Postcolonial Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Central Asian Culture

This paper examines the legacies of Soviet environmental colonialism in post-Soviet culture and activism. As a case-study, I focus on Kyrgyz writer-activist Syinat Sultanalieva’s short story ‘Element 174’, which suggests that Soviet economic exploitation has been rooted in the often-overlooked racial inequalities within the Soviet empire. To this day, Russia and the former Soviet world sit uneasily within postcolonial studies, leading to a lack of critical analysis of Soviet policies’ negative effects on racially ‘Other’ peoples and their environments, for example societies in Siberia and Central Asia that were disastrously affected by the industries including oil, cotton and nuclear power. Now, politically engaged post-Soviet creative artists in these regions are at the forefront of environmental activism, and provide insights that help us nuance our understanding of global environmental movements. Sultanalieva’s ‘Element 174’ comments on the existential crisis facing the new generations, both post-Soviet and global, as a result of imperialism. Yet, while critical of Soviet colonial policies, Sultanalieva eschews self-victimisation, moving away from emotional narratives on the struggles of postcolonial societies, and an outright rejection of Communism (thwarted as it was, according to her, by the Soviet regime). Furthermore, while Western posthumanist theories (notably by Donna Haraway) hold some force for writers like Sultanalieva, these authors also emphasise that harmonious co-existence of human and animals has been central to the societies inhabiting Central Asia since antiquity. As a result, these post-Soviet authors prompt us to rethink the implications of applying problematic and binary paradigms of aid, development and progress that might seep into how the ‘developed’ world proposes to tackle the climate crisis in the ‘developing world’, and brings to the forefront these societies’ own agency and local knowledge when it comes to environmental activism.