The importance of wilderness in Russia and America
Russia is home to millions of square miles of untouched wilderness and yet does not have a well-developed national park system like the United States does. This excerpt from Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century by Alan D. Roe compares the differing relationships Americans and Russians have to wilderness spaces.
Although Russia had far more open space than the United States, it had nothing akin to a “frontier myth,” which historians have argued influenced Americans to seek out experiences in the “wilderness” on conscious and unconscious levels. Further, while the American word “wilderness” has undergone an etymological evolution from connoting a much reviled deserted wasteland to something of pristine, undefiled beauty, the Russian language, like Japanese, Chinese, and even most European languages, has no equivalent, and these expressions — dikaia priroda (wild nature) and pustynia (desert or deserted wasteland) — remain entirely distinct. Moreover, as an ideology that focuses on industrial modernization in urban settings, Marxism did emphasize the importance of leisure, but it was hostile to the sort anti- modernism celebrated by the Romantic movement, which informed individuals and groups that sought to get “back to nature.”
In spite of a comparative dearth of literary tropes celebrating the country’s remote places and an official ideology that paid no attention to them, Soviet authors started starkly juxtaposing “wild” places and civilization in the decades after World War II as the percentage of Soviet citizens living in cities dramatically increased. Nature was most typically identified with something “out there,” in areas seemingly away from people’s everyday lives in civilization. With an internal transportation system that by then allowed its citizens to go to once remote places, Soviet citizens went into the backcountry in droves. Time away from civilization allowed them to revel in their country’s spectacular beauty, set new challenges, and even give them more space to contemplate “higher truths” (istina) than during their daily lives when they were constantly hearing official ideology that few believed on television or the radio.
Time away from civilization allowed them to revel in their country’s spectacular beauty, set new challenges, and even give them more space to contemplate “higher truths” (istina) than during their daily lives when they were constantly hearing official ideology that few believed on television or the radio.
The extensive development of US national parks since the 1930s has made the most spectacular natural areas of the United States much more accessible to Americans than Russia’s spectacular landscapes are to its citizens. However, from the late 1950s until the USSR’s final years, the numbers of Russians who took part in backpacking and rafting trips for extended periods perhaps exceeded the numbers of those doing so in the United States. At first, many, like Vasilii Skalon, lamented that pride in the USSR’s wide variety of spectacular landscapes was not a strong part of Russian or Soviet identity. However, a distinctive culture of outdoor recreation that encouraged Soviet citizens to experience the USSR’s and especially Russia’s wild places developed in the decades that followed. Contrasting with pre- Revolutionary Russia, pride in living in a country with such a variety of wild, beautiful, and dramatic landscapes became a strong component of Russian and Soviet identity. But the initial impulse to leave the city for wild places seems grounded in something much deeper than particular cultural associations with and understandings of those areas outside of what we call civilization. The strong pull that Russians and Americans felt to wild places suggests that there is a common yearning among those living in industrial civilization to experience more primitive conditions and that this desire might be even stronger among people in large countries with a great variety of scenic landscapes. Perhaps the wonder that both Americans and Russians seek and experience in the face of the wild is grounded more in our common biology than in something within each of our distinctive cultures.
Because of its geographical immensity, Russia still has more places to enjoy primitive recreation, where tourists can, as Vasilii Skalon once said, “observe nature in its natural state,” than any country in the world.
However, culture has undoubtedly been critical in informing the development, effectiveness, and exportability of nature protection institutions. Often associated with democracy, the national park idea proved much more appealing to environmentalists around the world than pre-Revolutionary Russian nature protection ideas or those of the USSR’s first years ever were. The Soviet government’s responsiveness to broad demand in establishing parks demonstrates the deep international resonance of national parks. Moreover, it shows more flexibility within the Soviet system than is often acknowledged. At the same time, however, national parks likely would have become more of a priority for government officials if the idea had not been appropriated from the West and if Russia had stronger democratic institutions. On the other hand, the United States invested little in parks during their first several decades, and the US National Park Service was not established until more than forty years after the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Although the Russian Federation could make national parks a higher priority in the decades to come, few Russian environmentalists and veterans of the park movement are optimistic about such a prospect. But less developed national parks will mean that many of Russia’s parks will offer opportunities to spend long periods of time in places without visual reminders of the civilization.
Because of its geographical immensity, Russia still has more places to enjoy primitive recreation, where tourists can, as Vasilii Skalon once said, “observe nature in its natural state,” than any country in the world. While natural beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, Russians can make a strong claim that no other country has such a variety of beautiful landscapes. Although the state’s ongoing neglect of environmental protection and protected territories has demoralized Russian environmentalists and park supporters, many Russians are justifiably proud to live in a country with so many seemingly “untouched” spectacular natural landscapes and will continue to value the temporary reprieve that these places offer from civilized life.
Alan D. Roe is a lecturer in history at West Virginia University.
