The Unrecognised Empire: Russian Colonial Policies’ Lasting Impact on the Global Climate Crisis

Moscow Gets to Decide, Neighbouring People Get the Losses: Environmental and Climatic Impact of Russia’s Colonial Policies

2022 was the year when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first identified colonialism among the factors predisposing vulnerability and exposure of ecosystems and people to climate change. International researchers acknowledge that the colonial period not only created unstable economies and socially destructive hierarchies but also fostered environmentally detrimental practices that went on to play a significant role in global climate change.

Vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions (very high confidence, driven by patterns of intersecting socioeconomic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalisation, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance, reads the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.

Researchers from the Carbon Brief discovered that colonial responsibility dramatically alters the estimates of historical responsibility for climate change. Former colonial powers such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Russia carry greater historical responsibility for CO₂ emissions than was previously believed, if one considers the colonies where they exercised economic and political control.

Apart from that, even today, those countries remain the world’s top emitters on a per-capita cumulative basis. The Global North is responsible for 92% of excess carbon emissions. Colonial structures remain part of the modern world; therefore, combatting climate change cannot be done without further decolonisation.

Over the past few decades, the Global South has been making efforts to decolonise in a variety of forms. After WWII, European colonies proactively sought independence and began recovering their identity. Gradually, they are regaining their rights to use their own resources, pave their own pathways of economic development, manage their own ecosystems, and shape their own policies, climate policy included.

During this same period, Russian imperial policies were hiding behind the screen called the Soviet Union. Eastern European, Caucasus, Central Asian, and Baltic countries may have looked parts of a voluntary union, but they were in fact under Moscow’s full economic and political control. Every decision regarding the economy, foreign relations, culture, and the distribution of resources was made in the Kremlin. In a bid to melt different ethnicities into one ‘Soviet people’ and surpass ‘the West’, identities of entire peoples and ethnic groups were erased, along with their political autonomies, and last but not least, their environments were devastated.

Central and Eastern Europe, Siberia, Central Asia, and the lands around the Black and Caspian Seas are white spots on the postcolonial world map, and their geography and culture are referred to as ‘the Russian Empire’, ‘the Soviet Union’, ‘the Soviet bloc’, or ‘the Russian sphere of influence', Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism by Professor Ewa M. Thompson.

The concentration of power in Moscow contributed to decisions that led to man-made disasters (the worst of which was the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident in 1986) and enforced economic dependence on fossil fuels upon certain regions. Those policies contributed to global climate change, inflicting environmental, social, and economic harm on the local populations. We will elaborate later on how Russian imperialism (from Soviet times to the present day) is harmful to the environment of the neighbouring countries and the global climate ambition.

Change nature to accommodate the ‘interests of the state’ 

From the outset, Soviet policies were based on the desire to get the most out of available resources rather than the well-being of the people, in order to outmatch the so-called ‘Western opponents.’ The environment was one of the first sacrifices in the name of that goal.

For instance, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, the so-called Great Stalin Plan for Transformation of Nature was in force, initiated by then Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and approved by the central government in 1948. The essence of that plan was to plant forests and dig reservoirs in the steppe and the forest-steppe belt of the USSR in order to change the climate, prevent droughts in those areas, and promote agriculture.

In particular, the Kakhovka Hydro Power Plant (HPP) and the Kakhovka Reservoir were created in the Ukrainian SSR under that plan, becoming the final of the ‘great construction sites of Communism’, designed to outmatch the Grand Coolie HPP in the American Rocky Mountains, the world’s most powerful HPP at that time. That construction resulted in Ukraine losing a 400 km² [~155 mi²] area of unique natural territory, the Velykyi Luh (“Great Meadow”) flooded by the waters of the newly-built reservoir.

Before that, the area was vast plains inhabited by a diverse population of birds and plants. Up to the late 1800s, this land was also a mother lode for the Ukrainian Cossacks1, and was part of the Zaporizhzhia Sich. Thus, apart from the environment, the dictator also wanted to destroy Ukrainians’ historical memory about the centuries of their fight for freedom and Ukrainian statehood.

The Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers feeding the Aral Sea (officially an endorheic salt lake) in Central Asia also underwent significant change to accommodate economic ambitions. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Government decided to divert the flow of those rivers to irrigate the desert and grow cotton, rice, cucurbits, and grain crops, in particular, in present-day Uzbekistan. Cotton was what the USSR needed the most, to feed its consumer goods industry, ammunition production, and rocket propellant production.

This is how the fourth largest lake in the world shrunk from its original size of 68,000 km² [26,300 mi²] to about 2,500 km² [~965 mi²], with only 4% of its previous amount of water left. Since 1968, average temperatures in the Aral Sea basin have increased by about 2°C. The devastation of the Aral Sea also affected the climate: without the lake to cool the air, the latter became drier, and the weather became hotter.

‘Soviet Union Republics’ as Moscow’s raw material suppliers

Moscow used a variety of means to dictate how the republics were supposed to live. For instance, the so-called ‘Five-Year Plans for the Development of the National Economy’ were adopted, determining, in particular, target production goals for developing certain resources in each republic, like electricity, coal, oil, etc. The various policies defining the development vectors for the republics’ economies were also shaped in Moscow. The republics, for their part, were forced to extensively develop those industries, while often paying the price of deteriorating their environments and overall well-being.

