My first conscious encounter with Russia’s peatlands was one of immediacy and distance at the same time. In the summer of 2010, prolonged heat and drought caused massive wildfires across central Russia. I had been looking forward to traveling to Moscow, but excitement gave way to unease once I arrived in early August. The atmosphere was eerie when I left the airport, as the wind blew the smoke from regions further east, where the fires burnt ferociously, into the city. I had read about the situation, but words and images left me unprepared for the experience that awaited me. Some days the smoke was so thick that it was difficult to make out the houses across the street. The smoke crept through the wooden window frames of the apartment where I was staying. Breathing was difficult. Sleeping even more so. I developed a cough and bought a mask to cover my nose and mouth. But my daily discomfort was trivial compared to the displacement and death the fires brought beyond the Russian capital. The village of Mokhovoe, some 150 kilometers to Moscow’s southeast, was erased within minutes during that summer. The entire population lost their homes. Twelve locals perished. Mokhovoe was never rebuilt, while its former inhabitants were moved into hastily constructed standardized houses in a larger settlement nearby. Leaving a landscape of charred ruins and dead trees, they carried a trauma bound to stay with them.Footnote ¹

The uncanniness of that summer remained with me long after the inferno was over. At the time, experts had pointed to the underfunded fire services, which compounded the fire vulnerability facing Russia’s forests as periods of drought and heat became more severe and frequent. Wildfires in Russia continuously worsened during the 1990s and even more so after the 2005 Forest Code relegated fire prevention and suppression to poorly resourced regional administrations.Footnote ² While the intersection between climate change and the immediate political context is crucial to understanding the summer of 2010, the nature of the disaster also hints at deeper layers of the past. In the eastern and southeastern parts of the Moscow region, the fires spread through a landscape marked by extensive drainage and peat extraction in the twentieth century. Journalists within the country and abroad drew a link between the 2010 emergency and the dire state of central Russia’s exploited peatlands. Titled “Past errors to blame for Russia’s peat fires,” a New York Times article suggested a direct connection between Lenin’s electrification campaign, the drainage of peatlands, and the smoke that clouded Moscow’s skies almost a century after the 1917 Revolution.Footnote ³ None of this was immediately apparent to me. Although Russia is the country with the largest known peatland area in the world, I had not encountered peatlands in my history books. Nor had I considered that peat could be a matter for historians. Past and present spoke to each other in ways I struggled to understand.Footnote ⁴

It took me years to accept this irritation as an invitation. Once I did, I learned that peat had been used as an industrial fuel long before the Bolshevik takeover and that the Soviet peat industry had had its own bureaucracy. Reading what archives and libraries had to offer, I began to look up places from the written record on Google Maps, where a geography of extractivism and settlement, transport and drainage infrastructure, fragmentation and connectivity emerged before my eyes. In 2016, I went on my first trip to the Shatura region. The town of Shatura had occupied an important place in the Soviet electrification myth since the opening of its regional power plant in 1925, a symbol of the utopian spirit and mobilizing power of the Soviet project. Until it was converted to run primarily on natural gas in the late 1980s, Shatura’s power plant received its fuel from the surrounding peatlands. Mokhovoe, wiped from the map in 2010, had been located close to abandoned extraction sites from where peat used to be shipped to Shatura. Peat extraction had ceased decades before I visited, but its former importance resonated strongly. The power plant was still working, its chimneys towering over the leafy streets of the town. In front of Shatura’s Museum of Local Lore, the monument of a woman carrying a basket full of peat evoked a strong connection between resource extraction, labor, and the town’s identity (Figure I.2). In a workers’ settlement a few kilometers outside Shatura, three women shared memories of a time when life in the area had revolved around peat. Their stories made me realize how closely peat and people’s sense of home were tied together in this part of Russia. The places of the written record may not provide us with the answers we are looking for, but they can hold clues that are easy to miss in the two-dimensional reality created by archival documents and library holdings.Footnote ⁵

Figure I.2 Monument devoted to female peat workers in Shatura.

Source: Author’s photograph (2016).

