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.

‘Burning Swamps offers remarkable insights on the social, economic, and environmental life of the Soviet Union by recasting the global history of fossil fuels from the standpoint of peat extraction. Bruisch brilliantly foregrounds unanticipated ecologies, labor and gender inequities, regional and seasonal dependencies, and widespread irritations.'

Andy Bruno - Indiana University Bloomington

‘By recovering the history of Russia's reliance on peat as an industrial fuel from imperial through Soviet times, Katja Bruisch's Burning Swamps helps us appreciate just how central the margins can be to the rise of the fossil economy. A wonderful study relevant to all interested in energy, environment, and the endurance of extractivist states.'

Victor Seow - author of Carbon Technocracy

‘A meticulous analysis of Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet environmental and economic development through the lens of peat extraction. … Drawing on extensive archival materials and published primary sources such as periodicals and supported by the author’s empirical observations, the study emerges as a solid and reliable academic study. The book is a timely contribution to the expanding literature on the history of natural resources within Russian and Soviet environmental, technological, and economic history … an excellent monograph that will appeal both to specialists and to a broader readership.’

Elena Kochetkova Source: Technology and Culture

‘Bruisch’s book stands as a model of thoughtful, methodologically sophisticated historical writing - one that would serve both undergraduate and graduate students especially well as an example of how history can and should be written.’

Maria Fedorova Source: H-Environment

‘In an impressive analysis marshaling a wide range of sources - poems, maps, interviews with former peat workers, and archival material - Bruisch paints a vivid picture of what it meant to live and toil in the Soviet center’s resource periphery.’

Daniela Russ Source: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History