The Max Weber Network Eastern Europe cordially invites you to the presentation of a recently published book in Russian environmental history:
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.
Dr Katja Bruisch is Ussher Assistant Professor in Environmental History at the Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin). She is an environmental historian interested in the history of energy, extractivism and land in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Before joining the History Department in 2016, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Moscow. Katja Bruisch is the author of Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy (2025) and Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war: Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (2014). Her current project examines the global history of Soviet and Russian fertilizers.
You are welcome to attend in person or on zoom after the registration.
Book launch with Katja Bruisch | 16 June 2026 | 4.00–5.30 pm OEZ | MWNO office, Vuorikatu 5, Helsinki and online