Burning Swamps recounts the history of Russia’s modern economy from its margins. A journey through the expansive peatlands of central Russia, it tells the history of a forgotten fossil energy carrier that once fueled industries and power plants, of workers who exploited their bodies for the energy needs of an expanding economy, of place-making through extraction, and of wetlands that have become highly vulnerable to fire – a danger that only increases as the world gets warmer. Reconstructing peat’s role as a regional energy source and the socio-ecological impact of its extraction, this book claims that Russia’s energy system was historically much more diverse than top-down narratives of the fossil fuel age suggest. At the same time, it identifies the extraction and use of peat in Russia as a crucial chapter in the global history of how the energy demands of industrial societies made peatlands and the people exploiting them subject to the imperative of fuel extraction. In places like Shatura and its surroundings, this history was full of ambiguity. As wetlands and workers became part of Russia’s industrial metabolism, the regions shaped by the extraction of peat turned into sites of contestation and resistance as much as home and belonging. It is this tension – between the destruction and the creation of life, loss and possibility, inclusion and marginalization – that lies at the heart of this book.

Revisiting the historical geographies of energy and growth in Eurasia, Burning Swamps underscores the significance of lesser-known resource histories for understanding the planetary crises of the present day. Ranked among the top five greenhouse gas emitters globally, Russia is also among the world’s major climate debtors, which means that its historical emissions have exceeded what would be considered a “fair” share in the “atmospheric commons” if humans were to live within planetary boundaries.Footnote ⁶ From the late nineteenth century, Russia’s economic trajectory combined industrial expansion with an increasing reliance on fossil fuels. Imperial domination over territories rich in fossil energy resources, such as the Donets coal basin in Ukraine and the oil fields in the South Caucasus, was crucial for the empire’s industrial take-off. Siberian fossil fuels became relevant in the second half of the twentieth century. But Russia’s rising industrial metabolism and its increasingly excessive combustion of fossil energy sources also hinged upon rural regions close to political and urban metropoles, where the extraction and burning of peat turned wetlands into wastelands and released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Attending to these places means recognizing the multiple forms of resource extractivism in Russia’s empires and the diverse historical pathways leading into the climate emergency.

The forgotten role of peat in Russia’s economy is an example of how economic growth transformed the global countryside, as human labor, minerals, and land in rural hinterlands and imperial peripheries became resources for commodity production and urban development.Footnote ⁷ Histories considering the socio-ecological parameters and legacies of Eurasian growth require a lexicon that transcends established market/plan and capitalism/socialism dichotomies.Footnote ⁸ The critical scholar Andreas Malm introduced the term fossil economy to emphasize the link between capitalism, fossil fuels, and carbon emissions.Footnote ⁹ This book employs the notion of the fossil economy to place the case of peat in central Russia within a larger narrative of social and environmental change driven by the spiraling energy demand of an expanding industrial metabolism. Fossil economy also allows us to think through the continuities across the shift from late imperial capitalism to Soviet state socialism and to make sense of the parallels between Soviet state socialism and Western capitalism that permeate the history of peat despite its many particularities. Russia’s modern economy, rather than being an anomaly rooted in political institutions and ideology, fits squarely within a global history of economic expansion and associated socio-ecological changes that reverberate locally and at a planetary level. Envisioned as the main contender of capitalism in the twentieth century, the Soviet economy never overcame but reinforced a productivist economic logic that caused a metabolic rift and continues to undermine the foundations of life on earth.Footnote ¹⁰

Two premises guide this book. First, any productive activity relies on multiple forms of ecological and social reproduction, which conventional notions of the economy and economic history tend to obscure.Footnote ¹¹ Second, as the social and material process that renders nature consumable, labor is an essential category for understanding how economic growth in the past has relied on and affected both humans and the nonhuman world.Footnote ¹² Erected in 1989, the monument of the female peat worker in front of Shatura’s local museum appears like a distant echo of the early Soviet cult of labor, a celebration of workers’ contribution to the building of socialism. Despite its naivety, the monument points to a crucial aspect of the history told in this book: the hard physical labor through which workers turned the matter stored in peatlands into fuel which, once converted into heat or electricity, powered machines and illuminated factories, streets, and homes. From the imperial period until the 1950s, this labor came primarily from seasonal, often female, workers who migrated between farm work and peat extraction every year. Production and reproduction were closely entangled in workers’ lives. Even when seasonal labor declined in the late Soviet period, workers retained their dual role as employees of the peat industry and food producers, as they cultivated garden plots in their settlements. The peat industry provided cheap fuel to manufacturers and power plants and gave an income to peat workers. But it also took a toll. Extraction degraded wetlands and undermined their ability to accumulate peat as workers carried the marks of extractive labor on their bodies. In telling their history, this book examines not only how Russia’s fossil economy placed the burden of its energy demands on people and nature at its margins but also how workers and peatlands responded to, accommodated, and resisted the demands imposed on them.

