In August 1971, at an international symposium on physical and dynamic climatology in Leningrad, Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko delivered a provocative closing remark: ‘Global warming is unavoidable.’Footnote 1 Rather than offering the customary thanks to his international colleagues, he presented a theory that would only gain wide recognition decades later. The audience – comprising climate specialists from over twenty countries – responded with confusion and resistance. Budyko recalled in 1990, ‘it was a very dramatic event … 100% of the specialists objected’.Footnote 2 Some American scientists contradicted him outright, arguing that human activity was too insignificant to alter the Earth’s vast energy systems. Soviet colleagues, too, seemed unprepared for the implications of his claim.Footnote 3 Budyko’s intervention, far from being a footnote, exemplifies the ambivalent place of climate science in the Soviet Union: at once pioneering and constrained. While the development of climate research in Western Europe and the United States – from Svante Arrhenius’s greenhouse theory to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has been extensively documented, the Soviet path remains comparatively underexplored, particularly with respect to the institutional, ideological and technopolitical frameworks that shaped scientific inquiry behind the Iron Curtain. This article offers a political and institutional history of Soviet climate science in the late Cold War. It argues that scientific knowledge about anthropogenic climate change did not emerge in an epistemic vacuum but was shaped by the logic of the Soviet State – namely its technocratic planning structures, ideological orthodoxy and political positioning.
For several decades, historians of science and of science and technology studies have demonstrated that the earth sciences are closely entangled with political and institutional structures of the Cold War. Historians such as Ronald Doel, Naomi Oreskes, Jacob Hamblin and others have shown that, in the United States and Western Europe, earth-system modelling, climate forecasting and environmental monitoring were closely tied to military, strategic and governance logics. Oreskes, for example, has argued that climate modelling in the US was profoundly shaped by Cold War institutional structures, including the military’s interest in environmental predictability and control.Footnote 4 Similarly, Doel and colleagues have illuminated how earth sciences became instruments of US statecraft and forecasting under postwar conditions.Footnote 5
This article expands that analytical lens to the Soviet context. It explores how a state-driven epistemic regime – characterized by central planning, ideological certainty and pragmatic interest in warming – shaped both the content and the institutional trajectory of climate science. While Soviet climatologists like Budyko played a prominent role in international debates, existing accounts, such as Oldfield’s intellectual biography and Anisimov’s insider reflections, tend to emphasize technical contributions and personal trajectories without critically examining the ideological framing or institutional pressures that guided research agendas.Footnote 6 My approach complements these accounts by emphasizing how climate science in the USSR operated within a matrix of political imperatives: the demand for clear and actionable knowledge, and the need to uphold ideological coherence in the face of mounting evidence of anthropogenic environmental change. Although comparable debates about anthropogenic climate change were unfolding in the United States and Western Europe, the aim of this article is not to determine who first proposed particular climate hypotheses. Rather, it explores how the Soviet scientific and political context shaped the production, interpretation and institutional fate of climate knowledge.
In this article, I use the term ‘epistemic governance’ to refer not simply to state control over science, but to the political shaping of what counts as legitimate and useful knowledge in the first place. It encompasses the ways political systems influence the kinds of models scientists produce, the forms of evidence they privilege, and the degree of uncertainty that can be publicly articulated. I argue that Soviet climate science developed within a distinctive epistemic regime rooted in systemic thinking, technocratic planning and an ideological commitment to the governability of nature. Soviet climatology tended to favour systemic modelling, relatively univocal conclusions and often optimistic interpretations of environmental change that aligned with the political rationality of socialist planning.
Beyond the Cold War historiography, a growing body of scholarship has become concerned with how scientific knowledge itself has become a mode of governance. Works by Edwards, Gunderson, Heymann and Dalmedico, and Lam and Rousselot have examined how modelling, observational infrastructures, data systems and earth-system concepts shaped political decision making and therefore legitimized state action.Footnote 7 My article brings the Soviet case into this conversation by demonstrating how Soviet climate science operated within a distinctive regime of epistemic governance shaped by specific political and intellectual priorities. This reframing has implications for how we understand not only Soviet science but also the global history of climate knowledge. Post-Soviet Russia is often portrayed as a climate-denialist state, its reluctance attributed to fossil-fuel dependency and authoritarian governance.Footnote 8 Yet the longer arc of Soviet climate science complicates this picture. Already in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists like Budyko publicly discussed anthropogenic climate change, circulated models forecasting warming trends and engaged in international scientific exchanges. The key question, then, is not whether Soviet scientists understood climate change, but how their knowledge was shaped, mediated and governed – and why it failed to influence long-term policy.
This article proceeds in three parts. The first section explores how the Soviet state enabled and constrained climate research from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, focusing on key scientists and institutional environments. The second examines the governmental and public reception of climate knowledge. The final section analyses the integration of Soviet climate science into the emerging global climate regime of the 1980s and early 1990s, asking how Soviet epistemic frameworks interacted with international institutions, and what was lost or transformed in the process. The analysis draws on archival research conducted in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, on interviews with former Soviet scientists, and on a range of Soviet publications and newspapers.