For instance, under the industrialisation policy, Kazakhstan (annexed by the Soviet Union in 1920) became Moscow’s raw material supplier. During that period, the republic expanded its coal, copper, and iron mining facilities, intensified gold and lead mining, and established new industrial centres, like the city of Zhezqazghan (Kazakh., “a place where copper was mined”), which is now the country’s largest copper supplier and a place suffering from water pollution, soil degradation, and multiple diseases. Due to industrial facilities’ close proximity to residential infrastructure, mortality from cancer and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases is significantly higher there than the national average.

During WWII, Kazakhstan’s industries were on the rise, as Moscow evacuated industrial facilities to there from its warring western territories. They opened an engineering plant in Almaty, an oil refinery in Atyrau (then Guryev), which is operational to this day, and starting constructing a large metallurgy plant in Temirtau (near Karaganda).

Between 1942 and 1988, Kazakhstan’s CO₂ emissions increased by 18 times (from 5.4 to 274.2 million tons), subsequently falling by half over the next decade. During this period, the weaknesses of such lopsided development became evident: despite its advanced processing and manufacturing enterprises, Kazakhstan’s gross domestic product declined sharply. Today, despite being rich in resources, Kazakhstan is forced to import electricity, with a large amount of it coming from Russia.

Ukraine, rich in coal, gas, and metal ores, was also seen by Moscow as a raw materials supplier and means of hitting its economic goals rather than an ally. In 1961-1965, coal mining became one of the republic’s priority industries. Having opened 324 coal mines, Ukraine increased its coal production almost 2.4 times, while the CO₂ emissions from coal mining increased 1.8 times between 1951 and 1991.

To this day, that intensive resource extraction has a lasting economic, environmental, and social impact in Ukraine. So-called monotowns started emerging around the coal-mining enterprises. For instance, Pavlohrad (Dnipropetrovsk Oblast) was re-oriented in the 1960s from commerce to coal mining, and became fully dependent on it, while Vuhledar (Ukr. “the one giving coal”) was completely built in the 1960s where untouched stepped once lay, as a town for the workers of the newly developed mines. Today, Vuhledar has been all but erased by Russian troops during combat, and Pavlohrad (also in the East of Ukraine), routinely suffers from shelling by the Russians.

Today, with humankind facing the need to wind down the coal mining industry to slow down climate change, these cities face new challenges: they need to rebuild their entirely coal-dependent economies from scratch, create new opportunities for the current industry employees, and restore the damaged environment. By closing the mining enterprises, they can plan their own just transformation and reduce the harm inflicted on the locals.

Even after collapsing, the Empire perseveres

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow never gave up on trying to maintain its control over the entire region, by hook or by crook. Apart from the ‘peaceful’ means of binding the former republics with political and economic agreements, over the past 30 years, Russia occupied a part of Moldova, invaded Georgia, and started a war against Ukraine in 2014 after the Ukrainian people outright refused to support the pro-Russian political discourse — the war that Russia escalated to a full-scale one in 2022. Still, this list of Russia-inspired conflicts in the region is far from exhaustive.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is perhaps the best-documented war in history. The damages caused to Ukraine’s natural reserves and biodiversity are estimated at over UAH 600 billion to [$14.6 billion, €13.3 billion]. According to Oleksandr Krasnolutskyi, First Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, about 900 species of animals are at risk of extinction due to the war waged by Russia. Over a million hectares [~2.5 million acres] of natural reserves have been affected by the war. The bushfires caused by the war destroyed over 1,000 km² [~386 mi²] of forests.

Russians detonating the dam at the Kakhovka HPP became one of the worst man-made disasters of recent times. The Kakhovka Reservoir, a project envisioned by Stalin, was destroyed by the very hands of his dedicated followers. The waters released by the explosion not only flooded the surrounding communities, destroying infrastructure and killing residents, but also washed colossal amounts of pollutants from the fields, industrial enterprises, and landfills into the Black Sea.

Due to the ongoing active hostilities and partial temporary military occupation of Ukraine, it is difficult to accurately assess the damages caused, as the most affected territories are inaccessible for conducting thorough research. However, it is obvious that entire ecosystems were affected — the same ecosystems that were instrumental in mitigating climate change are being destroyed by the hands of the Russian military.

Apart from that indirect effect on climate, there is also a direct negative impact. Two years of the full-scale war caused greenhouse gas emissions comparable with the heavy exploitation of 90 million fossil-fuel-powered vehicles on the roads, or building 260 200MW Coal-Fired Power Plants, according to research on greenhouse gas emissions put together by experts from the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War supported by the NGO Ecoaction and the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine.

Afterward

Therefore, the Russian Empire did not expire even after its collapse in the early 20^th century — it just morphed into the Soviet Union, where the elites in the Russian capital had an ultimate say on to where the republics whithered. Having lost that means of control over the region after the Soviet Union collapsed, too, Russia persists in its efforts to regain that control by force wherever the countries try to pave their own way, independent from Moscow.

The environment and climate also fell victims to Russia’s imperial policies. For decades, Moscow forced destructive and carbon-intensive paths of economic development upon other nations, with the entire ecosystems deteriorating for the economic gain of the metropolis, while the locals were left to deal with the losses. However, a free and climate-neutral future has no place for empires, especially the Russian Empire, regardless of whatever name it adopts in its next incarnation.