact died of starvation. But they were, it seemed to romantic viewers, sort of immune to the tides of history in some way because they had made their home in the forest. They hardly even understood about World War II, the biggest trauma in Russian history. You know, obviously they weren't worried about the decline of the Soviet Union because they weren't even that clear on what the Soviet Union was or what was happening in it by 1970. Sure. So yeah. And unfortunately, three of the children in the family died quite quickly, maybe because they were exposed to unfamiliar pathogens, right? And had no resistance. But Agafia, the youngest daughter, and her father Carp survived for quite some time. And it's an interesting story because over time they became simultaneously these symbols of survival in the wilderness and also wards of the state. And no one wanted anything bad to happen to them. And, you know, they would have people sort of coming to visit them, checking on them. They eventually gave Agafia a panic button. If she got sick or something, then a helicopter would come. But then she kept pressing the panic button and they had to explain to her how much a helicopter costs in this part of the world. Another interesting detail that didn't make it into the book is that their homestead is incredibly remote, but it is also underneath the flight path of the Baikonur space station in Kazakhstan. So it's the former Soviet space station. And as a result, they also have to send a helicopter to warn Agafia when there will be sort of debris from these, I'm not sure what to call them. Whatever is flying out from the biker space station sometimes leaves kind of bits of like space, you know, space shuttle debris on her homestead that just drops out of the sky. So it's this incredibly surreal collision of this semi-prehistoric way of life and the space age. Then also she recently got her house rebuilt by Oleg Derepaska, who's one of the most, the richest and most influential Russian businessmen who's from the region. And so he had a new house built for her. And then she used her satellite phone to try to invite Putin over to visit her. So she's an amazing and super surgery.

Eco Nationalism And Modern Russia

Michele McAloon 32:01

It's all on video. Look on YouTube, folks, if you get get this book because it's such a good read. But look on YouTube on some of this stuff because it's just I mean, you just don't even know what's out there in the world. It's fascinating. So I was watching videos of her. She kind of like when they found the Japanese soldier who was still fighting the war 30 years later or something in the, you know, they'll have some list of Jamaica. This was this story is amazing. So the the these last couple years, though, that what we've seen and what your book really shows is how nationalism, uh Russian nationalism has kind of fused with the forest in in ways in kind of a chauvinistic, uh Russian national chauvinistic way.

Sophie Pinkham 32:50

Yeah, I mean, I trace that the development of that trend much farther back. I don't think it's a a new development. It becomes quite obvious already under Stalin, with Stalin's very crazy so-called great plan for the transformation of nature, which involved planting walls of trees to block the uncivilizing Central Asian winds, as they were imagined at that time. And the work of various novelists who were kind of decrying Soviet modernity and celebrating life in the village and closeness to trees, closeness to forests. But obviously, that kind of eco-nationalist rhetoric has become much more alarming and come much more to the fore of Russian politics in recent years. There's a whole current of sometimes neopagan, sometimes Russian Orthodox kind of back to the land mentality that is also, I argue, connected to what could be called the kind of Russian arc philosophy, which is this idea that Europe and the rest of the West is falling into degeneracy. We used to talk a lot about gay ropa, as they call it. The West is degenerate, except for Russia. And Russia may have come late to Christianity, come late to Enlightenment principles, et cetera. But today, Russia is sort of the last stronghold of traditional Western ideas and especially of a kind of true, true Christianity, a moral purity. And that is strongly allied with the countryside, with the forests, with old forest practices, and then with also with traditional wooden architecture, interestingly. And so you see we meet in the course of the book one guy who's actually the nephew of Andrei Takovsky, one of the greatest Soviet directors and one of the greatest film directors of all time. The nephew of Andrey Takovsky, who is now a professional hunter in an incredibly remote part of Siberia, had this sort of reality show about himself and his fellow villagers, but then went to visit the front in Ukraine and was a very full-throated supporter of Russia's appalling invasion of Ukraine. Yeah. So there are all these strange, strange allegiances, strange alliances. It really is.

Ukraine’s Forests In Drone Warfare

Michele McAloon 35:24

It's very strange. What have you heard from Ukraine? What have you heard about the forests in Ukraine? And the, I mean, obviously they're I think they've been shelter for drone attacks. What have you heard?