Researching global warming under conditions of the Cold War
The development of Soviet climate science during the Cold War cannot be understood without situating it within a longer intellectual tradition of Russian environmental thought. Soviet scientists played a pioneering role in developing energy balance models, polar-feedback mechanisms and palaeoclimatic reconstructions – conceptual tools that would become foundational for understanding anthropogenic climate change. As the anecdote at the outset of this article illustrates, Soviet climatologists were among the early scientific voices drawing attention to the possibility of anthropogenic climate change. Their work laid the ground for the theory of nuclear winter and informed both domestic and international assessments of long-term climatic shifts. These achievements were not produced in isolation. Rather, they were embedded in a political system that both enabled and constrained scientific inquiry.
One key to this story lies in the long-standing Soviet interest in integrating nature and society through technoscientific planning. The concept of the noosphere, developed by Vladimir Vernadsky and popularized in the interwar and postwar decades, expressed a vision in which human intellectual activity and technological intervention could transform the biosphere.Footnote 9 Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere framed the Earth as a planetary system in which living matter, geochemical cycles and energy flows interacted to shape environmental conditions. In its Soviet interpretation, the noosphere signalled an ideological belief in the governability of the natural world – a belief that would inform everything from geological prospecting to meteorological modelling.
This orientation also drew on a longer intellectual tradition within Russian environmental science that emphasized the study of large-scale natural systems. From the late nineteenth century onward, scientists such as Alexander Voeikov and Vasilii Dokuchaev conceptualized climate, soils and living matter as interconnected components of a planetary system governed by flows of energy and matter.Footnote 10 Within this intellectual framework, climate was more than a statistical description of atmospheric patterns – it was a fundamental regulator of the biosphere’s functioning. The later Soviet work on the global heat balance of the Earth and efforts to model planetary climate dynamics built directly on this tradition, translating earlier holistic concepts of the biosphere into quantitative thermodynamic models of climate.Footnote 11
The early institutionalization of Soviet climate research is best understood through the career of Mikhail Budyko (1920–2001), whose trajectory from theoretical physicist to director of the Main Geophysical Observatory (GGO) reveals much about the scientific and political stakes of climatology in the USSR.Footnote 12 Born in Gomel, Belarus, Budyko began his studies in theoretical physics at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute. When the war began, the institute was evacuated to Sverdlovsk (today Yekaterinburg), where Budyko encountered scientists from the newly established military meteorology department of the GGO. This meeting marked the beginning of his lifelong affiliation with the institution. During the war, he collected data for a dissertation on the meteorology of the boundary layer, which he defended in 1944 in Leningrad shortly after the lifting of the blockade. His dissertation introduced a mathematical model for air turbulence using a ‘stability index’ – a tool still used in climate modelling today, called the ‘Budyko index’. Budyko demonstrated a distinctive approach: combining mathematical abstraction with practical modelling, aiming not only to describe climate but to quantify and predict it. Drawing on the expanding availability of observational data across the Soviet Union and beyond, Budyko developed a methodology for calculating the balance of incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial heat.
Although direct international collaboration remained limited in the 1950s, Soviet research institutes maintained systematic access to foreign scientific literature. Budyko’s early publications on atmospheric processes and energy balance cited American and German climatologists, indicating that Western research circulated within Soviet scientific libraries and bibliographic networks. This circulation was facilitated by large translation and information programmes established by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1952 the Academy created the Institute for Scientific Information (later the All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, VINITI), which systematically translated and summarized thousands of foreign scientific journals for Soviet researchers.Footnote 13 Through such channels, Soviet climatologists were able to follow developments in international atmospheric science even during periods of limited direct contact. With the death of Stalin, opportunities for international scientific exchange gradually expanded. Budyko himself visited the United States for the first time in 1957, where he met Helmut Landsberg and Charles Thornthwaite.Footnote 14 With the former, Budyko formed a lifelong friendship. On a second visit, in 1966, Budyko was invited by the University of California and the RAND corporation for a conference.Footnote 15 But he also received visits in Leningrad from abroad, for example in 1961 by the American meteorologist Jule Charney.Footnote 16
