Abstract
This dissertation is about state building and disintegrating in the Soviet Union outside Moscow. It examines the project to protect Leningrad from floods within the history of the Soviet epoch, concluding with the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the later completion of the flood control barrier. This case study reveals how a Soviet city—Leningrad— confronted the exigencies of its environment, how it mobilized its technological, architectural, and scientific institutions toward combating floods, and how that created a tenuous claim for legitimacy. Because it spans practically the entire duration of the USSR, it sheds light on how opposition to the project became an encompassing critique the CPSU in the 1980s. I trace the history of flood control beginning with the catastrophic 1924 flood that led the city leaders to make eradication of floods a major point of their vision of the future. As meteorologists, hydrologists, engineers, and architects worked to understand and control the water, party members praised their work and repeatedly made the commitment to flood control a central mission in the post-war years, the Khrushchev era, and “developed socialism” (1964-1985). Throughout these years, the environment acted as a historical agent, pushing the search for a viable solution by repeatedly inundating city streets and buildings, particularly in 1924, 1955, and 1975. But during the technical studies of the 1970s, engineers, with the full support of the party, split ways with natural scientists over the optimal form of flood control, setting the stage for public debates and a powerful environmental movement in the 1980s. This is a history that encompasses multiple actors on multiple scales, from hurricanes in the Atlantic, the local and central government, scientific specialists, engineers, journalists, and the Leningrad social movements that emerged during Gorbachev’s perestroika. As such, it is engaging with multiple methodologies and historiographical fields to capture a holistic image of Leningrad’s confrontation with its hydrological regime, defined as the Neva River, Baltic Sea, Neva Bay, Lake Ladoga, and Gulf of Finland. Flood control is thus a useful case study to examine the history of Soviet Russia outside of Moscow, and a relevant metaphor for Soviet and post-Soviet history.
The focus on Leningrad is crucial. Previous histories of Leningrad have examined its role as the birthplace of the revolution, its engagement with the past, or as the passive victim of Stalin’s purges. By focusing on Leningrad’s environment, we move away from the restrictive approach of the city government’s relationship to the center and capture a major defining characteristic that was specific to local lived experience. Leningrad’s scientific and technical establishments and leaders committed themselves so thoroughly to flood control that they tethered their legitimacy to an ability to protect the city from disaster. Thus, once the viability of the party’s chosen method came under public scrutiny from citizens and ecologists, their credibility faded as well. Far from a “project of the century,” specialists and city officials argued that flood control was integral to protecting the financial, social, and cultural future of the revolutionary capital. Leningrad could not successfully or securely fulfill economic plans without protecting its industry from foreign invasion, whether by sea or land. They incorporated flood control into architectural General Plans and tied it to visions of the urban socialist future. Most importantly, this dissertation suggests that zeroing in on environmental contingencies in Soviet cities reveals a lot about how local governments, scientific and technical institutions, and residents experienced the Soviet Union.
By the time construction began on a flood protection barrier, the party faced a backlash from an increasingly vocal public sphere in the form of scientists and neformaly (informal) citizen-led organizations. During the transition of 1987-1993, the Leningrad flood protection barrier became the major point of contention between candidates to municipal offices. Ecologically based objections to the western variant, along with public anxieties constituted a new environmental social movement that effectively stopped construction of the barrier. Its contentious status throughout the late 1980s and the abandoned components throughout the 1990s provide a lucid metaphor for the stagnation of post-Soviet transition. Yet, the flood control barrier ultimately exists as of 2011 thanks to Vladimir Putin, suggesting both continuity with the Soviet dream of a dry city and rupture with the democratic process of the perestroika.
This dissertation is thus an urban history that focuses on how Soviet city sought to construct socialism and how local authorities confronted multiple environmental disasters. It is also an environmental history in the sense that cyclones are historical actors, eliciting reaction from officials and specialists who sought to avert infrastructural and economic catastrophe, and to raise the city’s standard of living. At the same time, it details the often-contentious relationship between science and technology in Leningrad, and how despite attention to detail on both sides, they could still have important disagreements about optimal flood protection methods. Finally, this dissertation challenges the declensionist historiography of Soviet science and technology and suggests that some Soviet projects were noble responses to modern maladies and visions for improving urban life. Indeed, one of the central contradictions is that while flood control evinced the party’s commitment to protecting the city, its altruism became its own undoing. This is not simply a history of “conquering” nature or technocratic determinism, but one of overcoming a historical impediment to growth. Finally, it complicates black-and-white arguments about continuity and rupture with the past, proposing that while the region’s history of flooding is older than the USSR, no city committed itself so thoroughly to flood control—the absolute mastery of its urban environment—more than Leningrad, and this commitment was forged from the experience of environmental disaster.