Sophie Pinkham 35:35

Well, the situation with the forests in Ukraine is quite interesting because from what I've heard, the forest has been of strategic importance. So there was the example of the swampy forest that I mentioned earlier blocking the tanks. Forests are hard to get through, especially if they're if they're wet, if they're dense. And then in the east part of the eastern part of Ukraine, which is of course where much of the fighting has been concentrated, there are a lot of these Soviet-era pine plantations that are not native to the region at all and are quite sort of ill-advised. They've been there for a long time, but they're not an ecologically sound model. There's not enough, not enough sort of groundwater to support them. They suck up all the water. They're these very thirsty pine trees. Then they get very dry. So they they burn down very easily and very often. And those have been used as cover by soldiers, right? Especially in an era of warfare that is dominated by drones. Any kind of cover becomes incredibly, incredibly important. And it's sort of a death sentence to spend too much time in an open field. So they've been important as cover, which means that a lot of them have burned down. But there's an interesting ecological conversation, and this has to do with the dams that have the Soviet-era dams that have been blown up in the course of warfare during the conflict, too. There have been these questions about whether rather than trying to just reflexively restore things to the way they were before, now could, especially if some kind of ceasefire is reached, now could be a valuable time to reevaluate the way that the landscape was altered over the course of sort of Russian-Soviet rule and think about ways to make the landscape more resilient. So by restoring floodplains, restoring the natural course of rivers, and then also by not replanting these pine plantations and instead trying to help the landscape to go back to something more like its former state of sort of mixed steppe forests, which would also be more resilient, wouldn't use as much water, would have more ponds, wouldn't be as dense, therefore wouldn't burn as much. So, of course, you know, most of the story is tragic and appalling, but there are also some sort of experiments in ecological imagination that are going on right now in Ukraine, which are quite interesting.

Two Big Lessons About Nature

Michele McAloon 38:05

That is interesting. And you said something earlier about geography. It's so, it is so important. And we may think it's not, but talk about the Dinepa River. It keeps keeps Russians on one side of that river, right? And so it, I mean, these are just realities of our lives. Sophie, this is a fabulous book. To my listeners, it is a really interesting read because it's this is why I like nonfiction. It just you go on this incredible adventure with Sophie through the forest of Russia, one that you probably would never go on if you're thinking about it. And it also brings to mind right now, I'm reading a French translation of Dr. Shivago, and now I see the elements of nature that old Boris Pastornik is is bringing out into his characters. This book kind of will change your outlook on just on literature. And uh what make sure you watch the YouTube videos that she recommends because some of them are really good. Agafi Lakeov, that is great. That is absolutely amazing. So I really want to thank you for your time. And uh let me ask you this one last question. What did you learn most in writing this? What do you walk away with this? Is there anything that you can sum up, or is it just a mosaic of as large as the Russian forest?

Sophie Pinkham 39:26

Well, I would say two broader lessons, apart from all you know, all of the all of the details and all the stories that I encountered, two big issues that really kind of transformed my thinking about these issues is just realizing, well, first of all, realizing how much enmity there has been in the human attitude towards nature, in the Russian attitude towards nature. But I think this is true in a lot of places, how much the human relationship to nature has been characterized by fear and almost aggression or competitiveness, thinking of nature as a victim or something that we have to protect, but that we're destroying and we feel nostalgic towards it and we want to cherish it, but we don't really understand it. That's such a recent development. I think that fear to some extent is a sign of respect, right? And going back over the history of the Russian relationship with the forest, the forest was just so much bigger than people. And even now, Russians still talk about the aggressive forest that's consuming old farmland that's been abandoned in central Russia, right? There is still this sense that the forest can beat us. And that segues into the second big thing that I thought about, and this was largely from talking to scientists in the course of researching the book, is just that the forest is so active. And the forest is is in many ways very resilient, right? I mean, trees are amazing things. They can trees can migrate, right? We never think about trees migrating, but they can migrate and they already are moving in in sort of where where they live as the climate changes, right? Not an individual tree, obviously, but trees as as collectives. Trees can move, trees can change a landscape too. Trees are not only kind of passive recipients of our aggression or our love, on the contrary. And I think that, you know, it's not to say that that climate change and everything that humans are doing to affect the landscape isn't having a very worrying effect. But I think that it's wrong to think of nature as as passive. And that's something that is really reinforced by a study of of the Russian, the Russian interaction with nature and with the forest over history.

Final Thoughts And Goodbye

Michele McAloon 41:47

That's a good lesson to remember. It's interesting because the Russian forest is actually bigger than Russia. That's that's pretty big. That's good. Well, uh, Sophie, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And this was a great interview. And I, you know, can you write another book, please? Okay.

Sophie Pinkham 42:05

Well, with it's a pleasure with readers like you to imagine writing another book. And I really I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for that's great.

Michele McAloon 42:14

Thank you.