This effort gains a lot from thinking about the past in more-than-human terms. The environmental historians Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor have called for histories “that are attentive to the perpetually changing set of social, symbolic, ontological, and material relations through which historical actors – human and nonhuman – are co-constituted.”Footnote ¹³ This book highlights the vitality of the material world and its role in shaping the human experience at individual and societal levels. Peatlands and peat were not simply there; they constantly changed because of how humans interacted with and acted upon them and because of influences beyond human control. The amount of sunshine or rain, soil and air temperatures, the growth of plants, the spread of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, which made thousands of workers sick, and fire – all these factors played their part in making the history that Burning Swamps seeks to unearth. “More often than not,” the historian Timothy McCain wrote, “it is not so much the case that abstract human minds interact with abstract sociocultural phenomena but rather that embodied human beings interact with material organisms and things that have lives, histories, and trajectories of their own.”Footnote ¹⁴ Contemplating entanglements across the boundaries between humans and other species and between the living and the inert does not overwrite more familiar histories of social inequality and the uneven distribution of power. Instead, it reveals how social categories such as gender, race, and class are always embedded, reproduced, and contested within relationships that extend beyond the human world.Footnote ¹⁵ The peat fuel that supplied machines and electric power plants in central Russia was a product of both the often unruly interactions between humans and peatlands, as well as the social hierarchies that enabled the peat industry’s appropriation of cheap rural labor, without which most peat would have stayed in the ground.

An Awkward Matter and Its Historical Significance

Peat is an awkward matter that unsettles the categories of current debates surrounding energy and climate change. Peat accumulates in wetlands, where waterlogged conditions delay the breakdown of trees, mosses, and other plant litter, leading to the build-up of organic matter at a rate of often no more than one millimeter per year. During this process, massive amounts of carbon are sequestered in the ground, making peatlands the most significant terrestrial carbon stores and sinks on the planet. The amount of carbon dioxide they hold per unit of land greatly exceeds that of forests.Footnote ¹⁶ Unlike geographically concentrated minerals, peat stretches across large territories close to the earth’s surface. Extraction can be simple, sometimes requiring no more than a spade. However, referring to this activity as “harvesting” is inaccurate because extraction disrupts peat formation, particularly when accompanied by intensive drainage. Since most peat layers extend just a few meters into the ground, the pace of extraction may easily surpass the material build-up and severely reduce or deplete the peat layer in a given place.Footnote ¹⁷ Reflecting peat’s peculiar state at the intersection of becoming and being, its categorization as a resource has caused considerable debate. Although peat is considered fossil from a phenomenological perspective – in the sense of being “conserved by burial,” as the peatland scientist Hans Joosten described it – and its burning results in carbon dioxide emissions higher than those of anthracite or oil, industrial lobby groups have pushed to classify it as “renewable” or “biomass” to justify further extraction.Footnote ¹⁸ The IPCC does not assign peat to either biomass or fossil fuels, though countries report carbon dioxide emissions from burning peat under the fossil fuel category because of peat’s high emission factors.Footnote ¹⁹

These conceptual dilemmas resonate in the field of energy history, where peat straddles the distinction between “traditional” and “modern” or “organic” and “inorganic” (mineral) fuels.Footnote ²⁰ Peat seems to have a natural place in pre-modern times, for which its use as a fuel is well documented.Footnote ²¹ However, it is strikingly absent from depictions of industrial economies and their energy sources. Apart from Alexander Etkind’s cultural history of natural resources, which points to peat’s often overlooked significance in global energy history, most surveys mention peat only in passing or ignore it altogether.Footnote ²² The “adolescent fossil fuel,” as the environmental historian Alfred W. Crosby once called it, has a much lower energy density than most types of coal, oil, and natural gas. As a result, the conventional narrative of the fossil fuel age as an epoch in which highly potent fuels, mostly of fossil origin, have replaced organic and inefficient energy sources struggles to account for peat. The Dutch reliance on peat fuel during the early modern period tends to be treated as a historical exception during a transitional moment before coal, the “real” fossil fuel, prevailed.Footnote ²³ In the words of the historian E. A. Wrigley, “peat can only provide an escape from the normal energy problems of an organic economy for a relatively brief period of time.”Footnote ²⁴