Budyko’s efforts to quantify the Earth’s heat balance culminated in his habilitation and in the publication of a global Atlas of the Heat Balance of the Earth’s Surface in 1955 – a pioneering achievement that helped place Soviet climatology at the forefront of research on the Earth’s radiation balance.Footnote 17 By reconstructing the Earth’s radiation balance at the planetary scale, Budyko conceptualized climate as an integrated thermodynamic system structured by global energy flows. In doing so, he helped shift climatology from a largely descriptive science of regional atmospheric patterns toward a quantitative analysis of the Earth’s climate system. Shortly thereafter, Budyko was appointed director of the GGO in Leningrad, the central institution coordinating Soviet meteorological and climatological research, placing him in charge of climatological research across the USSR. While administrative duties curtailed his time for personal research, they granted him institutional authority to expand his staff and direct large-scale projects. Under his leadership, Soviet climatology acquired a quantitative and systems-based approach that prefigured later global climate modelling.Footnote 18 Budyko’s approach differed in important respects from the emerging modelling traditions of Western climate science. What distinguished Budyko’s work in the 1950s and early 1960s was the extent to which he approached climate as a planetary thermodynamic system rather than primarily as a problem of atmospheric circulation, weather forecasting or regional climatic description. In later reflections he described his scientific approach as rooted in what he called the ‘energetics’ of the Earth system, an effort to understand large-scale exchanges of energy and matter between the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere.Footnote 19
Until the 1950s, climatology in the USSR had largely focused on empirical generalizations and regional surveys, often aligned with the needs of agriculture, water management and settlement planning. Budyko, by contrast, sought to formulate predictive laws of climatic change grounded in thermodynamic principles. As early as 1962, he proposed that anthropogenic emissions of heat and greenhouse gases – driven by demographic growth and industrial activity – could induce a long-term warming trend.Footnote 20 By 1971, when Budyko made his controversial speech at the Leningrad symposium, his warning about inevitable anthropogenic warming drew not only international scepticism but also domestic confusion. In later reflections Budyko described this conclusion not as a sudden insight but as ‘an unavoidable step in a big staircase’ of research he had pursued for more than two decades, rooted in his earlier work on the Earth’s radiation balance.Footnote 21
The 1971 International Symposium on Physical and Dynamic Climatology in Leningrad brought together climate specialists from more than twenty countries and placed Soviet research in direct dialogue with Western atmospheric science. Budyko was also closely aware of discussions taking place outside the Soviet Union. In his 1972 publication on the influence of human activity on climate, he explicitly referred to recent international meetings devoted to the problem of anthropogenic climate modification, including conferences held in Williamstown in 1970 and Stockholm in 1971.Footnote 22 The proceedings of these meetings – published in volumes such as Man’s Impact on the Global Environment (1970) and Inadvertent Climate Modification (1971) – circulated widely among climatologists and helped consolidate climate change as an international research agenda. Budyko’s own work increasingly intersected with these networks. His 1977 article in the journal Tellus, for example, cited numerous Western climatologists and illustrates the extent to which Soviet and Western research on climate dynamics had become intellectually intertwined despite the geopolitical divisions of the Cold War.Footnote 23 Yet this growing integration into international climate debates did not eliminate uncertainty within the Soviet scientific community itself. On the contrary, competing interpretations of recent climatic trends soon became the subject of institutional concern for Soviet authorities.
The 1970s proved to be a turning point for climate science globally, but especially within the Soviet Union. Competing hypotheses about climate futures – global warming versus global cooling – generated confusion and political unease. Unlike in the United States, where discussions of global cooling entered public debate and popular media, the Soviet disagreement remained largely confined to a small circle of climatologists and quickly became a matter of bureaucratic concern for the state. Soviet authorities were thus confronted with diverging assessments from their own scientific community. Evgenii Borisenkov, Budyko’s successor as director of the GGO, advocated a cooling interpretation, whereas Budyko remained a strong defender of his warming hypothesis. The situation was further complicated by the circulation of foreign reports. In 1974, the Central Committee received a translated CIA press release that highlighted US fears of an imminent ice age, citing the work of American geographer Reid Bryson.Footnote 24 The document heightened anxieties within the Soviet leadership about the reliability of domestic expertise: if US agencies warned of cooling while Soviet scientists spoke of warming, which interpretation should guide state planning? The Central Party Committee demanded clarification from the State Committee for Hydrometeorology (Hydromet), the institution responsible for climate observation and forecasting. Hydromet operated under the Council of Ministers and retained considerable bureaucratic autonomy.
Hydromet established a formal commission at which leading specialists presented their arguments.Footnote 25 Among them was Konstantin Vinnikov, a climatologist from Budyko’s department, who defended the warming thesis using empirical data and radiative modelling. According to later recollections of Vinnikov, he and Borisenkov presented their competing interpretations, where Borisenkov emphasized cooling trends and Vinnikov himself argued that greenhouse forcing would ultimately dominate.Footnote 26 The latter’s analysis, which drew directly on Budyko’s earlier work on the Earth’s global heat balance, provided a coherent thermodynamic framework linking greenhouse gas emissions to long-term temperature change. The representative of Hydromet in the commission eventually endorsed Vinnikov’s interpretation of climate warming as the Soviet Union’s official scientific position. Yet the political implications of the competing hypotheses were not irrelevant. As Vinnikov later recalled, the prospect of global cooling – widely discussed in international climate science during the early 1970s – appeared as a serious economic and geopolitical threat, whereas the identification of warming was often interpreted as alleviating that danger. The endorsement of the warming scenario therefore resonated not only with the scientific arguments advanced by Budyko’s group but also with broader expectations about the future trajectory of the Soviet environment and economy.
