Soviet History Colloquium with Klaus Gestwa "Ecological Globalization and Regional Dynamics in Late and Post-Soviet Environmental History, 1970-2000"

The cooperative French-German research project EcoGlobReg in the field of (post) Soviet contemporary environmental history will move beyond national borders in terms of both its research and its organization. In its research, the project will analyze the sometimes tumultuous processes associated with the ecologization and de-ecologization of politics and society in the last three decades of the 20th century. The individual studies, with their overlapping global and regional historical perspectives, will contribute to a more in-depth analysis of a) the reciprocity within processes of cross-border interaction, b) the formative powers of centralized state politics, and c) practical activities at the regional level. In doing so, they will provide an innovative and highly insightful perspective on the contemporary “East Side Story” of global environmental history.

Klaus Gestwa is Professor and Director of the Institute for Eastern European History and Area Studies at the University of Tübingen, where he received both his PhD and Habilitation. His early research interests in Russian industrialization eventually led him to work on environmental history. His books include Proto-Industrialisierung in Rußland. Wirtschaft, Herrschaft und Kultur in Ivanovo und Pavlovo 1741–1932 (1999), and Die „Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus“. Sowjetische Technik- und Umweltgeschichte 1948-1964(2001), as well as edited volumes on forced labor, social inequality, science and technology in the Cold War, visual history, and the Gulag.