Narratives focused on transition risk underestimating the biophysical weight and the diverse social experiences linked to different historical energy regimes. The historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that energy history should be narrated as a series of additions if it were to understand the material impact of past energy use. Instead of moving along a linear path from wood to coal, then oil and natural gas, and later nuclear energy, industrial economies consumed many kinds of energy simultaneously within a continuous upward spiral of resource use.Footnote ²⁵ Blurring the distinction between “traditional” and “modern” energy sources, this framework allows us to acknowledge histories of peat as part of this trend instead of dismissing them as irrelevant or abnormal. Crucially, peat consumption in the Netherlands peaked between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – and not in the early modern period with which it is usually associated.Footnote ²⁶ In the nineteenth century, peat fuel was used in small industries and sometimes even railway transport in Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, and Germany, though there are likely many more examples. As a rule, this practice was regionally concentrated and declined in the first half of the twentieth century. Fuel insecurity during the World Wars could revive local interest in peat.Footnote ²⁷ In Ireland, with its strong but gradually fading tradition of private peat cutting, decentralized, often illegal extraction regained importance amidst energy price hikes following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Footnote ²⁸

However, peat remained relevant beyond the private household or individual enterprises, where energy infrastructure was designed around it. This is evident in Ireland, whose peat-fueled power stations operated until the early twenty-first century, as well as in Finland and Sweden, where several central heating power plants and district heating that had fully or partially relied on peat are now in the process of being converted to other energy sources. The oil crises of the 1970s helped to retain and even strengthen peat’s role in all three cases.Footnote ²⁹ In the Baltic republics, peat-based heat and power systems originating from the Soviet period have similarly survived into the new millennium, even though their reliance on the resource is declining.Footnote ³⁰ Between 2013 and 2017, nearly 65 percent of all peat extracted in the European Union went into energy, while the remaining served nonenergy (mostly horticultural) purposes. During this period, Finland and Ireland were the leading consumers of peat fuel.Footnote ³¹ While its role as an energy carrier is rapidly shrinking, peat has had a much longer and more diverse history than most energy historians would admit. It certainly mattered beyond domestic consumption and the early stages of industrial growth. As this book demonstrates, the case of Russia is a crucial chapter in the history of how the energy hunger of expanding industrial economies degraded the world’s peatlands.

The Nature of Russia’s Fossil Economy

Peat has been neglected in Eurasian energy histories no less than in the broader field of energy history. Reflecting Russia’s longstanding role as an energy power, the field has focused on the geopolitics of fossil fuels, a topic that has moved to the fore of public attention since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the political scientist Margarita M. Balmaceda demonstrated, participation in “Russian energy chains,” which for decades linked fuel deposits in Siberia to commercial, public, and private consumers in central and western Europe, profoundly impacted domestic and foreign politics all along the value chain – from Russia, through “midstream” countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, to the importing nations in the EU.Footnote ³² Historians have traced these ties back to the Cold War period, showing how fossil fuel exports allowed the Soviet Union – and later the Russian Federation – to earn foreign currency and project power abroad, as countries at the receiving end benefited from cheap energy that fueled decades of economic growth.Footnote ³³ Peat, which was deemed a “local fuel” (mestnoe toplivo) since imperial times and never attained the status of an international commodity, does not fit into this picture. According to the economist Lev B. Kafengauz, peat accounted for only 3.3 percent of the overall fuel consumption in the Russian Empire in 1900.Footnote ³⁴ In 1960, peat fuel represented no more than 2.9 percent of all fuel produced in the Soviet Union. Its share declined to a mere 0.4 percent in 1980, making it the least significant fuel alongside firewood and shale.Footnote ³⁵ From a statistical point of view, ignoring peat might seem justifiable.