Yet this scientific endorsement did not translate into institutional security for Budyko himself. In the Soviet scientific system, the acceptance of a scientific position did not necessarily strengthen the authority of the individual scientist associated with it. Institutional leadership depended less on epistemic authority than on political alliances within the Party apparatus. In Leningrad, Budyko’s position at the GGO was increasingly undermined by local Party actors, particularly by Grigory Romanov, the first secretary of the city’s Party committee. Budyko was accused of forming a ‘Jewish clique’ at the observatory.Footnote 27 This was a charge that reflected the persistent and often unspoken anti-Semitism that permeated Soviet academic institutions. Anti-Semitism was not merely a social prejudice; it operated as an implicit but powerful mechanism of institutional disciplining, frequently weaponized in bureaucratic struggles for influence and access to resources.Footnote 28 In Budyko’s case, the accusation of fostering a ‘clique’ – a term with specific pejorative connotations – served to delegitimize his authority at the GGO and to isolate him within the scientific community. These dynamics must be understood within a broader pattern of Soviet state bias toward Jewish intellectuals. After the anti-Semitic campaigns of the late Stalin era, especially the ‘Doctors’ Plot,’ open persecution subsided but never disappeared; instead, a quieter, informal anti-Semitism persisted within the Party apparatus and scientific institutions. Even in fields such as climatology – ostensibly non-ideological and technical – Jewish scientists were vulnerable to being portrayed as politically unreliable or ideologically suspect.Footnote 29
Accusations toward Budyko were amplified by his refusal to promote candidates favoured by the local Party bureau. Although Budyko enjoyed support in Moscow – particularly from Evgenii Fedorov, head of the Soviet Hydrometeorological Services – he was ultimately forced to step down as director of the GGO in 1972, although he remained at the GGO as head of the Division for Physical Climatology. Budyko continued to receive disciplinary warnings from the Party for ‘serious shortcomings in training personnel’ and for ‘ignoring the opinions of the Party bureau’.Footnote 30 These reprimands, however, did not stem from his scientific work on climate change. Rather, they reflected tensions over institutional authority and kadrovaya politika (personnel policy) within the observatory. His replacement, Evgenii Borisenkov, was a military meteorologist closely aligned with the Leningrad Party apparatus and brought with him colleagues from the Mozhaisky Military Space Academy in Leningrad. According to Konstantin Vinnikov, a fellow climatologist and close colleague of Budyko at the time, their presence turned the observatory into a repressive and professionally stifling environment.Footnote 31
By 1974, with his authority at the GGO eroded and his team marginalized, Budyko began looking for a way to distance himself from Borisenkov’s leadership while continuing his research. Moving his group to another institute required both laboratory space and reliable funding – two things that could not be secured through scientific arguments alone. Instead, Budyko turned to the Military–Industrial Commission, the powerful body overseeing defence-related research and development in the USSR. In a bold and pragmatic move, Budyko submitted a proposal that reframed climate modelling as a matter of strategic interest. The project focused on the potential for intentional climate modification through manipulation of the stratospheric aerosol layer. Specifically, he proposed investigating whether the injection of sulphate aerosols could be used to cool the planet by altering its heat balance – a concept that later came to be known in the West as geoengineering.Footnote 32 Budyko’s proposal drew on a growing international literature on stratospheric aerosols and their climatic effects, including research by Western atmospheric scientists, illustrating the extent to which Soviet climatologists remained engaged with international atmospheric science despite Cold War barriers.Footnote 33 Budyko’s proposal moved one step further by proposing the deliberate injection of sulphate particles into the stratosphere as a means of regulating global temperature.Footnote 34
The political logic behind the proposal was clear: if the United States acquired the capability to alter the global climate for military or strategic purposes, the Soviet Union had to be prepared. Budyko’s framing was both anticipatory and defensive – he did not advocate active climate manipulation but insisted that Soviet science should be capable of understanding and responding to it. The proposal gained high-level support in Moscow. Among its champions were Evgeniy Federov and Yuri Sedunov, director of the Institute of Experimental Meteorology. Because Budyko and his team were uniquely positioned to conduct the research, Hydromet was appointed the lead agency, and the Main Geophysical Observatory remained the nominal host institution. However, the project’s classification as a military–technological endeavour limited Borisenkov’s authority over it, allowing Budyko to reclaim a degree of autonomy.Footnote 35
After lengthy negotiations and a search for facilities, the team finally relocated in 1975 to the State Hydrological Institute, also in Leningrad. There, Budyko founded the Department of Climate Change Research, which became the Soviet Union’s main institutional hub for the study of anthropogenic climate change. On paper, the move marked a significant expansion: a dedicated unit with its own mandate, personnel and research agenda. In practice, however, the new department’s location reflected the persistent marginality of the field. The building rented for the lab was situated in Leningrad’s Ligovka district, an area then associated with poverty, crime and urban neglect. According to members of the team, the building itself had previously served as a hideout for petty criminals and was only partially vacated when the scientists moved in, with some residents still occupying the upper floors. Only gradually did the entire building become available for research use.Footnote 36
Despite these conditions, the move to the State Hydrological Institute proved productive. Freed from the constraints of the politics of the Main Geophysical Observatory and the militarized agenda of the Military–Industrial Commission, Budyko and his team returned to the problem that had long preoccupied them: the detection and modelling of global warming. Using data generated in the aerosol manipulation project, they refined their earlier models of Earth’s heat balance. In 1976, Budyko and Vinnikov published their most consequential findings.Footnote 37 The article presented evidence for a long-term warming trend driven by greenhouse gas emissions, drawing on both theoretical and empirical data. Like much Soviet atmospheric research of the period, their analysis was informed also by international scientific literature that circulated through translation programmes and scientific libraries maintained by the Academy of Sciences. While Budyko and Vinnikov acknowledged potential benefits from warming – such as improved agriculture or Arctic navigation – they warned against any deliberate attempts to manipulate the climate. The risks, they emphasized then, far outweighed the potential gains.
