Open Access

Tatjana Petzer

• The Soviet Union is remembered as a lab for socioeconomic changes on larges scales and environmental catastrophes: the Chernobyl disaster, the Aral Sea tragedy, and ecocide. However, little is known about the groundbreaking concepts and theories of Russian and early Soviet science which laid the foundation for systemic ecological thinking, environmental consciousness for nature conservation, and corresponding initiatives of the revolutionary years after 1917. The isolation of Eastern Europe that came as a result of Stalinism and the Cold War led to Soviet science developing its own scientific approaches and terminology during the 20th century. This does not only include ideological constructions and practices such as the pseudo-scientific Lysenkoism which outlawed genetics and led to disastrous effects on agriculture, the people, and the scientific community. Soviet science has also managed to continue and unfold the new concepts and interdisciplinary dynamics of the ecological turn on the threshold of the 20th century, a development which, at that time, was only sporadically noted in the West. In the context of its thematic focus on Eastern European ecological terminology, this issue discusses a selection of these concepts.