Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy

by Katja Bruisch

Overview

This groundbreaking environmental history recounts the story of Russia's fossil economy from its margins. Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world's peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009603089
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Series:	Studies in Environment and History
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Katja Bruisch is Ussher Assistant Professor in Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Part I. Promising Environments: Material Premises of Growth and Power: 1. Appropriation; 2. Mobilization; Part II. Working Environments: Extraction and the Making of Place: 3. Exploitation; 4. Transformation; Part III. Unsettling Environments: Threat, Loss, and Precarity in Russia's Peatlands: 5. Irritation; 6. Revaluation; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

‘Burning Swamps offers remarkable insights on the social, economic, and environmental life of the Soviet Union by recasting the global history of fossil fuels from the standpoint of peat extraction. Bruisch brilliantly foregrounds unanticipated ecologies, labor and gender inequities, regional and seasonal dependencies, and widespread irritations.' Andy Bruno, Indiana University Bloomington

‘By recovering the history of Russia's reliance on peat as an industrial fuel from imperial through Soviet times, Katja Bruisch's Burning Swamps helps us appreciate just how central the margins can be to the rise of the fossil economy. A wonderful study relevant to all interested in energy, environment, and the endurance of extractivist states.' Victor Seow, author of Carbon Technocracy

From the Publisher