This reorientation of Soviet climate science away from military–technological applications and toward long-term environmental forecasting signalled a partial return to Budyko’s original vision. Yet it also revealed the structural limitations of scientific autonomy in the late Soviet Union. The team remained in a dilapidated building, Budyko continued to face travel restrictions due to suspicions about his political reliability, and his standing in the Academy of Sciences remained precarious. His failed bid for full membership in 1969 – derailed by local Party opposition – continued to haunt him. According to internal reports, his candidacy had been approved by the Academy, but Gennadiy Kudashkin, secretary of the Main Geophysical Observatory’s Party organization, lobbied the Leningrad Regional Committee to block the appointment. The committee pressured the Academy to reverse its decision, arguing that Budyko’s promotion lacked local Party backing and would set a dangerous precedent.Footnote 38 Without Academy membership, Budyko lacked access to key funding streams and remained institutionally vulnerable.
Toward the end of the 1970s, global climate change began to surface more prominently on the Soviet state’s agenda, but this development had less to do with domestic scientific momentum and more with the shifting priorities of the United States. The American Climate Act of 1978, which framed climate change in terms of its economic consequences, prompted Soviet officials to reconsider the potential geopolitical and economic implications of environmental change. In this context, the Council of Ministers charged Hydromet with the creation of a state-wide environmental and climatic monitoring system. This change culminated in 1980, when the State Committee for Science and Technology launched a coordinated research initiative titled ‘Assessment of Possible Climate Change and Its Impact on the National Economy’.Footnote 39 The programme included twenty-four institutions from Hydromet, the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Higher Education. Its stated goal was to develop forecasting models that could inform long-term economic planning and help mitigate the expected damages from climate change. On paper, this initiative echoed developments in Western countries, where state actors had begun to integrate climate science into policy frameworks. Yet the Soviet version remained largely performative. Funding levels were modest, timelines were vague, and the expected deliverables never materialized into concrete policy instruments.
Despite their decades of pioneering research, Budyko and his colleagues from the State Hydrological Institute were not central to the initiative and do not even appear in the document available in the archives. When later asked about the 1980 programme in interviews, Budyko’s closest collaborator, Konstantin Vinnikov, did not even recall its existence. Rather than building on the work of existing experts, the state sought to signal its concern for climate change by launching a new, centrally coordinated effort – one that was more about bureaucratic visibility than about scientific coherence. The state’s brief enthusiasm for climate modelling in the early 1980s quickly waned. As the Soviet economy entered a deeper phase of stagnation, and as new scientific priorities emerged (notably biotechnology and nuclear energy), long-range environmental forecasting fell once again to the margins.
Framing climate change for the Soviet public
While early debates on anthropogenic climate change in the Soviet Union unfolded primarily within scientific institutions, climate science was to some extent also part of the public discourse. This section does not seek to identify uniquely Soviet scientific ideas about climate change, but rather examines how climate knowledge was selectively communicated and framed for a Soviet audience through newspapers, magazines and popular-science outlets. The Soviet government closely controlled how scientific knowledge was communicated to citizens, emphasizing achievements that reinforced techno-optimism and the promise of planned environmental management, while downplaying or omitting findings that could provoke uncertainty, anxiety or doubts about the limits of scientific control. In this context, discussions of long-term climatic trends – though often framed in relation to agriculture, energy, or natural cycles – occasionally entered the realm of popular media. What was withheld from public discourse – especially uncertainty, risk and the global dimensions of climate change – reveals how the state used science as a legitimizing narrative, not as a site for critical reflection.
The first notable Soviet publication on the unintended consequences of human activity on the global climate appeared in December 1960. Curiously, it was a translated article from 1959 by Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass, republished from the American journal Scientific American in the Soviet magazine Priroda (Nature), the leading popular-science publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The Soviet edition of his article featured an image of smoke-belching factories in Youngstown, Ohio in the United States, known for its steel production – an industrial landscape emblematic of capitalist overproduction.Footnote 40 Plass, a pioneer in calculating the atmospheric warming effects of CO2, outlined the link between fossil-fuel combustion and global warming. While Plass’s calculations were respected by his US colleagues, the article did not trigger a mass realignment of climate research immediately. Some researchers remained sceptical about the size of the effect due to uncertainties about oceanic carbon absorption and cloud processes. However, in the long run, the article sparked interest in further research in the United States coupled with the calculations of CO2 development at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and the famous Keeling curve.Footnote 41
In the Soviet Union, however, the results of Plass’s research had no detectable effect. Rather than focusing on the dangers of unintended anthropogenic warming, Soviet readers in the 1960s encountered discussions that emphasized humanity’s capacity to deliberately transform the climate. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Soviet scientists, engineers and popular writers widely discussed the possibility of deliberately modifying the Earth’s climate. These proposals – ranging from serious atmospheric models to speculative mega-projects – reflected a broader mid-twentieth-century confidence in humanity’s ability to reshape planetary systems.Footnote 42 In the Soviet Union, however, such ideas took shape within a political culture that viewed nature less as something to be protected than as something to be changed and managed through science and technology. This logic found its most extravagant expression in proposals such as the Bering Strait dam project advanced by Stalin Prize-winning engineer Petr Borisov. Building on earlier ideas by Aleksandr Voeikov and Aleksandr Shumilin, Borisov’s project aimed to reroute Arctic currents, melt polar ice, and warm Siberia into an agricultural paradise.Footnote 43 Borisov’s plan was widely circulated not only in Soviet journals, but also abroad in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune.Footnote 44 Klaus Gestwa argues that the timing of Borisov’s climate modification plan was strategically aligned with the International Geophysical Year of 1957, when Soviet scientists re-entered the international science stage after many years of self-isolation and when spectacular, utopian projects like the Bering Strait dam helped to impress the West and to assert scientific leadership in the world.Footnote 45 Yet despite its publicity, there is no archival evidence that the Soviet government ever seriously considered implementing the scheme.
