Murky Waters of Tsarist Russia

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia was rapidly transforming from an agrarian empire into one of the world’s leading industrial powers—at immense environmental cost, one historians have rarely examined. In Murky Waters of Tsarist Russia, Andrei Vinogradov offers the first detailed study of how industrial water pollution reshaped the country and compelled its inhabitants to confront a new and unfamiliar problem. Drawing on archival documents and regional cases—from oil pollution of the Volga to conflicts around sugar factories—the author traces how pollution shaped the emergence of systematic environmental policy. This is a history of clashing interests and compromise: townspeople’s struggles for clean water, scientists’ attempts to understand an invisible threat, and state’s efforts to control a vast, industrializing empire. The book shows that many present-day environmental problems, and the tools devised to address them, have roots in this earlier moment of reckoning, and invites readers to look back to understand where to go next.