Burning Swamps

Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy

Katja Bruisch

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009603133
• Year: 2025

This groundbreaking environmental history recounts the story of Russia's fossil economy from its margins. Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world's peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Usage
• Introduction
• Part I Promising Environments: Material Premises of Growth and Power
• Part II Working Environments: Extraction and the Making of Place
• Part III Unsettling Environments: Threat, Loss, and Precarity in Russia’s Peatlands
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index