More speculative climate-engineering visions such as Borisov’s remained at the margins of serious climate science.Footnote 46 Yet the broader assumption that climate could be potentially managed through scientific intervention persisted in Soviet scientific culture. Throughout the 1960s Budyko’s specialist publications were primarily concerned with the physical mechanisms of climatic change, examining the Earth’s heat balance and the interplay of processes that could contribute either to warming or to cooling, including greenhouse gases and atmospheric aerosols. By the early 1970s, however, when Budyko began addressing wider Soviet audiences, his framing became more explicit. In a 1971 article in Priroda, he openly argued that anthropogenic warming was already becoming a reality and that future climate change would be shaped by natural processes as well as by human activity, especially fossil-fuel combustion. Instead of presenting this development as a looming ecological crisis, Budyko discussed strategic responses ranging from energy and land-use planning to nuclear energy expansion and even forms of climate intervention such as albedo modification.Footnote 47 A shorter version of the article appeared in Pravda the following year, bringing these ideas to an even broader readership.Footnote 48 This illustrates a Soviet pattern of technocratic optimism, where climate change was acknowledged as real, but framed as a challenge that could be managed through scientific expertise.
A similar framing appeared in a 1972 Izvestia interview with Budyko titled ‘Scientists respond to readers: does the Earth’s climate change?’. Triggered by public concern over an unusual winter and spring, the article presented climate change not as a cause for alarm but as a matter for expert explanation and reassurance. Readers from different parts of the Soviet Union had written letters to the newspaper, alarmed by unusual snowstorms and prolonged cold weather, asking whether these events reflected fundamental climatic shifts.Footnote 49 In his answers to these letters Budyko acknowledged that human activity, including CO2 emissions, could influence the climate, but emphasized that such changes should be understood within longer historical patterns and could ultimately be managed. His conclusion – ‘either humanity will learn to regulate the planet’s climate, or the climate will undergo a profound transformation by the middle of the 21st century, given the immense energy capabilities of human society’ – was therefore notable for the context in which it appeared: an interview in a popular newspaper that framed planetary climate change as a problem ultimately manageable through scientific planning.
Within a few years, his technocratic approach in public statements became even more pronounced. In a 1977 article in a Soviet newspaper, Budyko argued that the warming might even be beneficial, especially for agriculture, and that instead of ‘resorting to such drastic measures as abandoning the industrial use of fossil fuel’, one should consider altering the atmospheric process directly through sulphur combustion at high altitudes.Footnote 50 Beneath his article the newspaper’s science department added an afterword remarking that it was still unclear and in dispute whether industrial pollution of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide should be blamed for the warming trend and that more research needs to be done. The idea that a warmer climate will be beneficial for agriculture gained traction and from thereon was repeated by him and others in popular-science outlets available for the broad Soviet public.Footnote 51 All in all, at least in the public sphere, ‘Soviet scientists take a businesslike and optimistic approach to the problem of man’s impact on the planet’s climate’, as a journalist from the Literaturnaya Gazeta summed up the situation.Footnote 52
By the late 1970s, Soviet popular-science outlets began to pivot more explicitly toward climate policy questions and argued for the need for climate modification for the well-being of men. In 1979, the Znanie (‘knowledge’) publishing house released a fifty-page booklet titled The Impact of Man on the Climate.Footnote 53 It featured four articles by leading climate researchers. Yuri Izrael, then director of Hydromet, wrote about state responsibility in environmental management, advocating for his agency Hydromet. Atmospheric physicist Khoren Pogosyan emphasized natural climatic factors, including astronomical processes. N.I. Buchinsky discussed both intentional and inadvertent anthropogenic influences, from reforestation to Arctic river diversion. Although both Buchinsky and Pogosyan acknowledge the role of CO2 in influencing climate, they did so in a relatively cursory manner, alongside other factors. Budyko’s concluding article stood apart in its insistence on CO2 as a central driver of climate change. Yet, in line with his other publications for a broad Soviet readership, he did not frame the problem in terms of reducing fossil-fuel consumption.Footnote 54 Instead, the text called for international cooperation and technological solutions. While some Western scientists also expressed techno-optimistic views of climate control during this period, the Soviet political context shaped how climate knowledge was communicated to state authorities and the public. As Budyko’s colleague Konstantin Vinnikov later recalled, when climate research was reported to the government it was presented ‘from the point of view of the interests of the country’.Footnote 55
In the 1980s, when international alarm about climate change intensified, the tone in the Soviet press changed as well. This shift occurred in the context of growing international scientific concern about global warming and the political liberalization associated with perestroika and glasnost, which allowed a somewhat broader discussion of environmental risks in the Soviet public sphere.Footnote 56 Ideas about benefits through global warming seem absent and so are suggestions to manage climate change through manipulations of the atmosphere. Instead, articles by Budyko and other scientists for the Soviet public explain the scientific results, the different scientific opinions, and the possible consequences of global warming. In a 1989 article, radio physicist and astronomer Vsevolod Troickiy framed consequences of global warming as catastrophic.Footnote 57 In his view, Earth was already approaching this threshold. Even if clean energy sources like fusion became available, the dissipation of heat from global energy use would still threaten the biosphere’s stability. Troickiy’s article viewed climate and energy problems as existential planetary system challenges that required scientific foresight and political planning.
