The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires

In this epic but sprightly history, journalist and critic Pinkham (Black Square) explores the central role forests have played in the Russian cultural imagination. Noting that “long after western Europe had felled a large portion of its trees, the Russian Empire still had more forests than it could map,” and that today the country contains “one-fifth of the world’s forest cover,” she argues that while “tree defenders” have long been present in Russian society, so too have those who want to exploit the forest for its resources. She traces this “contradictory attitude” toward the forest over time, pegging it as a manifestation of the ambivalence of a “place that has long been torn between east and west, city and country... past and future.” Among the many salient through lines she identifies is the forest’s longstanding dual role as both a defensive bulwark against outsiders (a role it served from the 13th-century Mongol invasion to the 20th-century Nazi one) and a modernizing resource that helps integrate Russia with the rest of the world (timber-harvesting and new forestry techniques were essential for both Peter the Great’s empire-expanding naval fleet and the Soviets’ rapid industrialization). Throughout, Pinkham draws eloquently on Russia’s writers and political thinkers, many of whom developed worldviews that encompassed trees in unique ways; anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s disillusionment with the state, for instance, partly derived from his witnessing of vast, government-run deforestation projects. Airy and elegant yet covering much ground, it’s a fascinating wander through Russia’s woods. (Jan.)