But where do these narratives and figures leave a place like Shatura, the women I listened to, and central Russia’s degraded peatlands? Aggregated statistics may fail to identify historical importance and render regional variety invisible. Focusing on absolute instead of relative numbers, on physical matter instead of percentages, we can draw a more accurate picture of the past, one that accommodates how peat extraction shaped human and nonhuman life at the margins of Russia’s fossil economy. From the late nineteenth century, workers and machines removed ever-increasing volumes of peat from central Russia’s wetlands, turning it into fuel that supplied factories and power utilities. Several of these utilities proved crucial for maintaining electricity supply in cities and industries during the Second World War. The weather could support or undermine these efforts, causing considerable variation in annual extraction. Still, a long-term perspective reveals a clear pattern. Peat extraction exhibited strong growth from the late imperial period and accelerated during Soviet times. Within the RSFSR, annual peat fuel production rose from just 1.7 million in 1913 to some 40 million metric tons in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after which it declined (Figure I.3). Though its contribution to the aggregated fuel balance was small, the absolute amount of peat extracted for fuel in the Soviet Union exceeded that of any other country in the world. In 1980, when peat fuel consumption was already shrinking, the Soviet Union still accounted for almost 90 percent of the globally produced peat fuel.Footnote ³⁶

Figure I.3 Peat fuel production in the RSFSR (million tons) reflecting substantial annual variation and the overall rise and decline of the peat fuel industry in the twentieth century.

Based on Narodnoe Khoziaistvo RSFSR (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1956–1990). Note that peat extracted for agricultural uses, which in the late Soviet period surpassed the amount of peat used as a fuel, is not included here.

Figure I.3Long description

The chart shows annual peat fuel production rates and their fluctuation. The short shows that peat fuel production increased until the 1960s, retained high levels in the 1970s and declined notably in the 1980s.

This history had a distinct geography. Peatlands are among the most prominent features of the landscape in Northern Eurasia. Taken together, peatlands and so-called paludified (shallow-peat) land, with a peat layer of fewer than 30 centimeters, account for 20 percent of the territory within the borders of the Russian Federation. Peatlands span vast parts of the Permafrost zone in Siberia and the Far East and are also found in many areas west and northwest of the Ural mountain chain (Figure I.1, p. 1). Peat extraction for energy generation and agricultural products, which surpassed fuel peat in the late Soviet period, affected these lands unevenly. The most intense exploitation occurred in the Moscow region and adjacent parts of the Vladimir region, where industrial producers came to value peat in the second half of the nineteenth century. Peatlands in Ryazan, Tver, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, and Saint Petersburg were severely marked by the peat industry, too, while wetlands in Siberia and the Far East have been affected to a much lesser extent. During Soviet times, large-scale extraction transformed peatlands in the Belarussian SSR, parts of Ukraine, and the Baltic republics. In the Baltics, the Soviet peat industry drew on an earlier history of extraction that went back to the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷

Reconstructing how peat was extracted and used as a fuel in manufacturing and the power industry, Burning Swamps provides a corrective to dominant narratives in Eurasian energy history. This field may not suffer from what the historian Christopher F. Jones called “petromyopia,” an overemphasis on all things relating to oil at the expense of other energy sources.Footnote ³⁸ Still, the tendency to think about energy primarily through the prism of international relations has created blind spots. Except for hydro- and nuclear power, the intertwined histories of energy, labor, and nature are poorly understood.Footnote ³⁹ Several case studies with a regional focus, along with historical research on renewables, have recently opened up exciting avenues, highlighting shifting conceptualizations and uses of energy resources in Eurasia’s recent past.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is this conversation that this book seeks to advance. Tracing how the extraction and use of peat, a not very potent and supposedly unimportant fuel, transformed rural livelihoods and degraded central Russia’s wetlands, I underscore the historical relevance of the statistical margins and the value of regional perspectives in modern energy history.

A History across Scales

The history of peat in Russia’s fossil economy operates across multiple temporal and geographical scales. Considering sources from various parts of European Russia, this book primarily focuses on the Meshchera Lowland, a landscape marked by extensive wetlands, forests, and lakes between the administrative regions of Moscow, Vladimir, and Ryazan. Peat extraction in Meshchera took off in the imperial period and gained pace under Soviet power, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. From the early 1930s, it fell under the responsibility of the Shatura Peat Trust (Shaturtorf), an umbrella organization for over 10 peat companies which secured fuel for the Shatura Power Plant. Following the decline of the peat industry in the late Soviet period, parts of the region’s remaining plant and animal life were protected. In 1994, the floodplains of the rivers Oka and Pra, a small Oka tributary, in southern Meshchera were designated Wetlands of International Importance under the 1971 Ramsar Convention. From the early 2000s, and particularly following the 2010 fires, several former peat extraction sites have been rewetted.Footnote ⁴¹