Across very different registers, from Borisov’s fantasy to Budyko’s projections, climate was framed as something humans could direct and ultimately shape. The scientist’s presence in newspapers and journals reassured readers that Soviet science could diagnose environmental risks and help to eliminate them. Instead of mobilizing behavioural change or challenging fossil-fuel dependency, Soviet climate experts pushed for a techno-strategic vision: that human impacts on the atmosphere could be regulated. Their role in public discourse was to reinforce faith in the system. Rather than highlighting novel or uncertain research findings, climate science was domesticated to fortify these established state narratives.
The Soviet Union and the international climate change regime
While Soviet climate science was guided by internal imperatives of planning and political control, it was also embedded in a web of international scientific collaborations. From the late 1950s onward, Soviet scientists actively participated in international conferences, bilateral exchanges and global research initiatives.Footnote 58 These engagements served two distinct functions: to affirm the USSR’s scientific legitimacy abroad, and to strengthen technocratic confidence at home. Yet international cooperation also revealed the boundaries of what Soviet scientists could say and do, as discussions of global systemic risk sat uneasily within Soviet political discourse. As climate debates in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s increasingly turned toward questions of risk and mitigation, Soviet contributions often framed climate change differently.Footnote 59 While Soviet and Western scientists increasingly agreed on the physical mechanisms of global warming, they did not always agree on its political and economic implications. International collaboration therefore became a site where scientific convergence coexisted with interpretive divergence.
Mikhail Budyko and his team from the Climate Change department at the State Hydrological Institute in Leningrad exemplify this dual positioning of Soviet climate science within both domestic political structures and international research networks. By the early 1970s, Budyko had become a leading figure in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and in Soviet cooperation with the newly established United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).Footnote 60 In 1971, he was one of only a handful of non-Western scientists involved in the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC), an early interdisciplinary attempt to synthesize climate knowledge across disciplines. Its main goal was to assess the state of knowledge on human-induced climate change and identify key uncertainties and research priorities in this emerging field. The report, published by MIT Press, emphasized inadvertent human influence on climate – primarily through carbon emissions – and advocated for the long-term monitoring of atmospheric changes.Footnote 61 In these international forums Budyko became one of the most visible Soviet voices in the emerging climate debate. The Soviet Union also actively participated in bilateral agreements with the United States in the field of environmental sciences.Footnote 62 Following the 1972 US–USSR environmental agreement, a joint US–Soviet Working Group on the effects of environmental pollution on climate was established. Budyko co-chaired this working group alongside US scientist Alan Hecht. Their collaboration produced joint reports and exchanges of delegations, although most working Soviet climatologists were excluded from trips to the US and senior administrators were sent instead.Footnote 63 These joint ventures were significant: they allowed the USSR to showcase its scientific expertise, access Western modelling techniques and satellite data, and project an image of responsible participation in global environmental governance. Notably, Soviet scientists also played a consultative role in later milestones of international climate science, including the Villach Conference of 1985, which brought together UNEP, WMO and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), and helped set the stage for the creation of the IPCC.
Yet despite this formal engagement, Soviet climate science remained epistemically insulated: international forums and findings were rarely integrated into domestic debates, and participation abroad was not reflected in the Soviet public sphere or in institutional openness at home. For instance, engagements with the international climate science community were rarely publicized within the USSR. Soviet newspapers and popular-science journals scarcely reported on multilateral climate forums or highlighted their scientists’ roles in shaping global climate agendas. Working Group Eight played a formative role for the scientists involved, but despite its international scale it received no mention in Soviet media or popular publications. This relative silence likely reflected ideological caution: acknowledging climate change as a global, shared problem implied interdependence and systemic risk. International scientific cooperation was politically useful – for diplomacy, signalling peaceful engagement and accessing data and technologies – but it was kept deliberately compartmentalized from the domestic sphere. The goal was not to inform the public, but to maintain political control, avoid public concern and uphold confidence in the Soviet state.
Nonetheless, within this international bubble, scientific cooperation played a subtle yet significant role in shaping Soviet climate science. Although Western and Soviet research cultures were different – especially in terms of institutional openness, access to computing and publication norms – collaboration produced convergence at the level of results. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet climatologists used empirical and analogue approaches – drawing on palaeoclimate baselines and energy balance models – while Western scientists ran numerical experiments on emerging supercomputers. Despite these methodological differences, projections about the magnitude and timing of global warming aligned surprisingly well.Footnote 64 This convergence of results strengthened the credibility of climate projections across both research communities and helped consolidate the emerging scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change at a moment when political actors were beginning to pay attention. International exchanges also offered Soviet scientists a platform where they could speak with greater intellectual freedom. Outside the confines of domestic publication, they could advocate openly for the scientific reality of climate change, explore technical mitigation strategies, and frame the USSR as a cooperative and rational actor in international environmental cooperation.
