This story describes the unusual and unexpected path taken by one of Russia’s first innovations in pollution control. Born in what was then considered the periphery of the empire, it was successful enough to be adopted by the Russian government. Not only did it survive the Revolution of 1917, but it came close to becoming the basis of environmental policy in the early Soviet Union.
These were commissions for sugar factories’ wastewater treatment, which worked at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Podilsk. As early as the 1880s, water pollution from sugar beet wastes became a serious problem, threatening agriculture and the traditional way of life of the peasants. At the same time, the Russian sugar industry – the only one that could compete with “colonial” cane sugar – had geopolitical importance and brought enormous profits to industrialists.
Confronting such powerful corporations with weak sanitary regulations and a lack of relevant scientific knowledge had little chance of success. Nevertheless, the local communities were able to form commissions that first brought the conflicting parties together in a common desire to develop uniform, understandable, and feasible anti-pollution measures that did not yet exist at the national level. Their joint work has greatly improved national environmental policy.
Register and join us on April 5 at 4 pm at the Institute of Botany after A. Takhtajyan National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (Acharyan Sr. 1, Yerevan), where Andrei Vinogradov will tell the history of these commissions, the reasons for their effectiveness, and the fate of nationwide initiatives inspired by their example.
The Botanical Garden’s entrance costs 500 AMD.
Andrei Vinogradov is an environmental historian with a focus on the late imperial period of Russia’s history and industrial pollution abatement. In 2013, he completed his dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences at Shigabutdin Mardzhani Institute for History (Kazan, Russia) on the subject “Kazan Province in the 19th – early 20th Centures: Environmental Problems of Industrial Development”. He worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Kazan and as a senior researcher at the School for Environmental and Social Studies at the University of Tyumen. Currently, Andrei Vinogradov has finished his PhD on the subject “In Dire Straits: Struggle with Industrial Water Pollution and Emergence of Russia’s Environmental Policies (1871-1931)” at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In 2023, he took the position of a researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO) in Leipzig.