Examining this area’s intertwined social and environmental history through a century of extraction, Burning Swamps opens up new perspectives on the geography of marginality in Russia’s empires. The stories told here highlight the historical significance of spaces between imperial metropoles and peripheries, spaces that evade familiar administrative and analytical distinctions between the city and the countryside.Footnote ⁴² At the same time, this book expands conversations about place and region in Russia’s past into the material world.Footnote ⁴³ Peat extraction and associated developments in transport and settlement left lasting imprints on physical environments in areas like Meshchera, as myths, stories, and people’s lived experiences endowed the changing landscapes with cultural significance. This book understands these transformations as inherently interrelated. It illustrates that the making of places and regions in modern Russia was as much a cultural as a socioecological process which reconfigured physical and human geographies in ways that effectively blurred the distinction between them.Footnote ⁴⁴

Rooted in local particularities, the forgotten history of peat offers insights into Russia’s place in broader histories of growth. Chronology provides important clues. The economic history of Russia’s empires is typically organized around critical political turning points or economic reforms, such as the Stolypin reforms, the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, or Stalin’s economic revolution. However, from the perspective of peatlands and peat workers, there was a lot of continuity across these moments. Significant changes occurred in the late 1950s when new machinery reduced the industry’s labor dependence, expanded its spatial reach, and amplified the environmental damage it inflicted. The large-scale exploitation of peatlands for industries and power plants might seem like an outlier within the master narrative of the fossil fuel age. Interpreting it as evidence of Eurasia’s alleged economic sonderweg would be misleading though. Instead, we should understand it as one of the many manifestations of the Great Acceleration, marked by unprecedented resource use, growth, and ecological disruption following the Second World War.Footnote ⁴⁵ The history of peat extraction also muddies clear-cut distinctions between both the imperial and the Soviet economy on the one hand and the Soviet economy and market economies on the other. Indeed, as the historian Bathsheba Demuth argued, market and plan were not so different in their disregard for nonhuman time and the rhythms of natural reproduction.Footnote ⁴⁶ When viewed through frameworks that move beyond the chronologies of political history and emphasize the socioecological premises of economic growth, the history of peat confirms global trends rather than diverging from them.

The margins of Russia’s fossil economy also invite us to view the past from a planetary perspective in ways that – other than universalizing notions of humanity as a singular force of ecological decline – emphasize accountability alongside the contingent histories and local manifestations of the current environmental predicament.Footnote ⁴⁷ Formed as a result of the Holocene glacial retreat, peatlands in the northern Hemisphere have sequestered carbon over thousands of years – time spans that most historians would consider outside of their domain. However, drainage and extraction turned many of them from carbon sinks into carbon emitters, illustrating that, as the anthropologist Richard D. G. Irvine wrote, “life is lived in relation to the geology, not just on top of it, and that through these interactions deep time protrudes into everyday life.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Scientists consider peatland degradation a significant factor in human-caused greenhouse gas emissions since the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁹ Peat fires, more likely to happen when the water table is low, exacerbate the positive feedback loop between degraded peatlands and climate change.Footnote ⁵⁰ These issues are particularly evident when deeply drained peatlands are abandoned after extraction, a common occurrence in many parts of Russia as the state retreated from the countryside following the Soviet collapse.Footnote ⁵¹ Far from being a minor episode, the forgotten history of peat in Russia’s fossil economy is both part of the global trajectory of wetland destruction in the modern era and a process deeply reflective of local circumstances. One of the countless chapters in the history of our planetary emergency, the case of peat straddles the boundaries between here and there, now and then, calling us to think about human history beyond the human.