However, important divergences remained – particularly around the question of interpretation. Tensions emerged over how to present results in joint publications and reports. Western discussions increasingly framed climate change in terms of global risk, vulnerability and long-term mitigation, whereas Soviet scientists tended to emphasize planning, technological responses and the management of climatic change within economic systems. This was partly institutional – Soviet climatologists were accustomed to presenting results in ways that could inform planning decisions, and discussions of climate change often highlighted potential regional advantages. This planning-oriented perspective is visible in Soviet contributions to international climate impact assessments. One example is the large comparative project coordinated by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Climate Impact Programme. Initiated in the early 1980s, the project examined the effects of climatic variations on agriculture across several regions of the northern hemisphere, including multiple case studies in the European part of the Soviet Union. The project combined ‘impact experiments’, which estimated the effects of climatic change on agricultural production, with ‘adjustment experiments’, which evaluated how farmers and policymakers might respond through changes in crop varieties, fertilizer use, land allocation or agricultural infrastructure.
What distinguished the Soviet case studies was instead the institutional scale at which climate change was framed. Whereas other case studies – such as the Saskatchewan study for Canada – focused on climatic risk, yield sensitivity, drought vulnerability and the economic costs of preparing for uncertain climatic scenarios, the Soviet contribution explicitly treated climate change as a parameter in centralized agricultural planning. The Canadian analysis examined the climatic sensitivity of wheat production under different temperature and precipitation scenarios and discussed policy responses primarily in terms of risk management and preparedness under uncertainty. By contrast, the Soviet case study emphasized regional optimization, planned crop reallocation and state-level management responses designed to incorporate climatic change into long-term agricultural development strategies.Footnote 65 Climate change was thus framed less as an external environmental hazard than as a variable to be incorporated into centralized economic planning.
A similar perspective appeared in Soviet contributions to international climate policy debates at the end of the 1980s. In a chapter published after the 1989 Hamburg Congress on Climate and Development, Budyko and Hydromet official Yuri Sedunov accepted the scientific consensus on anthropogenic warming but questioned the feasibility of rapid reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.Footnote 66 Their analysis distinguished three possible responses – adaptation, mitigation and intentional climate modification – but emphasized that in the foreseeable future the most realistic strategy would be to integrate climatic change into economic development strategies rather than attempt to halt it through immediate emissions reductions. In this perspective, climate change appeared as a simple transformation to be anticipated and finally mitigated through technological intervention.
Ultimately, international collaborations did not fundamentally transform Soviet climate science. They broadened the scientific toolkit of Soviet climatologists and strengthened their international credibility, but the institutional priorities and interpretive frameworks within which climate change was understood remained largely intact. In this sense, international climate science produced similar results in the physical understanding of global warming but it left unresolved important differences in interpretation and policy implications.
Conclusion
By the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union had developed a climate research community that was scientifically innovative, internationally connected and actively engaged in emerging debates on anthropogenic warming. Scientists such as Mikhail Budyko contributed significantly to international climate science. Still, the Soviet case was not simply a story of scientific progress. Climate knowledge was shaped by the institutional and political structures of late socialism, which profoundly influenced how global warming was interpreted and what political significance it acquired.
Soviet climate research developed within a political and scientific culture that valued authoritative, univocal forecasts and actionable conclusions, while leaving relatively little room for publicly acknowledging uncertainty, which became increasingly common in Western scientific climate discussions. In this sense, the Soviet case challenges historical narratives that explain political inaction on climate primarily through ignorance or denial. In the USSR, climate change was not ignored, nor was anthropogenic warming fundamentally rejected by leading climatologists. Instead, it was interpreted through frameworks that made warming appear compatible with socialist planning and with economic benefit.
The Soviet experience should not, however, be understood as entirely exceptional. Historians have shown that in many countries scientific expertise struggled to translate environmental knowledge into decisive policy change. What the Soviet case reveals particularly clearly is the gap that can open between the production of climate knowledge and its political meaning. By the late Cold War, Soviet and Western climatologists increasingly agreed on the physical mechanisms of global warming, yet this did not produce a shared political interpretation of what climate change meant or how states should respond.Footnote 67
Climate research also offers a window into the wider culture of late Soviet earth sciences. Scientific expertise circulated internationally and produced important knowledge, yet remained embedded in institutional structures that favoured predictability, utility, and state relevance. Scientific authority was therefore uneven and contingent: internationally respected climatologists such as Budyko contributed to frontier knowledge on global environmental change, but this did not necessarily translate into more autonomy for the scientists or into material support for the scientific structures.
Climate research can thus point to the ambiguous position of earth scientists within a state that presented itself as governed by scientific expertise. Internationally respected climatologists such as Budyko contributed to frontier knowledge on global environmental change, yet this did not necessarily translate into institutional autonomy, political influence or even material support. Scientific authority in the late Soviet Union was therefore uneven and contingent: it carried weight when aligned with state priorities but offered far less protection when research did not map easily onto immediate administrative or strategic needs. Finally, this perspective may also help contextualize later Russian climate politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What stayed more readily than Budyko’s early recognition of anthropogenic warming was the inherent official interpretive frameworks that treated climate change as an outcome that might even offer strategic advantages for a northern state.
Acknowledgements
This article grew out of research conducted between 2017 and 2019 at the University of Birmingham as part of the Soviet Climate Science and Its Intellectual Legacies project (grant no. AH/P004431/1). I would like to thank my interview partners for generously sharing their time and recollections. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive feedback, which substantially improved this article.
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