Nature’s Wealth and the Intricacies of Language

Ecologists have developed a nuanced vocabulary for the various ecosystems that evade the land/water binary, though terminologies vary significantly across countries and languages, as do the natural formations they want to categorize. “Wetlands,” a term that gained legal and political significance following the (Ramsar) Convention on the Protection of Wetlands of International Importance in 1971, is widely accepted as an umbrella category for environments that “occur wherever water meets land,” as the leading NGO Wetlands International puts it.Footnote ⁵² The term encompasses diverse ecosystems such as salt marshes or river deltas and environments like rice paddies or salt pans that have been created by humans.Footnote ⁵³ Peatlands, a subcategory of wetlands defined by a layer of naturally accumulated peat, are the most widespread type of wetlands in the world. There are different national conventions to differentiate various types of peatlands. Scientific publications in English use “mire” to refer to a peatland where peat formation is ongoing. Another important distinction in this literature is that between “fens,” which are typically located in depressions and receive most of their water from the ground, and “bogs,” whose water comes from precipitation.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Russian language has its own tradition for naming and classifying waterlogged lands. Most historical sources that inform this book used the word boloto (plural bolota), which frequently, but not always, carried negative connotations reflecting people’s annoyance with or fear of environments they found difficult to understand or navigate. Boloto can mean many things in English, including swamp, marsh, peatland, wetland, fen, bog, mire, or quagmire. Sometimes, historical actors used more specific terms, such as torfianoe boloto (“peaty swamp”), torfianik (“peatland”), or torfianoe mestorozhdenie (“peat deposit”).Footnote ⁵⁵ However, the simpler term bolota dominated and remained influential in the Russian discourse on peat and peatlands throughout the history covered in the following chapters. In the wake of the Ramsar Convention, the term “wetlands” was translated into Russian as vodno-bolotnye ugod’ia (literally “watery-marshy grounds”). In contrast to the English term, which has been widely adopted by scientists, politicians, and activists, its rather cumbersome Russian equivalent has not gained much public or political traction.

These linguistic intricacies resonate throughout this book. Since the narrative primarily focuses on peat and peat extraction, “peatland” and “wetland” are used interchangeably as descriptive terms. When translating or discussing primary sources, I use “swamp” to maintain a source’s pejorative association with a place or landscape referred to as boloto; “peatland” and “mire” when the source’s use of boloto aligns with the respective scientific definitions; or “wetland” when it is unclear whether the historical actors considered peat a defining trait of the marshy land they described.

* * *

Peat is not naturally a resource. Part I Promising Environments explores the mental and material process through which peat came to be seen and used as an energy carrier. Chapter 1 traces how, beginning in the eighteenth century, imperial elites projected visions of improvement and abundance onto Russia’s wetlands, reimagining them as fuel deposits. It argues that peat extraction was primarily an elite project that imposed the developmentalist visions of the imperial state and industrial producers on peatlands and the people living with them. While most peasants continued valuing peatlands for what they offered above ground, elite groups conceptualized peat as a distinct substance rather than a component of complex wetland environments. Chapter 2 examines how peat became embedded in Russia’s industrial metabolism. In central Russia, peat gained importance as an industrial fuel from the late nineteenth century, inspiring technical elites to consider it a source of electric power. This idea was subsequently incorporated into the famous GOĖLRO-plan for the Electrification of Russia, which firmly anchored peat in the Soviet power industry. The early Soviet energy system, with its emphasis on regionally available energy sources, was not solely a product of Bolshevik power. Instead, it must be situated within longer trajectories of regionalized fuel use and the experience of a war-related fuel crisis that predated the 1917 Revolution.

Extraction sites and their surroundings are the focus of Part II Working Environments, which explores how the peat industry shaped workers’ lived experiences and refashioned central Russia’s wetland environments. Chapter 3 discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. But extraction also helped to make central Russia’s peatlands more habitable. Looking at the physical transformations of the land, housing, and the changing cultural significance of peat extraction sites and their vicinities, Chapter 4 foregrounds the often overlooked role of workers’ settlements as spaces of reproduction in the history of Russia’s economy. Peat, this chapter contends, was not just a fuel but also a source for place-based feelings of belonging that allowed workers to embrace the margins of Russia’s fossil economy as their home.

Part III Unsettling Environments discusses hazards, loss, and precarity as central aspects in the history of peat extraction. Focusing on malaria outbreaks and fire events, Chapter 5 highlights the agency of peatlands in the history of Russia’s fossil economy. The chapter identifies peat extraction sites as spaces of environmental injustice and points to a crucial irony running through the history of human–peatland relationships in imperial and Soviet Russia: Peatlands had long been imagined as dangerous and useless, but they only turned into unsettling landscapes once they became part of Russia’s industrial metabolism. Chapter 6 demonstrates that the decline of the peat industry in the late Soviet period, driven by the country’s shift to Siberian fossil fuels and a rising scientific and cultural appreciation for intact wetlands, brought new challenges. The Soviet collapse made the end of extraction an unsettling experience. Many regions were cut off from the resources and services that had sustained them in previous decades, leading to social marginalization and massive fire events. This final chapter demonstrates that, instead of recovery, the end of extraction brought new forms of precarity. Peat’s role as a fuel may have shrunk dramatically in the past decades, but the legacies of its extraction and use are bound to remain.